“I know if I do certain things, there will be certain consequences,” says Julia Sanders, 14, who attends Patrick Henry High School in San Diego. “So I try to stay way above the influence.”

Low self-esteem, body image issues, family turmoils, unhealthy social networks, non-communicativeness, pressure to excel and the list continues. All part of the adolescent experience, some say.

But left unaddressed, experts note, any one of these could allow the dark specter of drug abuse, eating disorders, Internet misuse, self-mutilation, severe depression, crime and even worse to spiral out of control and become a severe, debilitating, and often addictive reality.

If Sanders is the model of a well-adjusted teenager, aware of the issues and pitfalls of adolescence that can shortchange a life, she’s quick to credit some outside forces for helping to keep her grounded.

Over at the nearby High School of Jewish Studies, where she attends classes once a week, Sanders values the monthly visits of guest speakers from the Partners in Prevention program of Beit T’Shuvah, a Jewish faith-based recovery and rehabilitation center in Los Angeles.

They are people like Doug Rosen, now 32, who describes to Jewish teens his upbringing in Beverly Hills, his academic sprint through the University of Colorado and his burgeoning career as a film studio executive in Hollywood.

Oh, and his cocaine and heroin addictions too.

The road to that pretty much started in high school, or even before, Rosen says, when he began to retreat in a fog of pot smoke at the moment his parents announced they were splitting up. Unequipped to faithfully express himself or seek support in community, feeling abnormal and lonely, his experimentation with drugs began.

“It set the model for how I dealt with life’s challenges,” he says. “It took away all my feelings of pain and insecurity and trying to fit in. It was the answer.”

That questionable solution followed Rosen straight out of high school, through college and into his young adulthood, when his drug dependency was at its peak and burned through $200 a day in powdery heroin and cocaine, plus some crystal meth to top things off.

“I was treating this outside stuff, the drugs, to fix the inside stuff,” Rosen says. “That’s backwards.”

A recipe for a crash, literally and otherwise. Because it was after he destroyed his car and lost his girlfriend and his glam job and was arrested and jailed for shoplifting that Rosen found himself at Beit T’Shuvah, where he began the slow crawl back.

Rosen, today married and a new father, now works full-time for Beit T’Shuvah’s Partners in Prevention program, using his own story to connect with teens all over the country.

To impressionable students like Sanders, such tales may be dark, but are ultimately full of brightness and enlightenment and hope, aimed as they are at preventing teens from following suit.

“At first I was skeptical, but they have come to really inspire me to be a better person,” she says. “It makes me want to go forward on the path that I am on.”

But Partners in Prevention is so much more than a parade of human case studies meant to scare teens into drug- and addiction-free lives. Rather, it is a more formal program of Jewish education that uses Judaic precepts to promote self-acceptance, self-worth, a values-led existence and family harmony.

That is, extinguishing patterns and equipping teens with the proper tools and environments with which to resolve inner issues and conflicts – before they flame into full-blown personal catastrophes and addictions and behaviors that could destroy lives, families, futures, and hope.

“There is a tremendous power in framing within a Jewish context how we live life, and how we feel about ourselves, and how we cope,” says Kathy Marks, director of Partners in Prevention. “This has differentiated us and increased our effectiveness not only as a addiction prevention and recovery program, but also as one that deepens the feeling and connection to Judaism among our kids.”

The program aims at Jewish youth ages 12 to 18 and is divided into six parts, usually presented over three months in regular sessions at schools and synagogues and other organizations that partner with Beit T’Shuvah.

It begins with a recovering young person, such as Rosen, telling his or her story of self-destruction and the positive role of Judaism and Judaic values in recovery. But it moves in other directions, giving teens – and in many cases their parents – the space to confront issues sometimes for the very first time.

Established in 2003, Partners in Prevention has reached thousands of Jewish teens. A Covenant Foundation grant in 2006 allowed Beit T’Shuvah to more fully develop the program and spread it beyond the Los Angeles area.

“The fact that the Covenant Foundation believes in what we’re doing, and supports us in what we’re doing, and believes that prevention of addictive behaviors and risky behaviors is so important, gives so much more strength to what we do and has helped us push this taboo subject out into the open,” says Rabbi Mark Borovitz, spiritual leader at Beit T’Shuvah. “Covenant is a big part of this.”

As more schools and synagogues and other institutions hear of its effectiveness and its Jewish tilt, the list of venues just keeps growing, from California to Iowa, and to Wisconsin, and to New Hampshire, and everywhere in between – 25 states according to one estimate.

“Partners in Prevention is one of the most powerful programs in this community,” says Mickie Targum, Director of Teen Engagement and the High School of Jewish Studies at the Agency for Jewish Education in San Diego, who pushed to bring the program to her area. “By providing this, we are doing sacred work for our kids.”

Ah, the kids – those who are participating now or are alumni of Partners in Prevention, that is.

Beyond the views of teachers and administrators and anyone else who can be branded official, the most authoritative voices are probably the teens at the center of it all.

“It can be hard and take a long time to come back up from the bottom,” says Partners in Prevention devotee Julia Sanders. “So why would I even want to go there?”

For more information on Beit T’Shuvah and Partners in Prevention, visit www.beittshuvahla.org.

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Covenant Foundation