Treatment or Jail- Is This Really a Choice?

by Preston Peet

(originally published in Everything You Know Is Wrong-
Disinformation Books, 2002-
edited by Russ Kick)

posted at Drugwar.com August 29, 2002

“Madness is not enlightenment, but the search for enlightenment can easily be mistaken for madness.” --Martin (Asylum 1996-1997)[1]

Some people take drugs to escape difficult life situations. Some take drugs to assist in treating pain, physical or psychological. Some take drugs simply to get high. The reasons for taking drugs are legion. But under the War on Some Drugs prohibition, the US government has given itself the right to dictate which drugs and highs are acceptable. Now a movement is growing in the US to push those convicted of drug charges into drug treatment instead of jail.

Although US jails can be hellish and cruel, a certain percentage of people willfully continue to get high on any assortment of illicit (and licit) substances no matter what the law says. So they must be crazy or sick and therefore in need of behavior modification and mind control. In other words, drug treatment.

While living in Florida in 1987, I was arrested on a misdemeanor charge completely unrelated to drugs. Sitting in jail unable to make bail, I was taken from my cellblock one morning to meet with a man from TASC (Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime).[2] Naïve and unsuspecting, I was open with him about my drug use, listing all the drugs I had ingested up to that point in my life. It was a long list.

A week or so later, when I finally got to court, I was stunned when the same TASC evaluator stood up before the judge and told her I had a “drug problem” and needed to be placed into treatment. The judge sentenced me to a year of probation and to successful completion of the TASC program.

I fought it all the way. I was using some drugs then, abusing some others, and dealing with other problems, as well. I was told that the TASC program lasted twelve to eighteen months on average and that my probation would not be finished in twelve months unless I’d graduated from TASC. After a couple of months in the outpatient treatment program, I was being urine-tested each week--Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, then Tuesday and Thursday on alternating weeks. After dodging these testing sessions as much as possible, and repeatedly trying to fool the tests, marijuana and cocaine turned up in my urine. I was taken to see the head of the program, who told me he was notifying my probation officer and would be in court to recommend the maximum jail time for me, as I was “incorrigible and untreatable.”

Basically, he was right. I was, and still am, incorrigible but not necessarily untreatable. This doesn’t mean that I personally want or need treatment now, nor do I support treatment for others unless it is entirely voluntary. Under current US War on Some Drugs policies, how often is drug treatment really voluntary?


The Therapeutic State

“Coerced treatment is an oxymoron. Government intrusion by police and arrest is anti-treatment. I am not against treatment; I am against government-compelled treatment,” said ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser at the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation’s[3] international drug policy reform conference.[4] Continuing with a dire prognostication, Glasser said, "Fusing the police power of the state with medicine corrupts medicine and makes it a tool of the state. Then we get the therapeutic state and pretend that is progress. The worst danger is an ever-expanding net of social control. The ‘benevolence’ of coerced treatment is a trap. It will allow the state to define acceptable treatment, and that means abstinence and piss-testing.”

Deborah Small, Director of Public Policy and Community Outreach at Lindesmith-NYC, countered Glasser’s statements by asking, “How can you question anything that gets people out of the living death of prison? We have to engage with what is actually happening in the criminal justice system, and coerced treatment is an alternative to incarceration.”
 
I can personally vouch for the fact that jail is not healthy or fun, nor did spending time inside ever keep me from wanting to get high. When the judge first mandated me into treatment, I thought it was a far better choice than a trip through jail. Not by any means do I support incarceration for any drug offense (which I hadn’t been charged with at that time, anyway), but treatment at that point wasn’t better for me. It merely exacerbated my already high stress levels by focusing on immediately eradicating my drug use to the exclusion of all else, which I in turn dealt with by doing more drugs. This was when I first heard that I had a disease called “addiction,” that I had no control, that all substance use was substance abuse, that any drug use would lead me straight to jails, institutions, or death. As I wouldn’t accept this, even daring to question these assertions, I was in “denial.” Coerced drug treatment ordered by the court did nothing but prolong my legal and personal difficulties.

