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In the early 1970s, J. Paul Molloy was a young lawyer on Capitol Hill who had a key role in drafting legislation that created Amtrak and other federal programs. He was also an alcoholic whose drinking would eventually cost him his job, his family and his home.

For a couple of months in 1975, he found himself living on the streets and begging strangers for money before he entered a rehabilitation program. He moved to a county-run halfway house in Silver Spring, MD, to recover but soon learned that the facility was about to close.

Instead of being left to their own fates, Mr. Molloy and other residents decided to take over the house themselves, paying the expenses and utilities, cooking the meals and keeping watch over one another’s path to recovery.

They called their experiment in group living and joint sobriety Oxford House. It was the first step in a nationwide movement, now almost 50 years old, that has been credited with helping thousands of people overcome addiction and lead productive lives.

Something about the simplicity of the program seemed to work. Democratically run, self-supporting houses where anyone that uses drugs or alcohol is expelled.

Mr. Molloy and the other residents devised the basic rules of self-government that have shaped Oxford House ever since. First, all decisions would be made democratically, with a group vote. Second, every resident would contribute equally to the expenses and household duties. And, most important, anyone using drugs or alcohol would be expelled.

Another key element of the plan was that there was no deadline for moving out: People could live in an Oxford House as long as they wanted, if they followed the rules.

In the 1980s, the Oxford House idea expanded to other states. It received a boost after Mr. Molloy successfully lobbied for passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which established a fund to help provide start-up loans for groups opening residential recovery locations like those of Oxford House.

A long-running study by Chicago’s DePaul University shows that people completing one year of residency maintain a sobriety rate as high as 80 percent.

When some communities tried to keep Oxford House from renting in their neighborhoods, Mr. Molloy and his lawyers went to court. Oxford House won a U.S. Supreme Court victory in 1995 against the city of Edmonds, Wash., on grounds that the city’s efforts to block the group home violated provisions of the Fair Housing Act.

Today Oxford House has more than 20,000 residents at more than 3,500 homes across 47 states and several foreign countries. Hundreds of thousands of people have been through the program.

* Excerpted from The Washington Post article dated June 16, 2022