Hope House Executive Director Jerry Carrier believed helping addicts and alcoholics takes more than drying them out.

He envisioned a detox center and long-term residential treatment facility for women with mental and substance abuse problems, where they could live in efficiency apartments with their children, get psychiatric help and gradually return to society.

Dr. Carrier's dream becomes a reality in November with the opening of a new Hope House on Highland Avenue, more than five times the size of the current facility and serving three times the number of women and children.

A professor emeritus of pharmacology and toxicology at Medical College of Georgia, he spent two years raising $4.5 million for it, according to a consultant he hired to help with fundraising.

But Dr. Carrier didn't live to see it open.

He died Thursday of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung disease, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., where he was trying to get a lung transplant, his life friend David Biggs said.

Dr. Carrier worked incessantly to find state, federal and corporate money to fund Hope House, Mr. Biggs said. During his hospitalization he asked for his laptop so he could work in bed.

"He would sleep thinking about it," Mr. Biggs said. "Even in the hospital, in his last days, he was still writing grants."

Raised in Charleston, S.C., Dr. Carrier got his medical education in Mississippi, Texas and West Germany. He took a job at MCG in 1974.

He retired in 2002, and that same year he started volunteering at Hope House, a women's facility that had just opened.

"He saw the need for it," Mr. Biggs said. "He knew about the Hale House and the center for men, but there just wasn't much here for women."

Wanting to take advantage of his grant-writing skills, the Hope House board hired him as executive director that September.

Dr. Carrier thought the facility should be more than a halfway house or a women's shelter, said Charles Bellmann, a former Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce executive director whom Dr. Carrier hired to help make political connections and recruit and train staff.

He believed addiction is a disease of the mind and body, and treating it takes a holistic approach, Mr. Bellman said. Women live at Hope House for a year to a year-and-a-half, with both them and their children getting mental health treatment.

They move back into the community in phases. After a couple of months, women have full-time jobs or are furthering their education. Their goal is eventually to live on their own through Section 8 vouchers, Mr. Bellman said.

Hope House will soon add an outpatient program, also made possible by Dr. Carrier.

"He had a burning desire to help people -- homeless, those with addictions," Mr. Bellmann said. "And he was going to see it all the way through. That was his life's work."

A celebration of life service for Dr. Carrier will be held Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at the new Hope House building at 2205 Highland Avenue.

The facility's grand opening will be held Nov. 13.

Reach Johnny Edwards at (706) 823-3225 or johnny.edwards@augustachronicle.com.