Delray Beach, Fla., located between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, has emerged as the country's largest and most vibrant recovery community, with many halfway houses and 5,000 people a week attending 12-step meetings, the New York Times reported on Nov. 16.

The recovery community in Delray Beach exists well beyond the walls of the community's rehabilitation centers, with recovery radio shows, a recovery motorcycle club, and a coffeehouse with its own therapy group. Because it is a compact area, recovering people cross paths daily along the shops and bistros of Atlantic Avenue, oblivious to the tourists and "normies," their term for sober people not in recovery.

"This community is one big helping-hand that is always open," says Mike Devane, a new halfway house owner who relocated from New Jersey five years ago to get sober. 

The idea of an extended recovery community gets mixed reviews from addiction experts. Some find it too insular. "Cutting off contact with the outside world, is that a sign of mental health?" says Stanton Peele, a psychologist and author who challenges much of the conventional wisdom of the addiction field.

However, A. Thomas McLellan, director of the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, says the way to judge the wisdom of living in a somewhat isolated, sober community is to ask: "Where were they before? This may be their best available option."