“In thinking about linkages between drug treatment and criminal sanctions, it is important to distinguish between questions of effectiveness and fairness,” explains a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences.[5] “Supporters of using the criminal justice system for therapeutic leverage typically view treatment participation offered to offenders as an ameliorative device--an opportunity for mitigating the sentence they would otherwise receive (i.e., probation with treatment is offered in lieu of incarceration, using the threat of incarceration for noncompliance). Others worry that programs of mandated treatment will actually have the effect of increasing the severity of punishment compared with what the offenders would otherwise have received. As an example, offenders who otherwise would have been sentenced to traditional probation could be subject to treatment conditions that create a risk of imprisonment (for noncompliance) that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. Or an offender whose case might otherwise have been dismissed could be sentenced to conditional probation. These are classic ‘net-widening’ concerns, because they widen the reach and deepen the intensity of punishment. This issue should be kept in mind in considering research on coerced treatment.”


Lock ‘Em Up, One Way of the Other


“Because when the smack begins to flow I really don’t care anymore, about all the Jim-Jims in this town, and all the politicians making crazy sounds, and everybody putting everybody else down, and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds.” --Lou Reed[6]


Reading through the statistics, the numbers of people being arrested and going on to jail in the US for drug offenses are offensive. At first glance, it would seem that putting people into treatment programs instead of sending them to jail with hardened, sometimes violent, predatory criminals simply makes good sense. At time of this writing (August 2001), the US is about to surpass one million people arrested for drug offenses this year, with someone being arrested every 20 seconds. The US is locking up nearly 648 people a day for drug offences. A new report from the US Justice Department shows the number of adult Americans under “correctional supervision” rose 2 percent in 2000. In the US, federal and state prisoners, plus those on probation or parole, now number 6.5 million.[7] The federal and state governments are spending, in 2001, approximately $19 and $20 billion, respectively, on the War on Some Drugs.[8] As with any war, this means all kinds of established profit potential in conducting all facets of this war.

With the new push for drug treatment, there comes a lucrative new business and means of control that can be instituted without giving up the profits currently pulled in by the War on Some Drugs industries. When announcing his resignation as head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), then-US Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey bemoaned the use of war terminology in the fight against drug use, saying that perhaps when discussing the situation in the Andes, “war” is an apt term, but not when discussing efforts in US cities. This might seem an odd stance for such a stalwart proponent of US military and law enforcement involvement in waging the War on Some Drugs, but McCaffrey “agreed” on July 24, 2001, to join the board of directors at DrugAbuse Sciences Inc., “the world’s first pharmaceutical company worldwide devoted solely to developing medications for the treatment of addiction.”[9] McCaffrey’s newfound love of treatment is now explained.

“DrugAbuse Sciences has the potential to make a historic difference in the health of Americans through its understanding of treatment and its broad portfolio of new medications under development,” asserted the retired general. “They have created a company consisting of the leading medical researchers, clinicians and most exciting new product candidates. This combination offers the promise of developing highly effective medical treatment options for addictions. Addiction is a disease that costs our country over 100,000 lives and over $250 billion per year.”[10] Which is odd, as McCaffrey said only the year before, in July 2000: “Each year 52,000 Americans die from drug-related causes. The additional societal costs of drug use to the nation total over $110 billion per year.”[11]

Spouting spurious numbers to promote and justify repressive (and profitable) anti-drug policies has been a favorite ploy of prohibitionist Drug Warriors since President Nixon first uttered his declaration of a War on Drugs in 1968. As related by author Dan Baum, by 1972, “The conservative Hudson Institute estimated that New York City’s 250,000 heroin addicts were responsible for a whopping $1.7 billion in crime, which was well more than the total amount of crime in the NATION. ‘Narcotics addiction and crime are inseparable companions,’ said presidential candidate George McGovern in a speech on the Senate floor. ‘In 98 percent of the cases [the junkie] steals to pay the pusher...that translates into about $4.4 billion in crime.’ Senator Charles Percy of Illinois saw McGovern's bid and raised him. ‘The total cost of drug-related crime in the US today is around $10 billion to $15 billion,’ he said.

        “In fact, only $1.28 billion worth of property was stolen in the US in 1972, (the figure had actually fallen slightly from the previous year). That includes everything except cars, which junkies don't usually steal because they can’t easily fence them, and embezzlement, which isn’t a junkie crime. The combined value of everything swiped in burglaries, robberies, and muggings, everything shoplifted, filched off the back of a truck, or boosted from a warehouse was $1.28 billion. Yet during the heroin panic of Nixon’s War on Drugs, junkies would be blamed for stealing as much as fifteen times the value of everything stolen in the United States.”[12] As the original fallacious numbers bandied about by prohibitionists convinced the nation to support mass-jailing of druggies, so too do they steer us toward coerced treatment today.


