Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Straight, Inc. and Derivatives
Blueprints
Anonymous:
Drug War Casualties
Fox News Channel/May 23, 2002
By Radley Balko
Samantha Monroe was 12 years old in 1981 when her parents enrolled her in the Sarasota, Fla., branch of Straight Inc., an aggressive drub rehab center for teens.
Barely a teen, Samantha also had no history of drug abuse. But she spent the next three years of her life surviving Straight.
She was beaten, starved and denied toilet privileges for days on end. She describes her "humble pants," a punishment that forced her to wear the same pants for six weeks at a time. Because she was allowed just one shower a week, the pants often filled with feces, urine and menstrual blood. Often she was confined to her closet for days. She gnawed through her jaw during those "timeout" sessions, hoping she'd bleed to death.
She says that after she was raped by a male counselor, "the wonderful state of Florida paid for and forced me to have an abortion."
There are hundreds of Straight stories like Samantha's. Wes Fager enrolled his son in a Springfield, Va., chapter of Straight on the advice of a high school guidance counselor. Fager didn't see his son again until three months later - after he'd escaped and developed severe mental illness.
Since then, Fager's set out to clear the air on Straight. He has accumulated stories like Samantha's and his son's on a clearinghouse Web site. They are stories of suicides and attempted suicides, rapes, forced abortions, molestations, physical abuse, lawsuits, court testimonies, and extensive documentation of profound psychological abuse at Straight chapters all over the country.
Yet, the Straight model of drug treatment is thriving, with the trend toward "boot camp" style rehab centers growing more and more en vogue and Straight's founders, high-powered Republican boosters Mel and Betty Sembler, wielding enormous influence over U.S. drug policy.
Mel Sembler is currently serving as President Bush's ambassador to Italy, and the Semblers serve on the boards of almost every major domestic anti-drug program. They are longtime close associates of the Bush family, and are behind efforts to defeat medicinal marijuana initiatives all over the country. Despite the horrors that have surfaced about Straight's history, they are proud and unrepentant about the program.
With more and more U.S. states turning to mandatory treatment instead of incarceration for minor drug offenses - with Mel and Betty Sembler continuing to flex political muscle in the power corridors of the drug war - the story of Straight is one worth hearing.
Straight was spun off of a Synanon, Fla., based rehab program called The Seed. Established in 1972, the program lost its funding after a congressional investigation turned up evidence of brainwashing and cult-like mind control tactics. But a Florida congressman named Bill Young persisted. He found advocates in the Semblers and persuaded them to start a similar rehab center in St. Petersburg, which they called "Straight Incorporated."
Despite allegations of abuse from escaped members and pending lawsuits, over the next 15 years Straight won laudatory praise in Republican circles. Luminaries from Nancy Reagan to Princess Diana visited Straight branches and touted their successes (though by most estimates only about 25 percent of Straight "clients" ever completed the program).
But Straight's tactics soon caught up to it in the courts. A college student won a false imprisonment claim of $220,000 in 1983, and another claim cost Straight $721,000 in 1990. A Straight spin-off called Kids of North Jersey lost a $4.5 million claim in 2000. Straight chapters across the country began to shut down, culminating with the last branch in Atlanta closing in 1993.
But the Straight philosophy was far from finished. Many chapters and directors reopened new clinics that employed the same tactics under different names - such as KIDS, Growing Together and SAFE. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush visited and praised SAFE, despite the fact that an Orlando television station reported widespread Straight-like abuse at the facility in a 2000 expose.
Amidst mounting lawsuit losses and bad publicity throughout the 1990's, the umbrella organization Straight Inc. changed its name in 1996 to the Drug Free America Foundation. DFAF thrives today with $400,000 in annual federal subsidies.
"It amazes me that despite the pattern of complaints and abuse allegations, Straight chapters can simply change their names and continue to operate," says Rick Ross, a cult expert and intervention specialist. Ross says there's an unfortunate market for "rehab" centers that take burdensome children off the hands of troubled parents.
Most troubling, however, is the considerable and continuing political clout of Straight Inc.'s founders. Former President Bush once shot a television commercial for DFAF, and designated the Semblers' program as one of his "thousand points of light."
Long a presence in Florida Republican circles, Mel Sembler was tapped as ambassador to Australia in 1989. Today he serves the younger Bush as ambassador to Italy, and he served on the board of the 2000 Republican National Convention.
Betty Sembler co-chaired Jeb Bush's campaign committee. In return, the governor declared Aug. 8, 2000, "Betty Sembler Day" in Florida - due, he said, to her work "protecting children from the dangers of drugs."
She also serves on the board of DARE, the largely failed anti-drug program for elementary school students.
