Mattingly With Rene Grace and Jim Flynn
-The Bay Net Photo By Ahmar Mustikhan

Honesty as a miracle cure is at the heart of a massive but informal American movement that has transformed millions of lives in the U.S. and beyond.

At the Jude House, which espouses the ideals of the movement called Alcoholics Anonymous, the message is simple: if you try to drown your problems or sorrows in alcohol or drugs, they will only multiply manifold and your life will become unmanageable.

Commissioner Tom Mattingly (D. Leonardtown) met Monday afternoon with a three-member team of the Jude House—a house crusading since 1972 to bring sanity into people’s lives by adhering to the 12-step program of recovering from alcohol and drugs.

The team comprised Dennis Logan, executive director, Jim Flynn, who is the president of the Jude House board, and Dr. Rene Grace, a former president.

Named after the Catholic St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes who brought hope to the hopeless, the house has helped thousands of people in Southern Maryland to turn around their lives, but is hard-pressed for funds to keep the operations functional for St. Mary’s residents.

Clients that stay at the Jude House require about four to six months in order to return to the community as a productive member. They literally become a changed person, through practice of the Alcoholics Anonymous program of total honesty, making amends, and taking a moral inventory of themselves.

Logan said some clients require longer than four months stay because of a variety of factors, ranging from the purely medical to situations such as employment or housing.  “We don’t want them walking out the door unprepared.”

Logan guesstimated Jude House helped more than 5,000 people in Southern Maryland, including at least 700 from St. Mary’s, turn their lives around.

“Someone from one county, who is successful in the program, reduces the risk factors for those on the highways in all three counties,” according to Logan.

In year 2005, six out of 12 crashes in St. Mary’s and 15 out of 34 fatal crashes in Charles County were related to alcohol and/or drug impaired driving. In the following year, 11 out of 22 such fatal crashes in Calvert County were attributed to the same causes.

 
Dennis Logan-The Bay Net
Photo by Ahmar Mustikhan

Logan said since the Southern Maryland communities were clustered together, recovery of a person in one county brings safety for people in all three counties.

Alcoholism can afflict not only those down and dirty on the streets of major U.S. cities, but even those living in presidential places.

Mattingly said the Jude House had requested funding in the past. “What they are asking is a per diem type payment, where we w