Ron Farley has just worked a small wonder. Sitting in a circle of teenagers, he's gotten two surly recovering drug addicts to drop a feud that's been festering at their group home for a few days. Through laborious counseling, Farley has convinced Joey, a slight, reserved former marijuana user, that the rage that drove him to punch out a wall a few days earlier has actually been swirling within him. And, that it's not the fault of Larry, a loud kid Joey has been pointing his finger at.

"What part of it has to do with Larry?" Farley finally asks for closure, his voice softly coaxing.

"None of it," Joey says, looking at his sneakers.

Two minutes later the truce collapses. Joey is back fanning the flames, scowling and saying Larry poisons the home's atmosphere.

"I don't have a bad attitude," Larry screams back.

Farley turns red and puts his hands over his head as if the roof were caving in. And he smiles slightly, to get through the crisis.

The wheels can come off at any point during a day at Adapt (small company No. 27), a drug and alcohol treatment and prevention organization based in Roseburg.

Farley, a veteran youth worker who is Adapt's lead teenage counselor, eventually gets things settled down with his teens. "Sometimes they just get something in their craw," he says after the group session, shaking his head and laughing.

But working with recovering addicts is always a treacherous walk through clients' emotions, and those of Adapt's workers. "If you have kids who are 17 and haven't been feeling since the second or third grade [because of drug use], you've got a lot of stuff in front of you," Farley says.

Conditions are especially tough for the roughly 50% of Adapt's 106 workers who are themselves recovered addicts. Susan Jeremiah, the company's HR director, tells prospective hires about a recovered addict and model counselor for the organization who lost his handle on life after his father died and eventually slit his wrists.

"The stakes are high," Jeremiah says soberly.

But employees stay at Adapt, which has been a 100 Best company for five straight years, because of the same high stakes that make the place tough to withstand. They know that among the endless possibilities for frustration and failure is the daily chance of turning someone's life around.

"Some days I want to open a fruit stand or a car wash — anything but this," says Paul Farmer, an Adapt counseling supervisor. But, he adds convincingly, "I don't think I'll do anything else. "

Adapt employees come from all walks of life — there are former stock brokers, hospital accountants, parole officers. Farmer was making jewelry in Eugene after sobering up more than a decade ago. He had already decided that if he couldn't have booze and drugs, he didn't want to talk about them, either. But his body was giving out from the jewelry work and he decided to check out the counseling field, in part because he was uniquely qualified. "If you're an addict, you have long gaps in your resume," Farmer explains. "But that actually helps you if you're getting into counseling. I was good at it because I knew what it was like to struggle."

Tall and lanky with a roughened face and patchy graying beard, Farmer commands heavy respect around Adapt. Having risen to a supervisory role after six years with the organization, he's become the genuine article: someone who's turned his life around after being plagued by addiction.

For Dan Strasser, a gambling addiction counselor, seeing such human restoration at work richens the profession.

"How many stock brokers are broke?" asks Strasser, who once made a living counseling investors. "Paul lives what he teaches."

The weight of Adapt's work can get unwieldy, though. In any month, Adapt serves more than 700 clients — from cocaine-hooked pregnant mothers to sallow-faced meth addicts to chronic alcoholics — at a host of clinics and inpatient programs across Southern Oregon. In a good stretch, Adapt might stabilize these people with the same success as a solid clean-up hitter: About one in three will stay clean after the first or second treatment.

Piper's business dilemmas in recent years have had an air of the absurd as well. In 2001, state budget cuts forced Adapt, which gets the bulk of its funding through state grants, to chop its work force by 24%. Remaining workers' wages were temporarily frozen — just as demand for treatment services rose, as it always does during a recession. Staffing has remained slim, even as Gov. Ted Kulongoski has declared war on meth.

"We've been disassembling the infrastructure for dealing with these addicts," Piper says.

To keep health care benefits competitive while also insuring a high-risk employee pool that includes many recovered addicts, Adapt had to go to a higher annual deductible combined with a flexible spending account this year. The change caused some uproar among employees, even though it didn't raise overall costs significantly.

"I think people were surprised we made the 100 Best list this year because of the health care change," Paul Farmer says. But Susan Jeremiah wasn't surprised. "If people were economically driven they would have left by now."

Bruce Piper thinks that the trying work conditions at Adapt have built a lasting organization that is very hard to erode.

"Longevitity has a huge impact here," says Piper, who has been with Adapt since 1981. "When I read about business, I don't hear people talk about that. Instead, it's three, four, five years and move on. We throw around the term 'Adapt lifer.' When I retire, I doubt the organization will go outside to look for my replacement. The majority of people we train to take over new positions are coming from within."

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Copyright 2005 Oregon Business magazine