DFAF also worked with then-governor Bush on anti-drug programs in Texas, and today claims to have his ear on national drug policy as well. Indeed, Arizona prosecutor and Sembler favorite Rick Romley was on Bush's short list for drug czar. Though Romley wasn't nominated, Bush did tap staunch drug warrior John Walters. The nomination caused Betty Sembler to remark, ".... we have lacked the leadership and support of the White House ... until now."
"It's really shocking that the Semblers are still lauded and honored after all that's come out about their organization," says cult expert Ross, a self-described Republican.
Last year, a reporter from the Canadian e-zine Cannabis News asked Betty Sembler in person about the horror stories he'd read from Straight survivors. "They should get a life," Sembler replied. "I am proud of everything we have done. There's nothing to apologize for. The legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing."
That's the attitude of the drug war's power duo, who can be unrepentant about the lives their program destroyed because they believe a win-at-all-costs approach is the only way to remove the scourge of drugs from society. Shattered lives, suicides, forced abortions, fractured psyches - all necessary casualties of the drug war, and nothing to apologize for.
Rachael:
Thank You!!!!
Currently doing research.
Anonymous:
Getting Tough on Private Prisons for Teens
Residential programs for troubled teenagers tell parents they'll cure kids' behavior problems. But Congress may be cracking down after allegations of abuse and a GAO report that at least 10 teens have died in these facilities.
Maia Szalavitz | October 16, 2007 | web only
Members of Congress heard jarring testimony from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last week about people who were denied medical care, starved, beaten, and "forced to eat vomit, lie in urine and feces, forced to use toothbrushes to clean toilets and then on their teeth."
A latecomer to the proceedings might "think we were talking about human-rights abuses in Third World countries," said Rep. George Miller of California, who convened the hearing. In fact, Congress was for the first time discussing abuses in "tough love" residential programs for teenagers.
These programs -- variously known as "boot camps," "emotional growth schools," "wilderness programs," and "therapeutic boarding schools" -- sell themselves to parents as a way of fighting teen drug use, behavioral problems, and various mental illnesses like depression, attention deficit disorder (ADD), even bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression). Some programs are public and are part of the juvenile justice system, others are run by private, for-profit organizations. Some are part of large networks of affiliates; others are independent. All lock up teens without contact from the outside world.
At Miller's request, the GAO recently investigated 10 deaths in such facilities, and found thousands of other allegations of abuse. Miller had called for the investigation after reading media accounts of abuses and discovering that not only are the private prisons for teenagers unregulated, but no one even knows how many there are or how many teenagers are held incommunicado in them without any civil-rights protections. It is time, Miller says, for federal regulation of these programs.
The ranking Republican on the committee, Howard P. McKeon of California, said the testimony of three parents whose children had been killed "boggled the mind." He noted that while he usually doesn't support broadening federal oversight, "there are some times when it has to happen."
But successfully regulating this billion-dollar industry will be an enormous challenge. The GAO investigation showed that when many abusive programs are exposed, they simply change names and/or move to different states, with staff avoiding accountability. And the programs often have powerful political allies, allowing them to skillfully dodge regulatory frameworks such as those that cover psychiatric hospitals or prisons.
To understand just how daunting it will be to implement federal oversight, one need only to hear the story of Straight Inc. and its offspring. The Florida-based anti-drug program is the granddaddy of the teen "tough love" industry. It was shuttered in 1993 following reports of serious abuses, but several programs derived from it remain open, state-licensed in addiction treatment, and, in many cases, accredited by respected organizations like the Council on Accreditation.
Straight was founded in 1976 by Republican heavyweight Mel Sembler-- who chaired the finance committee for the party during the 2000 elections and heads the Scooter Libby defense fund. Straight was based on a federally funded experiment in the 1970s called The Seed that had been denounced by a congressional investigation as "similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans."
Nonetheless, Straight spent the 1980s as Nancy Reagan's favorite drug treatment program and won wide praise from Democrats as well. By the early 1990s, it had nine facilities in seven states, and it claims to have "treated" 50,000 teens. It only went from media darling to media devil when reports of its regime of psychological and physical abuse became too ubiquitous (and civil lawsuits too expensive) to ignore. Terminal attrition followed the bad press, lawsuits, and state investigations, ultimately causing Straight to shut itself down.
After Straight finally closed its doors in 1993, The St. Petersburg Times wrote an editorial headlined, "A Persistent, Foul Odor." It covered a state investigation that suggested influence from Sembler and other politicians had contributed to Straight's ability to stay open despite documented abuse.
However, just as The Seed produced Straight, Straight spawned as well. At least six programs using identical "therapeutic" language and the same model still operate today in the U.S. and Canada. They are all run by former Straight participants or former employees of programs copied directly from Straight.
The largest remaining Straight-descendant program, the Pathway Family Center, has sites in three states and support from major companies like Emmis Communications and the professional basketball team, the Indiana Pacers.
