"The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic doctrine or ideology, holding it as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence."
http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articl ... reform.htm"A Calgary program boasts an 85% success rate in getting teens off drugs and booze"
"The program...boasts a successful rate (total abstinence from alcohol and drugs) of 85%."
http://www.aarc.ab.ca/images/media/befo ... efroma.pdfThis claim is a complete fabrication. It is a lie that has been told over and over again, dating back to Miller Newton's claims for Kids. It is the second most popular method used to beg money, after testimonials from members:
"Over 85% of it's graduates are clean and sober, in school or working, and are reunited with their families."
This claim was made by MLA Ron Stevens in the Alberta Legislature.
http://www.aarc.ab.ca/endorsement.htmlThere is no scientific basis for this claim whatsoever. Here is what AARC says about the results obtained from a poll they conducted:
"100 sequential graduates who graduated from 1998 to 2003 were selected for interview in 2003, and 85 agreed to participate. In addition, 30 randomly selected parents, and 11 parents of the 15 clients not interviewed agreed to be interviewed. Using information from these interviews, data regarding the recovery status of 96 clients was obtained."
This statement raises many issues. Firstly, in a five year span AARC graduated only one hundred clients.
This with operating costs of six and a half million dollars. AARC propaganda repeatedly states that the program opened to meet a desperate need for the service in Alberta. Yet even with clients being brought in from Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and apparently as far away as Pennsylvnia, they managed to produce an average of twenty graduates per year in the period beginning six years (or eight?) years after it's inception.
Second, 85% of the clients agreed to be interviewed, yet AARC still includes data taken from eleven parents of the fifteen non-compliant grads. There is no reason to give any validity to the claims made by these parents, and the inclusion of their statements in the data renders the entire process meaningless.
Consider what DavidPablo Escobar-Grant said about parents in AARC:
"Parents could also be really interesting, and sometimes a parent benefited from being in AARC more than their kid."
"Clients who were old enough to sign out were allowed to do so, but the parents were encouraged to stay..."
AARC exists to sell parents peace of mind. It does not exist to serve the young people who are admitted there.
Back to the study. The polling was done in 2003, taking in the cohort of grads from '98 to '03. So some grads had been out over four years, and some less than a year. The inclusion of such a broad range of grad dates renders it absolutely impossible to derive any meaningful conclusion about long-term abstinence.
Here is the salient point that establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that the 85% claim is a lie:
"Of the sample 100 graduates, 85 reported being sober and 48 of the 100 were continuously sober since graduation."
52% have relapsed by AARC's own admission.
"For those graduated for over 4 years, 86% had maintained more than 12 months of sobriety."
So in the span of four years 86% had been sober more than 25% of the time.
In the study the average number of grads per year is 20. If all of the grads were sober for two years straight after AARC, that constitutes 40% of the total number of grads in the poll. That leaves only 8%, or 8 other grads in the poll who have maintained abstinence since leaving AARC, or 13% of the grads out longer than two years.
The spontaneous remission rate for alcohol abuse is 5%. So AARC's long-term rate of success could be a low as 8%. If we take into account that 11% of the data came from AARC parents, and not grads, AARC's long-term success rate may be as low as zero.
