A lot of addicts have come to that turning point where they must change their lives or lose everything they care about. But the problem was that Wilkerson had been there before. Again and again. Despite the birth of six children whom she loved, and repeated attempts to commit herself to rehab, she never was able to stop. She'd been addicted to crack since she was a teenager and she'd just about resigned herself to a miserable fate.

But when New York child welfare authorities seized her children and placed them in foster homes, the 36-year-old decided to try one last time to escape the drug that had destroyed her life.

"I went to court," she explains, "and they told me the only way I could get my kids back was to stop using. They gave me a list of rehab programs, including the acupuncture program at Lincoln Hospital, which sounded good to me. At Lincoln, they put the little needles in my ears. I had no drug cravings. It was amazing. I've been off drugs for two years now. I have a good job, and I got my kids back."

Long a poster child for the damning effects of drug addiction, she suddenly found herself being upheld as a different kind of role model: living proof that a needle treatment could help even the most chronic crack addict. In her new job she does outreach to crack users, telling them her story and giving them information about Lincoln's acupuncture treatment.

This week, with the publication of a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Wilkerson may have some powerful ammunition in the battle against crack addiction.

Acupuncture began to be used in addiction treatment in the United States at Lincoln and a few other places in the mid-1970s. Over the past 25 years, the number of facilities has grown steadily and is now estimated to be several hundred. But some doctors have continued to reject the ancient Chinese needle therapy because findings have been contradictory. Some studies show significant benefits; others show none at all. But this study, conducted by Yale researchers, seems destined to bring acupuncture closer to the medical mainstream. The largest and most scientifically rigorous to date, the study shows that acupuncture can be highly effective in treating cocaine addiction, in conjunction with a comprehensive treatment program.

This new study comes at a time when the Western disregard for this Eastern treatment is finally giving way. A growing group of studies suggests that acupuncture is effective for many conditions: from hives to fibromyalgia, from back pain to PMS. Even the National Institutes of Health recently endorsed incorporating the ancient needle therapy into mainstream medicine.

"This study provides further validation for what many of us in drug rehabilitation have been doing for many years," says Michael Smith, director of the substance abuse rehabilitation program at Lincoln Hospital and developer of the treatment procedure used in the new study.

"There aren't many other effective treatments for cocaine addiction," says Arthur Margolin, Ph.D., a research scientist in Yale's department of psychiatry and the new study's principal investigator. "In addition to its effectiveness, acupuncture is a low-cost treatment and has few, if any, side effects."

"In my experience," explains, "acupuncture not only minimizes cravings and withdrawal discomforts, but it also has longer-term benefits. People who get acupuncture tend to stay in treatment longer, and as a result are less likely to return to drug use."

The new study involved 82 heroin and cocaine addicts. They received methadone to treat their heroin addiction, plus counseling. In addition, they were all assigned to one of three experimental groups. Some received true acupuncture, needles into four classic points in the ears. Others received sham acupuncture, an equal number of needles inserted into non-acupuncture spots around the ears. And some viewed relaxing nature videos.

Participants received treatments five times a week for eight weeks. Each treatment lasted 45 minutes. They submitted urine samples three times a week that were analyzed for the presence of cocaine.

By the end of the study, the group receiving true acupuncture had the most cocaine-free urine samples -- 54.8 percent -- compared with 23.5 percent in the sham acupuncture group and just 9.1 percent in the relaxation video group.

"Not everyone with an addiction problem responds to acupuncture, but many do," says Patricia Culliton, an acupuncturist with the alternative medicine division of the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis who participated in some of the earliest studies of the needle therapy as an addiction treatment more than 10 years ago. "We've had good results with men and women of all ages, races, ethnicities and drugs: alcohol, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and prescription drugs such as Valium. And compared with other treatments, acupuncture is very safe and inexpensive."

Use of acupuncture in addiction treatment began serendipitously in the early 1970s, when H.L. Wen, M.D., a neurosurgeon in Hong Kong, used the needle therapy to treat postoperative pain in a man who also happened to be withdrawing from heroin. He noticed that the man's withdrawal symptoms had disappeared. Wen subsequently began treating narcotic addiction with acupuncture, and reports of his success reached Smith at Lincoln Hospital, who adopted the approach in the mid-1970s. Since then, it has spread to hundreds of drug-rehab programs around the world.