Founded by Terri Nissley, whose expertise lies in the fact that she had an addicted daughter and her family participated in Straight, Pathway opened in Detroit in 1993. In fact, according to The Tampa Tribune, the facility was simply Straight's Detroit affiliate, reincorporated under a new name.
Pathway has continued to expand, swallowing up another former Straight facility and opening several new ones. In 2006, Pathway took over Kids Helping Kids, an Ohio program which evolved out of Straight-Cincinnati. The program also has centers in Southfield, Michigan, and in Indianapolis and Chesterton, Indiana. The Chesterton location opened just this year, despite efforts from survivors of the Straight model to warn the community that the program was outdated and harmful.
What makes these "tough love" programs uniquely dangerous is that they are led by amateurs who believe they are experts. No qualifications are needed to own, operate, or work with kids at such programs -- although they often employ some professionals, their influence is subsumed by the organizations' strict rules and regimes. And while they claim to treat serious mental illnesses and addictions, many of their tactics conflict with proven therapies for these conditions and they often don't even have the expertise to diagnose them properly.
The programs also tend to endorse an outdated view of teen problems in which confronting, humiliating, and degrading adolescents is seen as beneficial -- while kindness is stigmatized as "codependence" or "enabling." As leading addictions-outcomes researcher William Miller, Ph.D. put it in a recent paper, "Four decades of research have failed to yield a single clinical trial showing efficacy of confrontational counseling, whereas a number have documented harmful effects, particularly for more vulnerable populations."
The programs descended from Straight are especially problematic because they house kids from one often-dysfunctional family in the home of another. To regulators, this appears to be "outpatient" treatment, but kids are not free to leave. In these programs, new teens are held in the houses of families of teens who have been at the program longer ("oldcomers"). Newcomers spend their first nights in bedrooms with specially set alarms and where, teens say, the "oldcomers" frequently keep their beds against the door -- a fire hazard that's meant to prevent escape attempts.
At night, these "oldcomer" teens -- many of whom were admitted to the program due to anti-social behavior -- have absolute power over "newcomers." According to former program participants I interviewed, they can restrain them if they try to run, deny them the right to go to the bathroom, and impose other punishments. Every program that has used this Lord of the Flies system has, not surprisingly, run into serious problems.
Some of the more egregious physical practices at Pathway centers and other Straight descendants appear to have been dropped. They no longer make kids flap their arms wildly instead of raising their hands to get attention, or deny newcomers freedom of movement by having oldcomers push them around by their belt loops, whenever they aren't seated.
But according to teens, parents, and a former employee, the amateurish and confrontational core of the program remains.
Holly Guernsey's 15-year-old daughter -- I'll call her "Blair" -- had been caught stealing a pint of Schnapps from a store. She had previously been diagnosed with depression and ADD and had also been cutting herself. After the shoplifting incident, Blair's grandmother found Pathway in a Michigan phone book, and in January 2007, Blair was brought in for an evaluation. "We were concerned, but we didn't think she was an alcoholic," says Guernsey. "We thought the pot and alcohol were just symptoms. We were told [Pathway] would deal with the underlying problems," Guernsey told me.
But Blair soon found herself in a program where drugs were the focus. She says she was repeatedly told that she was lying about the amount of drugs she'd taken, and she quickly became severely depressed.
She spent her nights in a host home, with an alarm on the locked bedroom windows and a doorbell and alarm on the door. To go to the bathroom, she'd have to wake her "oldcomer" to ring the bell, wake the parents to silence the alarm, and then be escorted to the bathroom. At this "phase" of the program, kids are not allowed to read, watch TV, hear music, go to school, or even talk without permission. For most of the 10 to 12 hour days they spent at the center, teens say they have to sit still and straight with their feet flat on the ground.
One night, Blair broke a glass candleholder and slit her wrists. "There was blood everywhere," she says, explaining that she was made to stay up all night in the bathroom, apparently so that she could be monitored and so that she would not leave bloodstains where they couldn't easily be rinsed away. She says she was not seen by an internist or psychiatrist -- nor did Pathway inform her mother of the suicide attempt, which left scars.
Months later, Blair "earned" the right to go home. "As soon as we got alone with her, she would just sob," Guernsey says. But Blair didn't tell her mother what had happened.
Parents and teens who have been through Pathway told me that if an adolescent says anything at all negative about the program to her parents or anyone else, Pathway considers it "manipulation," and if it's reported, the teen will become a "newcomer" again, forced to return to a host home. Other teens get in similar trouble if they overhear such "manipulation" but do not inform program staff.
Guernsey only learned of her daughter's suicide attempt because two girls who were living with Blair decided to break this rule. One had been living with her in the host home where she'd slit her wrists. The girls told Guernsey that Blair needed professional help and begged her not to report them.