Is it Really Worth It?


"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." --Tom Robbins[13]


According to public hearings for "Changing the Conversation: A National Plan to Improve Substance Abuse Treatment," sponsored by the US Center for Substance Abuse Treatment: “Over the last decade, spending on substance abuse prevention and treatment has increased, albeit more slowly than overall health spending, to an estimated annual total of $12.6 billion in 1996. Of this amount, public spending is estimated at $7.6 billion.... One of the main reasons for the higher outlay in public spending is the frequently limited coverage of substance abuse treatment by private insurers. Although ‘70 percent of drug users are employed and most have private health insurance, 20 percent of public treatment funds were spent on people with private health insurance in 1993, due to limitations on their policy.’”[14]

If the current “rush to rehab is indeed going to ease our nation away from the disasters of addiction, we must first determine if treatment indeed keeps addicts off drugs,” notes author and photojournalist Lonny Shavelson when discussing US treatment efforts, primarily San Francisco’s September 1997 plan of treatment on demand for any addict who said he or she was ready to stop using drugs. “If, as the data seem to show, treatment doesn’t actually keep addicts clean, this new push for rehab will simply become another dogma-based government strategy doomed to failure.

“Rehab has to work for the hardest-core of the dope fiends--those who create the vast majority of troubles we’ve artificially lumped into a single set phrase: the drug problem. The US Department of Justice has concluded that only a small percentage of the nation’s drug abusers create ‘an extraordinary proportion of crime.’ Yet those most destructive addicts are the least likely to enter or be helped by rehab. This latest push towards treatment, then, may do nothing more than get the ‘better’ addicts off drugs, leaving the hard-core troublemakers still disastrously addicted.... Those hard-core addicts (10 to 20 percent of users) have, depending on your point of view, either brought on the drug war, or are the tragic casualties of its battles. But if frenzied addictions are indeed responses to lives often complicated by irresolute ghetto-poverty or psychological disturbances, then rehab programs that fail to address these underlying conditions will barely make a dent in our nation’s drug disasters.”[15]

Rather than addressing the root causes of hardcore drug abuse, the prohibitionists have a much easier time directing attention to that most benign of plants, marijuana. The Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates the numbers of hardcore drug abusers between 1988 and 1998 at 3.2 million to 3.9 million (cocaine), 630,000 to 980,000 (heroin), and 300,00 to 400,000 (methamphetamine). With these numbers, the Warriors should be hard-pressed to justify the billions spent on the war--unless they drag pot into the picture.

“Marijuana is the gateway drug for the growth of state-mandated drug treatment. This important policy issue deserves greater public scrutiny and debate,” writes Jon Gettman, Ph.D.[16] Admissions for treatment of adolescent marijuana abuse increased 155 percent, from 30,832 in 1993 to 78,523 in 1998, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services. Total marijuana admissions increased 88 percent, from 111,265 in 1993 to 208,671 in 1998. Almost half of those admitted to treatment for marijuana abuse were under the age of 20.

All marijuana arrests increased 84 percent, from 380,689 in 1993 to 698,477 in 1998. Arrests for simple marijuana possession rose by 92 percent, from 310,859 in 1993 to 598,694 in 1998. Out of a reported 208,671 admissions to treatment for pot use in 1998, slightly more than half (53.4 percent) were referred by the criminal justice system, all of which goes a long way toward “explaining a great deal of the increase in marijuana treatment admissions,” notes Gettman. “Police and drug treatment specialists are caught up in an economic system. When criminal justice system referrals provide over half of admissions for treatment of marijuana abuse, it is clear that in this economic sector arrests move the market. Marijuana can be abused and the source of dependency, and these problems can be alleviated with medical treatment. Most debate focuses, with good reason, on whether the actual abuse liability of marijuana justifies arrest and criminal sanctions. A more fundamental question though is whether law enforcement and/or judicial personnel should be making medical decisions and enforcing them with the power of the state. At what point does the state dictate the treatment as well as provide the patients?”[17]


The Assassins of Youth


"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation." --Pearl S. Buck[18]


