Teen dies after state cuts drug program.

Byline: Travis Fain

Jun. 21--In January, a group of teenage girls showed up at the state Capitol, begging just about any official who would listen not to end a state-sponsored drug and alcohol treatment program.

The long-term residential treatment program, in which young people lived with other recovering addicts in group homes, was being phased out in favor of mostly outpatient therapy that would allow state dollars to stretch further.

You can't treat addictions that way, the girls said. Someone will be hurt, they pleaded.

The program shut down a few months later. As a result, an 18-year-old alcoholic named Barbara Wells was sent home several months shy of completing the program at a group home called Katharos in Griffin.

Less than three months later, she was dead.

Her mother, Diane Lankford, says Wells got drunk and choked to death on her own vomit at the home of a 30-year-old man. Police charged him with providing alcohol to someone underage, but they are waiting on toxicology results to officially list a cause of death.

Wells was put on life support for a while, but her mother says she was brain dead when medics found her that morning. In the end, the girls who'd spent time with Barbara in treatment watched as…