Soon, Guernsey discovered that another family had had a similar experience. I spoke to them as well. A woman -- I'll call her "Ada" here because she wishes to remain anonymous -- told me that her daughter had been admitted to Pathway for being suicidal. Yet Ada says she wasn't told when, while at a Pathway host home, the girl swallowed dish detergent and jumped off a 7-foot-high balcony. Again, both mother and daughter say the teen wasn't seen by a doctor.
A woman who attended the now-Pathway-affiliated Kids Helping Kids in 2003 reported similar abuses, including teens being made to restrain and even beat other teens who did not comply with the program.
Pathway's Executive Director Terri Nissley says every one of these negative allegations is "not true." In an e-mail, she wrote, "Pathway Family Center provides a professional and effective therapeutic community evidenced by our quarterly Parent and Client Satisfaction surveys, Exit Interviews with all families upon discharge, and countless testimonials from parents and clients. Our accreditation with CARF [the Commission on the Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities] is a testament to our commitment to person-centered, quality services. The agency was given an exemplary rating for our host home component... The adolescents are always treated with respect and dignity."
She also wrote, "A recent allegation was investigated by Pathway, CARF and the State of Michigan and was determined to be unfounded."
However, a knowledgeable state official who did not want to be named said that recent complaints regarding the host homes have not been resolved.
For reasons unrelated to the allegations, Pathway says it recently switched accreditation agencies from the Council on Accreditation (COA) to CARF, but a COA staffer said that Pathway had been put on probation due to complaints and had not resolved the situation before it switched agencies.
The Florida Straight descendant, Growing Together, finally folded last year after a 2004 exposé detailed bizarre sexual molestation of teens in host homes going back to 1997. And the reports out of Canada's Alberta Adolescent Recovery Center, which also uses the Straight host-home model, are just as horrifying.
These problems are clearly not just the result of a few "bad apples" taking charge. Allegations of abuse have rapidly arisen against any program using this treatment model. Consequently, careful regulation is desperately needed to ensure that adolescents with mental illnesses and behavior disorders are not subjected to it or to similar forms of quackery and to see to it that they actually get appropriate treatment. Straight and its descendants prove conclusively that troubled teens are too vulnerable to be left under the care of amateurs -- especially amateurs who are under less oversight than mental health professionals.
Rep. Miller is writing legislation intended to remedy the situation, which he plans to introduce early next year. The support from his committee's ranking Republican is enormously promising. However, the details here are truly devilish: bad regulation might further legitimize the industry, rather than successfully rein it in.
For example, if lax regulation is imposed, parents might be led to believe that these programs are being closely overseen by authorities. Straight was state-regulated as an addiction treatment center, as is Pathway, despite official complaints from families. Federal regulation without strict enforcement could allow programs to claim that there is oversight, even if it is toothless.
Effective regulation would at minimum ban the use of "host homes," ban corporal punishment in residential facilities (including punitive use of isolation and restraint), and require that mental illnesses and addictions be evaluated and treated only by professionals. By requiring independent evaluation before placement and on an ongoing basis, such legislation could restrict lockdown institutional care for teens to short periods of professionalized, empathetic inpatient care necessary for safety. It should also outlaw coerced placement in "wilderness programs" and the marketing of any unlicensed, locked facility for teens as treatment for psychological disorders or drug problems. (In fact, just this week, Rep. Miller asked the FTC to look into the industry's deceptive marketing practices.)
To have the strongest impact, regulation should also ban employees found to have engaged in corroborated abuse from further work in the industry and should prevent organizations found to be abusive from simply renaming themselves or moving to another state. It would have to be funded to provide for strict enforcement and ideally, would also have to fund evidence-based, outpatient alternatives to help desperate families.
Tough love cannot be made safe when carried out by lock-down institutions; since it doesn't offer any therapeutic advantage and carries serious risks, there is no need for an "alternative" system of unregulated private jails to impose it on teenagers. Regulation should provide for care that actually works. Four decades of Straight and its offspring is more than enough
Anonymous:
Pulling back from the abyss
A private program in Calgary specializes in drug-addicted teens who reject the idea of treatment
Gerry Bellett
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Though a psychiatric nurse, Valerie Goodale could not find help in B.C. for her drug-addicted son.
CREDIT: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun
Though a psychiatric nurse, Valerie Goodale could not find help in B.C. for her drug-addicted son.
CALGARY - When he talks about it today, Lawren Hyde just calls it a knife even though it was really a sharpened machete carried up his sleeve, a symbol of where he was at 17-- drug dealer, addict, violent, dangerous and on the brink of permanent insanity.
The machete was an accessory that came with the paranoia.
And the paranoia arrived when he was 16 and binging on cocaine, ecstacy, crystal meth and PCP -- horse tranquilizers -- in Downtown Eastside after hours clubs often for four days at a time without sleep.