“With America’s Number One Drug Problem [marijuana] identified as the one teenagers are most likely to use, and every sneer, slammed door, and blast of Joan Jett pegged as evidence of a ‘drug problem,’ the War on Drugs became a powerful weapon for parents to use in their struggle with their teenagers,” writes Dan Baum about the shift in emphasis by Drug Warriors to marijuana under Carlton Turner, President Reagan’s first Drug Czar, in September 1981.[19] “Blaming drugs for kids’ troubles also worked in wider society: it obviated concern for ‘root causes’ and let parents take their own behavior off the hook. If drugs were, as the Florida pediatrician Ian McDonald liked to assert, a problem teenager’s ‘only’ problem, then parents needn’t examine their own role in their children’s troubles--divorce, career obsession, neglect- or for that matter failing wages, the need for both parents to work long hours, and slashed funding for education and after-school programs. While some nasty kids did have drug problems that required intervention, the parents of all nasty kids were urged--in magazine articles, PTA handouts, TV spots, and exhortations from the White House--to band together and ‘fight back.’ And in 1982, the most bellicose pro-parent, anti-child manifesto of them all rocketed up the best seller list: Tough Love.”[20, 21]

Saving our children is one of the most oft-quoted justifications given by rabid anti-drug warriors and supporters for continuing the War. As Arnold Trebach, chairman of the Trebach Institute, so eloquently put it at the Saving Our Children From Abusive Drug Treatment conference: “Anything for the kids. Like the phrase in Vietnam, we had to destroy the village to save it, some people say I’ve got to destroy my kid to save it.”[22] Scores of both now-adult and adolescent survivors--whose parents, under the influence of “Tough Love” philosophy and anti-drug hysteria, forced them into adolescent drug treatment programs such as Straight Inc.[23], Safe, Kids, and many more--came together to relate individual experiences of being beaten, starved, spit on, deprived of sleep, subjected to constant surveillance, and isolated from schools and communities while in these so-called treatment programs. They also tried to figure some way to stop this industry from continuing. Many of these people were forced into long-term, confrontational drug treatment over minor experimentation with drugs or natural adolescent rebellious behavior, finding themselves locked in horrific programs that aim to tear people down and rebuild them as contributing members of society (as the treatment programs define it).

“During my involvement with the Seed and Straight, extreme physical violence was not very much a part of the Program,” says survivor Ginger Warbis.[24] “Physical coercion, such as restraint, which sometimes resulted in injury and forced exercise, were. But these were not everyday occurrences. I don't think I ever saw more than one person pinned to the floor at a time and very rarely any obvious and serious physical injury.” Until witnessing a severe incident of terror perpetrated against another Straight inmate, Warbis notes that, “I knew it was all theatre designed to intimidate and coerce sincere, internal compliance. I'd thought that eventually we'd each get out one way or another and either live as good little Straightlings or just shake it off. But I've come to realize that 1) the very basic thought reform methods used in these programs are extremely harmful psychologically and emotionally in themselves and 2) escalation to more extreme physical and psychological abuse is just about an eventuality under these conditions.

“The most important message that I wanted to deliver [at the conference] is that many of the most influential people in public policy, the drug war, juvenile justice and child protective services are big believers in using these very harmful methods. Some of them, I believe, should be in prison right now. Others just need a better understanding of what they're advocating.”[25]

A few parents attending the conference said that having put their children into a confrontational therapy-based behavior modification program had “saved their kids’ lives.”

“I think the parents are sincere. But they're confusing the issue,” says Warbis. “If you'll remember, Brian Seeber [a parent who put his child in SAFE, yet another drug treatment program for adolescents] talked about how much his son hated him before and how much he loves him now. They're not saving their children; they're saving their own egos. They're not aware of this, though, as they cloister themselves with people who constantly reassure them that they're right and they demonize all others. I wish I'd gotten my hands on the mic to answer the question, 'Well, what do we do if not this?' Basically, there comes a time when you have to realize that, as a parent, you don't have any guaranteed right to your child's affection. They're always your babies and you'd do anything to help or protect them; that never changes. But there comes a time when they're also young adults who may not want your help or advice or even your company. Whatever you do you have to respect that, even when you know they're making horrible mistakes. These people are doing great harm by crushing their children's egos. If I could find a way to make them understand that, I'd try it on my mother. I haven't spoken with her in years for just this reason.”

Stockbroker Stoney Burke sent his two sons, Scott and David, into treatment with Teen Help,[26] the umbrella name for a consortium of companies headquartered in St. George, Utah, that operates behavior modification camps in the US, Mexico, Western Samoa, Jamaica, and the Czech Republic. According to a news series by Lou Kilzer[27], Burke sent Scott into treatment “because ‘he was the extreme picture of what you didn't want your kid to be at 13 years old.’ He said he sent David ‘because he wouldn't stay with me. The court granted me custody, and he kept running back to his mother. He was not functioning properly in life.’”

