Free2Bme14, that's my interest in Elan.
I'll tell you this. A few years back, I spent a lot of time reading and posting to Ken's forum. I wasn't doing it to make trouble or to start fights. I wanted to compare notes with former Elan students.
That, of course, is taboo over there. Ken will tolerate NO discussion on the similarities or connections between Elan and other Synanon based programs. The only acceptable position is that Elan is entirely Unique in the universe, so no outsiders are welcome under any circumstances. Even from one individual to another, according to house rules, the Elan experience is entirely unique. Therefore, there can be no coherant discussion about it, even among ppl who were there for years together (and, of course, were not permitted to speak freely and candidly at the time).
So that's why I opened this forum. Of all the people who take an interest in these programs from all different perspectives, some few of us weirdos are actually interested and intrigued by all the complex goings on in the background.
I want to know these things and for other folks to be able to find out if they're interested. Where did the idea come from? Who ponied up the dough to get it started? What was it like for residents? How much of what you experienced was and is now going on in various warehouses, storefronts, boarding schools and outdoor programs accross the country and oversease? Who's getting all the money and what are they doing with it? What are the long-term adverse effects that many of us have in common? Have there every been any clinical studies? Informal studies? Is there a similar precident in history that we can draw on for insight?
Now, for most of the past 20+ years, I took very much the same attitude as some of the folks at Elanalum. The Program was a horrible and horribly long chapter ripped out of my life. I was glad to be able to walk away and never really wanted to 'process my feelings' or 'figure out my ...' whatever! No need for it, as far as I was concerned. I just went on with my life and have gotten pretty much everything I went after.
But I did get curious and, just a few years ago, had to look under the bed, just to make sure there were no boogie monsters. But there were and there are. I could live comfortably and happily knowing that there are weird little abusive cults scattered about all of human culture. This has always been true, and yet life is very much worth living; always has been.
But I came upon some things that I really don't want to accept and that I don't feel any of us should have to accept. That is that from the cop-on-the-street and schoolpeople all the way up to the Whitehouse and the UN, there is stayed support for THIS particular 'treatment' model.
The gulag where I was held for two years, Straight, Inc., morphed into several organizations, including the politically powerful Drug Free America Foundation. The crack-pots who established and ran these programs were not acting alone. They had funding and protection from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (an institute of the National Institutes of Health)
These folks continue to invest heavily in public policy which forces you and me, the tax payors (even if you don't earn an income, we all pay these taxes) to pay for things like "helping" major league allstar, Darryl Strawberry, who is currently serving prison time in Florida for unauthorized sex.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/news/2002/0313/1350789.htmlThe man is like 40 damned years old! What business is it of ours what kinds of drugs he likes to use or the details of the man's sex life? This is therapy? I at least admire his wife for not contributing to the public discourse on this very private matter.
Now comes Rush Limbaugh, the latest poster boy for the disease model. If he really had any sack or prescience, he'd have taken the oportunity to become the newest poster boy against the DEA/DOJ war on pain management. But, alas, Rush is not a hero. He only plays one on talk radio. At the bottom line, he seems to have gone with the highest bidder, just as one would expect.
These things disturb me greatly and I want to get to the bottom of it. DFAF (mentioned above) say they get around 30% or more of their funding from the Federal government. What they don't say is that they also get billions in private sector money as a result of mandated piss testing, DARE and Peer Counseling programs mandated in the schools, mandatory treatment (as in Operation PAR in the Tampa area). Their faithful lobby, law enforcement, get's more untold billions every year from property forfeiture laws and policies that DFAF and their allies have bought and paid for. Those 1-800-BEA-SNITCH anonymous tip hotlines? You guessed it, they've got tentacles in that scheme too.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil ---in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer!"--Thomas Paine, Common Sense
It is absolutely unacceptable to me that these people are taking my earnings by force to turn the world my children have to live in into the Program for the masses; prison without walls.
I'm a real live and let live kind of gal. I'd be very happy with just having left the cult in my dark and strange past and move on to bigger and better things. And I'll do that, too, just as soon as I'm fairly well assured that these sadistic Nazi bastards are getting not one red cent and not one free pass from the government I pay to protect me and mine.
That's my interest in this in more than a nutshell.
Speak gently! 't is a little thing Dropp'd in the heart's deep well; The good, the joy, that it may bring Eternity shall tell.
-- G. W. Langford: Speak gently.
