On 2006-01-07 08:14:00, Exit Plan wrote:
I would love some help reconciling a few thoughts about 'programs'.
Well, I can give you may take on this stuff.
Why did they come about in the first place? At what point did parents start becoming comfortable with the idea of sending their children off to 'get fixed'? How did the public consiousness shift, to now the child was so at danger of being deadorinjail they had to resort to this awful technique?
I think that had a whole lot to do w/ the peace/youth movement that grew up in the daze of the Vietnam war more than anything else. And, of course, it was gradual. I'm only 40 and I can remember when teenaged kids almost all had either wealthy parents or part time jobs. Most had a car or regular use of the family car and, when an adult wanted to go do something, it was pretty typical to snag the nearest teenager and have them babysit. It was almost as casual as 'tag, yer it!'
Teenagers were treated almost like adults. No one ever questioned their rights to privacy or expected them to do anything horrible if unsupervised. The #1 date rape drug was then, as it is now, alcohol. But the adults and their parents and grandparents and so on did alcohol. Nothing spooky or scary about it.
But marijuana? Crazy Mexicans and Jazz Mucicians used that stuff to seduce nice white girls!
Then there was the expected wave of heroin addicted returning Vietnam vets who never materialized. Oh, the vets came home, to be sure. Most of them just never looked for a new connect. Heroin, for them, was part of the hell-scene they'd left behind.
It's a really complex question you're asking. You could go at it from another, deeper angle as well and look to the begining of the Industrial Revolution or even further to the various waves of immigration from foreign lands.
But, as to the Synanon based programs specifically (and WWASP and the Seed line are Synanon based) I think it had more to do w/ the Summer of Manson phenomeno I described above (by contrast)
I also wonder, do people start these programs to become millionaires, or do they actually believe they are helping people, like other cults do? Are they just a succesful cult, that happened to make a lot of money (like scientology)? Or are they a business, which adapted cult tactics to save money. Or both?
Almost impossible to say. But I tend to think that, like most cults, most of the people involved believe they're doing good.
Why aren't more people who grew up in the rabid anti-communist era appalled by the very existence of these camps?
Excellent question! Why, indeed! The entire drug war started out as the Harrison Narcotics Act; part and parcel of the New Deal. And yet it's the darling of the extreme right (Religious Reich) and few others. Just one of those things that surpatheth all understanding.
Isn't the very ideal of America individualism and responsibility?
I get some of it, but not nearly enough for me to be satisfied.
I think you're way ahead of the pack already.
/back to reading
That may have something to do with it! :wink:
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
--Ayn Rand, Russian-born author
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Drug war POW
Straight, Sarasota
`80 - `82