"Shadows frightened me. My friends frightened me. I was convinced people were trying to kill me," said Hyde, now 23.
His widowed mother Valerie was at her wits end. He'd been uncontrollable since the age of 13 and on drugs since nine when his father died.
He'd been kicked out of four schools for dealing drugs, arrested for robbery, and was now raving around their North Vancouver neighbourhood with his machete, slashing at phantoms he believed were gathering to kill him.
Of all the torment his mother felt, the one that burned deepest was her inability to find him help.
If anyone should have been able to do this for him it was her -- after all, she was a psychiatric nurse working for North Shore Addictions and Mental Health Services with all the resources of the province open to her.
But despite the $1 billion a year the B.C. government spends on mental health and substance abuse programs, and all the youth addiction treatment beds throughout the province, none was of any use to Lawren who was going insane from an insatiable appetite for drugs.
"I tried everything to get help. I mean this is my profession and I should know where to get it, but in B.C. there was nothing for him. He needed to be forced into treatment but we don't do that here," she said.
"Treatment in B.C. is voluntary. Kids have to be compliant. There's no recognition that children like Lawren who aren't compliant need a secure environment where they can be treated. We give all the rights to kids and none to parents. So under the guise of human rights, parents can't get their children the help they need.
"Lawren only went for outpatient treatment because he was court ordered. But it never did any good. He needed more than that," she said.
Some therapists were so frightened by him they refused treatment.
SON COULD DIE, DOCTOR SAID
The last time she tried getting help in B.C. was from a Lower Mainland physician specializing in addiction. She told him she was afraid her son would die before he became an adult.
"He said to me 'yes that's quite possible.' That's all the help I could get -- him telling me my son might die. I can't tell you how I felt. I'd already lost my husband, if I lost my son I know I would have died too," she said.
In May 2001 she discovered the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre (AARC), a private program in Calgary which treats adolescents in the final stages of addiction when they are facing death or permanent insanity. Unlike programs in B.C., AARC won't reject youths like Lawren who fight treatment.
Most of the kids treated in AARC have been court ordered or placed in treatment by the Alberta Child Welfare Services, and virtually none of them choose to be treated, says AARC executive director Dr. Dean Vause.
"This is not the case with adults who will voluntarily enter treatment. Adolescents won't. None of them want to be here," he said.
Other kids are brought in by parents -- a few kicking and screaming. The Alberta government has secure care legislation that allows minors to be held for five days if deemed to be a danger to themselves or in danger of being exploited for prostitution.
B.C. considered enacting similar legislation in 2000 but the government was frightened off by the anticipated expense and the lack of facilities for holding them.
AARC requires every youth to sign a consent to treatment before being admitted in addition to a consent being granted by the government department or parent responsible.
Valerie was told that if she could get her son to AARC they would do an assessment to see if he qualified for treatment. She knew she would have to trick him into going as he was too violent and unstable to voluntarily enter the centre.
By now his paranoia was so bad that he'd gone into an RCMP detachment believing it the only safe place to make a phone call. His behaviour was so bizarre the officers sent him to hospital where a psychiatrist diagnosed drug-induced psychosis and found he was close to permanent insanity. When he was released from the psychiatric ward his mother convinced him to fly to Winnipeg and stay with an uncle.
Then she lied and said his return ticket would only take him as far as Calgary and offered to meet him there so they could spend the week shopping before returning home.
In Calgary she fashioned a heavy parcel using phone books and told him she had to deliver it.
When she pulled up outside AARC, a nondescript low building in an industrial area on the outskirts of the city, Lawren -- blissfully unaware of what AARC was -- volunteered to carry it in.
"I was trying to be nice," he said.
Inside he was told to go downstairs and in the basement he was surrounded by "eight guys all bigger than me who said I was getting a drug assessment."
Stunned, he was taken into a room where two young, fit, and large males stayed with him. At the time he was over six feet tall and a martial arts devotee and weighed about 160 pounds.
CONSENT FORM SIGNED
Vause remembers the admission.
"Lawren was a really sick kid and he didn't want to be here but we talked to him and he did sign the consent for assessment and treatment," said Vause.
"Sometimes you have to step in front of a kid that sick, although the risks for us as an organization are great because we don't want to leave ourselves open to accusations of unlawful confinement. That's why we require them to sign a consent."
Lawren remembers that if he had had a weapon that afternoon he would likely have used it.
"I didn't have my knife and I was dealing with guys a lot bigger than me.
"They took away my money, my jewelry, told me to take a shower to get deloused, took away all my fancy clothes and gave me the plain clothes my mother had brought in," he said.
He was escorted upstairs and placed with a group of other youths undergoing treatment. He spent the night at an AARC host home operated by the parents of a client nearing the end of treatment.
