An actual published study about Straight?

[Anonymous]

From http://www.jrsa.org/jjec/programs/substance/

Freidman, A. S., Schwartz, R., & Utada, A. (1989). Outcome of a unique youth drug abuse program: A follow-up study of clients of Straight, Inc. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 6, 259-268.

The evaluation of Straight, Inc., a multimodal day treatment facility for drug abusing adolescents in Springfield, Virginia, used a pre-post design. Due to ethical considerations, all 330 participants admitted were given treatment in the facility. A substance abuse survey was administered at the beginning of treatment and at follow-up (a minimum of 6 months after graduation). Measures included self-reported delinquency and substance abuse, and psychiatric measures. The analysis compared graduates of the program to dropouts and found significant differences between the groups on prevalence of drug use.

The primary outcome measure used in this study was substance use. Substance use was measured using the Drug Severity Index, or DSI, which takes into account both the frequency of drug use and the "risk levels" of each of the various substances.

[Anonymous]

Not sure what your point is.  This report is from 1989? Since then many professionals have lambasted the Straight modality as child abuse.  It's also been classified as a cult!

The data has to be skewed as well, because everyone knows that those surveys were not scientific at all.  No one was going to admit doing drugs for fear or being thrown back into Straight.

Straight = Child Abuse

[Anonymous]

I agree with you 100%.
My point is that I am totally suprised that Straight even made an attempt. I'm curious if there was a published peer-reviewable study of Straights "success" rate, to review the actual material would be good because we could easily challenge it and understand where that supposed statistic originated....

[Maia]

If anyone has any info on how the data was collected for this study (if you were interviewed for it, if you saw people being interviewed, if you did the interviewing, etc.)... if they could please contact me at maia@echonyc.com, I would be highly grateful!

I am writing a book about these programs for Riverhead (a division of Penguin Putnam) and I would like to know as much as possible about what actually happened.

[wesfager]

Dr. Richard Schwartz was the research director for Straight-Springfield and he published many studies involving Straight kids.  He was a professor at Georgetown along with Straight mouthpiece Dr. Robert DuPont.  Check out this rebuttal to Dr. Schwartz's reporting on Straigth by author Richard Lawrence:

http://thestraights.com/people/medical- ... z-lawrence

Wes