Author Topic: Ruth Fox, founder of the ASAM  (Read 6064 times)

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Ruth Fox, founder of the ASAM
« on: August 06, 2011, 03:29:30 PM »
Ruth Fox, founder of the American Society for Addiction Medicine

Ruth Fox  was the founder of ASAM, the American Society for Addiction Medicine, that promotes Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and the 12-Step treatment approach for alcoholism.  ASAM's mission statement is "to establish addiction medicine as a specialty recognized by professional organizations, governments, physicians, purchasers and consumers of health care services, and the general public."  ASAM's strategic plan boldly declares that "ASAM will define the basic and clinical science of Addiction Medicine as well as the scope of its practice".  Dr. Ruth Fox was the guru of mind-control techniques that use coercive control and experimental LSD drug therapy and disulfiram.  

Dr. Ruth Fox, medical director for the U.S. Council on Alcoholism, had used LSD in alcoholic rehabilitation.  She endorsed the therapeutic use of LSD for making experimental subjects develop a new feeling of compassion and tenderness for others.  Dr. Fox also felt that LSD was very helpful in changing alcoholics' thinking and behavior:  “LSD does seem to make the patient more willing to undertake the total program necessary for his recovery. After LSD, most of the patients who formerly refused to cooperate were willing to take disulfiram, attend group therapy and to affiliate with A.A.”   Dr. Fox reported in her book, Alcoholism: Behavioral Research, Therapeutic Approaches.

Dr. Fox gave her patients disulfiram and then alcohol, to deliberately make them very sick and attempt to build up an aversion to alcohol. Although she discovered that the aversion therapy was not effective, and after one patient almost died from a near-fatal reaction to a single ounce of alcohol given with disulfiram, Dr. Fox insisted that each patient be given at least one session of induced illness from the disulfiram/alcohol combination, before discharge. (See: Disulfiram (Antabuse) as an Adjunct in the Treatment of Alcoholism, Dr. Ruth Fox, in Alcoholism: Behavioral Research, Therapeutic Approaches, edited by Ruth Fox, M.D., foreword by 'Mrs.' Marty Mann, Springer Publishing Company, Inc., New York, 1967.)

The mind control project MK-ULTRA, was a CIA mind-control program that garnered public attention in 1975 through U.S.A. Congressional investigations by the Church Committee  , and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission.   George H. W. Bush was CIA director from January 30, 1976 – January 20, 1977.   Over thirty US universities and institutions were involved in an extensive testing and experimentation program  which included covert drug tests on uninformed citizens at variant social levels, and Native Americans.   Several of these tests involved administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." This was sanctioned governmental human rights abuse committed by these LSD researchers that sometimes resulted in permanent disability or even death.  The CIA itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense and monitoring was not performed by qualified scientific observers.  

Medical doctors are necessary to manipulate public policy and advance the financial interests of a criminal enterprise such as Straight Inc. and its progeny.  Corrupted interests use vulnerable patients for profit while ignoring a patient's real needs, which fosters a system of abusive human rights violations.  Well-appointed medical doctors were used to provide legitimacy to Straight Inc. interests, such as drug czars Robert DuPont, MD (a former paid Straight consultant) and Donald Ian MacDonald, MD (Straight's former national medical research director).    Both are members of the International Scientific and Medical Forum on Drug Abuse (a DFAF subsidiary).   Richard Schwartz, MD, former medical research director for Straight-Springfield, was another forum member.

The predecessor of Straight Inc., The SEED, began in June, 1970, in Florida as a substance abuse treatment center for adolescents and children.  A federal grant for $1 million dollars from NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse), a subsidiary of the sprawling NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), established the program.  Melvin Sembler's son was enrolled in The SEED and Sembler, a personal friend to George H. W. Bush, became the board president of Straight Inc.  NIDA Director, psychiatrist Robert L. DuPont, Jr., had approved the start-up grant.