For company he was assigned the same husky youths that he believed he'd have to fight if he attempted to escape.
"I thought about it but I was in a strange city, the house was locked and secure I had no money, would have to fight my way out and even if I did I'd have to rob someone and then try to get back home," he said.
He decided to sit tight and see what happened. It took two weeks before he realized he was being helped.
"I guess I began listening to Dr. Vause I liked the way he held himself."
Meanwhile, his mother had flown back to North Vancouver, arranged a leave of absence, closed up the family home and moved to Calgary with his sister as the program requires parents to live near the centre.
Ten months later Lawren emerged from treatment and has been clean and sober since.
"AARC saved him as it saved me and his sister," says his mother. "We'd lived our lives around his addiction. My love didn't stand a chance next to the hold drugs had on him. He loved me, I know that, but he loved his addiction more -- much, much more -- they all do."
DRUG BLITZ PLANNED
Last November Valerie was back in Calgary, part of a handpicked group contemplating an ambitious addiction intervention campaign for British Columbia. Addiction and medical experts -- with observers from the B.C. government and a number of aboriginal bands -- were gathered here to plan a community-wide blitz on drug abuse that will be directed at oil-and-gas-rich Fort St. John and the aboriginal communities surrounding it.
At first sight it appeared unusual that 75 people -- among them business and community leaders of this wealthy Alberta city -- would give up four days of their valuable time planning to save children in northeast B.C. from drug and alcohol addiction.
But the initiative is being driven by Allan Markin, the chairman of Canadian Natural Resources.
Markin -- one of the owners of the Calgary Flames and an unabashed philanthropist -- has offered to put $3 million into the project.
Markin's company is the second largest gas and oil producer in Canada. The Fort St. John area accounts for a large part of his company's holdings and hundreds of local people are directly employed by Canadian Natural Resources or work under contract. Therefore it's no surprise that when Markin looked at the map of British Columbia for an area to help he stuck a pin in the north east.
Markin wants to help communities deal with addiction "so that in 10 years from now they will be better places" and asked AARC to become involved because of the centre's effectiveness.
He has held talks with the B.C. government and believes he has a promise from Victoria that his money would be matched.
"They've promised that and I believe they'll do as they've said," Markin said.
That might be a bit hopeful as the B.C. government has yet to commit a penny. Whether the government's involved or not, the participants in the meeting set themselves the ambitious goal of blanketing the Fort St. John region -- schools, churches, industry, police, the courts, service clubs, aboriginal governments, municipal governments -- with the message that addiction is a disease of the brain and communities need to do more than just rely on the old 'just say no' campaign as this has never worked anywhere with adolescents.
"Addiction's a complex illness and there are no quick fixes. But we believe community intervention can be effective in keeping kids healthy," said Vause.
"Prevention is a million times better than treatment and we'll be glad to be involved in an intervention program in B.C. because no one wants to see kids come here for treatment," he said.
Vause said AARC would likely open an office in Fort St. John either with permanent staff or with personnel rotated in on two-week stints to organize the community prevention part of the campaign.
But there won't be any treatment in Fort St. John although some of the most severely addicted children could be offered treatment in Calgary.
This will cost about $100,000 per family, the money being split between treatment fees and living expenses as at least one parent will have to move to Calgary and set up home in order the meet the demands of the program.
Markin is prepared to finance five B.C. families a year for five years. If the B.C. government matches his contribution, 10 B.C. families a year could be helped.
In recent years the B.C. government has sent deputy ministers and politicians to this non-profit centre to gather intelligence. The government appears fascinated by the centre's results, which are impressive, but skittish of its methods which are abstinence based, hard-nosed and nothing like the voluntary programs available in B.C.
The interest in AARC began with the former B.C. New Democrat Party government which promised $1 million to start an AARC program in the Lower Mainland, but nothing came of it.
Now the B.C. Liberals are sizing up AARC to see if the program could be brought into the province as part of the Aboriginal Health Plan which calls for an increase in addiction treatment.
Treatment is based on the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. ARRC was founded by Vause in 1992.
A 2005 survey by U.S.-based evaluator Dr. Michael Quinn Patton tracked the condition of 100 consecutive AARC graduates who had been treated between January 1998 and January 2002 and found 85 per cent of them sober and drug-free at the time of interview.
Some reported a relapse after treatment but had regained sobriety after returning to the centre for further counselling. However, 48 per cent had never used alcohol or drugs after leaving AARC.
During this four-year period, 15 youths had quit the program or were terminated by AARC staff or referred to another institution, a drop-out rate of about four a year.
Since 1992 the centre has graduated 332 youths, a significant number from B.C.
GOVERNMENT INTERESTED
Health Minister George Abbott admitted the government was interested in the AARC program.
