I appreciate the perspective of the two previous posts. Yes - when I came into the Seed, I had seen several of my High School classmates overdose, drown, carwreck, suicide, etc. and my own family had a strong history of alcoholism, so when I came in and was told drugs were the problem, OK!
However, I continued on to spend seven years of my life at the Seed, because I thought I was helping people and because I was led to believe that leaving was wrong, that I would be admitting I was a loser and that I would never be happy on my own. All wrong!
Also, as far as drugs go...there are dangers to anything we do, from sex to overeating to thrill seeking to smoking, drinking and drugging. I think saying 'Just Say No' to everything is a simple solution, but it will not always work. I have family in AA, and that's great; I have others who are unrecovered, and that's NOT great, and others who enjoy a drink now and again but are aware of the dangers. For me, quitting smoking was really hard to do, and I enjoyed the way if made me feel but I don't want to die for it. So I consciously worked on stopping. I hope that the same approach would work for me on anything I put in my body - I'm an adult. For kids, they get exposed to all this and worse every day, but I think putting a kid in a boot camp is unlikely to work in the long term. Check out the Straight sites and see all the kids who left and went on to overdose or suicide.
Besides that, when I left the Seed I needed counseling - my family had a lot of problems I needed to understand, and the most I'd learned about it at the Seed was that they were 'fucked up' - well, no kidding. I had also developed a crushing low self-esteem, partly from my family issues and guilt and partly because the Seed enforced that for me, never allowing me to think that I was good enough as a person.
If the Seed or anything else helped you, that's great. I did get a lot out of it, but mostly because there were other kids like me and we were forced to rely on each other, and became friends - friendships that ended when I left the Seed because I would be considered a 'druggie' and would not be allowed to interact with my friends. That is cultish behavior, and THAT is harmful.
Glad to hear from you, I appreciate this forum for all of us to express our views OPENLY, unlike relating in Group when if you said anything 'wrong' you'd know it. Honesty IS the first and most important policy, after all!.
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Wally Gator[ This Message was edited by: cleveland on 2004-09-23 07:05 ]