Buzz, I think you're partially right about where toughlove came from. But take into consideration the way time distorts our memories. We all tend to forget how things were decades ago. In the `50's, teenagers were out hot-rodding, drag racing and, most often, w/ alcohol involved. The law was less strict wrt teen drinking and drunk driving (especially if the kid in question was a football player or something). But the laws of physics haven't changed at all.
Today, we're fed a steady diet of utter bullshit about kids ta'day. The turth, that teen violence, pregnancy and illiteracy have steadily declined for years, is just not very exciting or sensational. We worry too damned much and have too little faith in our kids to learn how to manage their own lives while they still have the safety net of minority. We accept things like the dreaded "law enforcement involvement" as evidence of their outrageous behavior w/o taking into consideration that the same behavior that used to get a kid a ride
home to dad and a good lecture and chores now lands the kid up in court w/ a record and under nearly unbearable scrutiny.
As to the specific origin of TOUGHLOVE®, here's some.
"Credit for the first grass-roots parent activity is generally given to Marsha Manatt, a mother from Atlanta, Georgia, who began to suspect that marijuana was being used at her daughter&rsquos birthday party."
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/bulletin/ ... ge005.html"One of the seminal events in the creation of the modern American anti-drug movement was a backyard barbecue held in Atlanta, Georgia, during August of 1976. In the aftermath of their daughter's birthday party, Ron and Marsha Manatt combed through the wet grass in their pajamas, at one in the morning, with flashlights, finding dozens of marijuana roaches, rolling paper packets, and empty bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 fortified wine discarded by their twelve- and thirteen-year-old guests. Alarmed by these discoveries, the Manatts gathered local parents in their living room and formed what would soon be known as the Nosy Parents Association, a group dedicated to preventing teenage drug use. Marsha Manatt wrote to Robert Dupont, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse; he helped arrange her introduction to Thomas Gleaton, a professor of health education at Georgia State University. There soon arose the Parents' Resource Institute for Drug Education and the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, two organizations backed by the top officials at NIDA and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) which would exert tremendous influence on the nation's drug policies. Thousands of other parents' groups soon formed nationwide, and Ross Perot helped launch the Texans' War on Drugs."
http://www.indiesent.com/ganjab/reeferma/crimdec.htmlNote that Bobby DuPont, then head of NIDA, had already granted millions of dollars to Art Barker's "The Seed" program, served as a professional wittness on behalf of it's follow-on program, Straight, Inc. in later years and now sits, along w/ H. Wayne Huizenga and Betty Sembler on the BOA of Psychemedic; America's #1 hair drug testing corporation.)
It is abaolutely preposterous to characterize TOUGHLOVE® as ever having been a grass-roots organization. It has always been a funded project of NIDA, DEA and ONDCP.
If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana.
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Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
Seed sibling `71 - `80
Straight South (Sarasota, FL)
10/80 - 10/82
Anonymity AnonymousSome days, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