"We have not formed conclusions on that program yet. I think it has enough positive results that it's important we look at it and see whether on a pilot project basis we ought to look at something like it," Abbott said.
"We spend over a billion dollars now on mental health and addictions programs. We frequently hear we should be doing more, and different and better. But while everyone agrees there should be progress not everyone agrees there should be change," he said.
"We will look carefully at that program and look carefully at other programs out of Alberta as well. There are also programs in Quebec and Ontario," said the minister.
He admitted there was no treatment centre in B.C. that would admit adolescents [such as Lawren] who were violently opposed to being treated.
The issue of whether severely addicted youth in the final stages of illness should be forced into treatment was something that still needed to be confronted, he says.
"That's an important issue and that's something that as a society and government we will have to grapple with -- whether one can treat those who are resistant to treatment?"
Asked if the government was planning to bring in any type of secure care legislation that might allow it to happen, he says it might be something for the future.
"I recall the debate when the NDP was looking at it. The Secure Care Act was controversial at the time particularly among those in the human rights area. It remains an important issue but it's not one that's going to be a part of legislative agenda in an immediate sense," he said.
Demands for treatment at AARC from parents in other parts of Canada and Alberta has been so intense that a new $6-million addition to the facility, allowing it to treat up to 60 children.
gbellett@png.canwest.com
? The Vancouver Sun 2007
Anonymous:
Suffering Together
By Trevor Aaronson trevor.aaronson@newtimesbpb.com
New Times Broward-Palm Beach, December 9, 2004
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In Lake Worth's Growing Together, kids don't kick drugs. They're beaten and humiliated.
"If they had to go to the bathroom in the middle of night, it was trouble. It was like a prison."
He was 16 and scared. Jason was a newcomer at Growing Together, a boot camp-style drug treatment center for adolescents in downtown Lake Worth. During the day, he attended group therapy at the program's two-story, banana-yellow building, which is equipped with security gates and barred windows. At night, he'd sleep at a private home endorsed by the facility. In February 1997, during one of Jason's first days in the program, George Johnson (not his real name) arrived to pick up five boys who were to stay at his place in Palm Beach Gardens that night. Among them were his son, George Jr., and four others, including Jason.
On the ride home, the boys began to discuss what they would do to Jason that night. "The Naked Crusader was going to appear," Jason later remembered one of them saying. It frightened him; he pretended not to hear.
That night at 10 o'clock, after doing chores and eating dinner, all five boys went to the bedroom where they were to sleep. They wore only underwear. The rest of their clothing was kept in a different room. Three of them lay down on mattresses on the floor. Jason and another boy wriggled into sleeping bags.
Several hours later, Jason suddenly noticed some noise. The other four boys were masturbating. "The Naked Crusader is coming," one of them said.
Then George Jr., naked, suddenly jumped on Jason's back, according to a statement Jason gave to police. Another boy held down his legs. Two others slapped Jason in the face with their erect penises.
"Stop!" he pleaded.
They did. But the boys weren't finished. They returned to their beds and masturbated again. A few minutes later, they assaulted Jason once more. Again, two boys slapped Jason with their penises. One of them tried to put his penis in Jason's mouth. Jason clenched his jaw shut. Then he felt warm liquid on his back. One boy had climaxed. Another ejaculated in his hand and rubbed the semen in Jason's hair.
Finally, they were finished.
If he ever told anyone about the incident, the boys warned, they'd do it again. And worse. But three months later, Jason could no longer stay silent. He told his father what had happened. Together, they filed a report with the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department on June 18, 1997.
During the one-month investigation that followed, two of the boys told the detectives that they too had been victims of "The Naked Crusader" soon after entering the drug treatment facility. The Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office filed misdemeanor battery and indecent exposure charges against the four boys but later dropped them. The records have since been purged, so there's no more explanation.
Growing Together's 17-year-old, nonprofit facility treats 25 to 40 children at a time. It rakes in roughly $1 million annually from donations and fees paid by parents of drug-addicted kids, some of whom are ordered by judges to attend. It has powerful friends and donors, including West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel, banker Warren W. Blanchard, attorney Jack Scarola, and Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Foley.
Yet physical and sexual abuse appears to be common there, according to a New Times investigation that included reviews of state records, police reports, and interviews with about two dozen former patients and parents. Kids rioted at the facility in April 1997, and last year, state investigators found that Growing Together was too quick to use physical restraint on children. Moreover, police have written more than 800 reports related to the program since 1995.
"I still can't get the screams out of my head from hearing kids dragged down the hall by the hair on their heads," says a former graduate of the program who asked to remain anonymous. "The crimes that were committed there have never been told in public. Nobody has ever put these people on trial."
Rik Pavlescak, a former investigator with the Department of Children and Families (DCF), wrote reports on the program in the early '90s that detailed beatings, restraint, imprisonment, and systematic humiliation. He alleges that influential outsiders have undermined investigations of the group.