Techniques to force compliance in addiction patients became the hallmark of the newly-minted A.A. and ASAM programs.  ASAM wrote its own book based, in part, on Ruth Fox's pioneering treatment of alcoholics with LSD and mind control techniques.  Outcome reports neglect to mention the patients who became permanently psychotic or committed suicide under her LSD treatment.  No accounting is made for violations of civil rights, privacy or human rights.

The Federation of State Physicians Health Programs (derived from ASAM) which is Dr. Ruth Fox’s legacy continues to be awarded private contracts with government agencies.  ASAM still collects financial donations to the Ruth Fox Endowment Fund.  The money is used to pay for medical continuing education (courses about ASAM philosophy and to fund scholarships for doctors-in-training as ASAM Fellows [FASAM]).  

Human subjects abuse

Abuse of human subjects by substance abuse treatment doctors was well documented in the Congressional Church Committee report and by the Rockefeller Commission.  (Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, April 26 (legislative day, April 14), 1976.)  The published evidence indicated that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function in U.S.A. and Canadian citizens.   Over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on uninformed citizens "at all social levels, high and low, Native Americans and foreign."  LSD was given to "unwitting subjects in social situations."  Researchers utilized a variety of drugs on alcoholics, homeless persons, enlisted military personnel and unsuspecting citizens as part of CIA research into mind control.  LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S.A. agreed to follow after World War II.   The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church, concluded that "prior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects."  Using recommendations of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities in 1976, which prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject" and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission.  Subsequent orders by Presidents Carter and Reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation.  These rulings laid the foundation for closure of the abusive programs, but only until new forms were created.

These mind control experiments were strongly condemned by the U.S.A. Congress but the financial association of substance abuse treatment centers with private funding from undisclosed sources continued unabated.  

References and citations:


1.  Ruth Fox according to her New York Times Obituary: Dr. Ruth Fox, a psychoanalyst who in 1959 became the first medical director of The National Council on Alcoholism, an agency devoted to alcoholism prevention, died in March 1989 at a nursing home in Washington. She was 93 years old and lived in Manhattan. Dr. Fox, a native New Yorker, performed pioneering research on the use of Antabuse, a chemical used widely in alcoholism treatment today. She was founder and first president of the American Medical Society on Alcoholism and Other Drug Dependencies in 1954. She wrote, lectured and taught extensively on the subject. She also maintained a private practice and was one of the first psychoanalysts willing to accept alcoholics as patients.  The winner of a number of honors, she received, among others, the Citation of Merit award from the Malvern Institute for Psychiatric and Alcoholic Studies in 1963; the Silver Key award from the National Council on Alcoholism in 1972, and the annual award from the American Medical Society on Alcoholism in 1973. Retired in '79
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/28/obitu ... olism.html

2.  Fox, Ruth, Alcoholism: Behavioral Research, Therapeutic Approaches, 1967, page 775, quoted in Slaying the Dragon, William L. White, page 229.

3.  The Church Committee, Wikipedia.org,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

4.  Opening Remarks by Senator Ted Kennedy.  U.S. Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, and Subcommittee On Health And Scientific Research of the Committee On Human Resources. 08-03-1977. DrugLibrary.org, http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/his ... /Hearing01

5.   AARCLibrary.org, http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/churc ... _0200b.htm

 6. The Church Report – The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence". Church Committee report, no. 94-755, 94th Cong., 2d Sess.. Washington, D.C..:United States Congress. 1976. pp. 392, AARCLibrary.org, http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/churc ... _0200b.htm

7.  CIA and DoD Human Subject Research Scandals Chapter 3, part 4: Supreme Court Dissents Invoke the Nuremberg Code: CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report. HHS.energy.gov, http://www.hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ ... ap3_4.html

8.  thestraights.net,  The Influence of Straight, Inc. (Drug Free America Foundation) On National and International Drug Policy http://www.thestraights.net/pickets/dfa ... -short.doc
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