Growing Together Executive Director Pat Allard denied a request to tour the facility, citing laws that protect confidentiality of patients. In three phone interviews in November, she maintained that children are not abused and claimed not to be aware of any of the evidence uncovered by New Times. "We would never beat any child," Allard said.
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Every Friday evening, 50 to 100 adults and children, most ages 13 to 17, gather inside Growing Together's facility at 1000 Lake Ave. The open house begins the same way every week. Parents sit in chairs at one end of a large room. Their children, who are enrolled in the program, sit at the opposite end. At first, an accordion divider separates the two groups.
One parent described Growing Together as a "concentration camp."
Then the session begins. The partition is pulled back. The music starts. The children sing: I am a promise, I am a possibility
I am a promise with a capital P
I am a great big bundle of potentiality
And I am learning to hear God's voice
And I am trying to make the right choice.
I am a promise to be anything that God wants me to be.
Vicky Butler, a Jupiter woman who enrolled her troubled, 16-year-old son, John, in Growing Together in the fall of 1999, remembers these sessions well. "The songs they made these kids sing -- and they were teenagers -- were songs intended for 4- and 5-year-olds," she says. "It was degrading. You just had to look at the kids. Behind their eyes, they would be saying, 'This sucks. '"
Butler says she began to wonder, when she attended her first open house, whether she'd made a mistake. "My son was no angel," she admits, "but no one deserves the treatment these kids receive." During the session, Butler remembers, staff passed around a microphone to parents, who would tell everyone in attendance about their children's misdeeds. There were drugs, illicit sex, violence, theft. The microphone would then move to the other side of the room. Assuming a child had behaved well during the week and earned the "privilege" to speak, he or she would then confess.
During one session in October 1999, Butler's son became agitated before she spoke. He stood up and flailed his arms. "He was totally flipping out," Butler remembers. John began to walk off. An alarmed Butler started toward her son. As she did, a large behavioral therapist parents referred to as "The Enforcer" also headed for John. Suddenly, the accordion divider rolled across the room and blocked Butler.
"All of a sudden, I heard my son screaming," she recalls. Butler panicked and confronted Growing Together staff. "That's my kid behind that curtain, and I don't know what's going on," she told them. They assured her that John was fine and that he would see a psychiatrist soon. Butler returned to her suburban home in Jupiter, convinced that John was in a safe place.
Meanwhile, she continued hosting other Growing Together children at night. She had modified her $169,292 home following directions from the program's staff. All pictures and mirrors were removed from walls. Knives were hidden. The bathroom was stripped, leaving only the sink, toilet, and bathtub. The windows and doors of the bedroom where five kids slept were rigged to an alarm system. Once they went to bed at 10 p.m., they could not leave the room until the next morning. "If any of them had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, they would have been in trouble," Butler admits. "It was like a prison."
Before bed, the children would write in their journals about what they had learned that day. Often, their entries involved confessions they had made during therapy. Growing Together refers to these journal entries as "moral inventories." To advance through the phases of the program, children must confess to illicit behavior or abuse they suffered, then describe the incidents' effects on their lives.
Butler recalls asking the kids about their entries. They told her that they made up most of their confessions because Growing Together required such admissions before graduation. Accounts that included sexual abuse or underage sex were particularly encouraged by staff, the kids allegedly told Butler.
The children also claimed staff had beaten and physically restrained them, Butler says. She even met one young girl who claimed a therapist had broken her arm. Other kids asserted that the building was always filthy. Growing Together administrators admitted to Butler (and later in court documents) that the facility had rats and that several urinals had been backed up for days at a time.
In March 2000, Butler and her ex-husband, Stephen, who shared custody, removed John from the program. Stephen Butler was moving to Arkansas and wanted to take the boy. Once free, John told his mother that he had suffered a sprained wrist at Growing Together when a therapist slammed him down on a table. Mickey Bowman, then the executive director of Growing Together, showed little concern for the injury. In a letter to Vicky Butler dated June 20, 2000, Bowman wrote: "Regarding the 'purported injury' to your son's wrist, he was laughing at the issue immediately following."
Soon after, a private psychiatrist examined John and determined that his problem wasn't drugs. He was bipolar. "You would think that, being in the program, someone would have said, 'Oh, by the way, your child is bipolar,'" Vicky Butler says. "Nobody picked up on that because no psychiatrist or psychologist ever saw him."
Butler later refused to pay Growing Together the roughly $5,000 she owed for John's treatment. She claimed the facility had billed her for clinical exams that never occurred. "Kids got more messed up in there than they were when they went in," she says. The facility sued and turned the debt over to a bill collector. Butler eventually forked over a reduced amount.
“Dr. Ross left Straight because he didn’t like some of the shenanigans.â€
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