The boys’ mother, Donna Burke, is suing Teen Help for its treatment of the boys while they were at its Tranquility Bay facility in Jamaica, alleging: “Both are changed from the wonderful, spontaneous young men they were before Tranquility Bay into robotic victims, afraid of any authority figure. They have lost their individuality, their spirits are broken, and their characters ruined. Instead of independent men, they are afraid, haunted by nightmares, subject to panic attacks and refuse to go anywhere near a beach.”[28]

“She may have been thinking, ‘Well maybe I'll injure myself, hurt myself, and that way I can manipulate and get home,’” said Teen Help spokesman Ken Kay to reporter Kilzer[29], offering several possible reasons why Valerie Ann Heron, a 17-year-old Alabama girl, plunged to her death from a 35-foot-high balcony at Tranquility Bay in August 2001. Heron had been taken against her will from her parents’ home at 4:00 AM the previous day by a Teen Help “transportation team,” then shipped to Tranquility Bay, where she bolted from a room, jumped the balcony, and died. Kay refuses to entertain the notion that Heron was trying to commit suicide, while simultaneously acknowledging that Heron was not at Tranquility Bay of her own free will.

“The State Department said it received ‘credible allegations’ in 1998 of abuse against American teens at Paradise Cove [Teen Help’s facility in Western Samoa] about the time that Corey Murphy's stay there was coming to an end,” writes Kilzer.[30] Seventeen-year-old Corey committed suicide when his mother, Laura Murphy, threatened to send him back to Teen Help, where he previously had been sequestered for 22 months. “‘The abuse alleged to have occurred includes beatings, isolation, food and water deprivation, choke-holds, kicking, punching, bondage, spraying with chemical agents, forced medication, verbal abuse and threats of further physical abuse,’ according to a September 1998 State Department cable sent from Washington to the US Embassy in Apia, Western Samoa. The State Department asked the Western Samoan government to investigate.”

Authorities in Mexico and the Czech Republic raided and closed Teen Help facilities over allegations of mistreatment and abuse, but Teen Help still exists, running a booming business elsewhere. They unfortunately are not the only ones, with scores of these programs continuing to open around the world.


Un-American Dogma


"Without deviation, progress is not possible." --Frank Zappa[31]
     

I am not arguing that drug treatment never helps anyone, but I am strongly asserting that coerced drug treatment by courts and government is not the answer to incarceration for recreational, or even abusive drug use. In my own experience, I did eventually come to a point where I felt I could use help and tried numerous times without success to get myself into one drug treatment program or another, both medical and non-medical modalities. Heroin withdrawals are harsh, and while living the life of a street-bound junkie, I was unable to arrest the cycle of self-abuse on my own. At that point, my drug use was no longer simply recreational. Maintaining the financial and physical costs of my habit, inflated beyond all rhyme or reason by prohibition, was a full-time job. After detoxing more than once, normally a five-day spell, only to find I couldn’t enter immediately into any sort of long-term treatment facility, I would find myself back on the streets, homeless, jobless, and soon strung out again. The couple of long-term residential treatment programs I did experience weren’t offering the help I needed, and I soon left.

Finally, after swearing up and down for years that I would never do so, I took an opportunity presented to me while in jail on Ricker’s Island, requesting entrance to a methadone maintenance program. Substituting a legal, officially sanctioned yet much more addictive drug that didn’t get me high for an illicit other that did enabled me to avoid withdrawal symptoms (until I decided to kick methadone five years later) and remove myself from contact with the worst of the black-market dope scene.[32]

I was one of the hardcore drug abusers committing petty crimes that Drug Warrior politicians rant about when allocating ever more taxpayer money to waging the war. Yet I was not mandated into methadone maintenance; methadone did nothing to assist my successful attempt to stop using cocaine, nor did I receive treatment when I kicked methadone. Though still feeding my head on occasion, I’m no longer abusing drugs nor committing real crimes. There are undoubtedly some uses and even benefits to be had by drug abusers and those around them by offering a vast assortment of voluntary treatment options for drug abusers who desire a change. 

Use of illicit drugs is the currently accepted stigma in American society. It is no longer considered socially proper or politically correct to hate one’s neighbor for their skin color or their sexual preferences (not to say it doesn’t happen), but it is perfectly okay to advocate harsh jail sentences or behavior modification for those who have an innate “drive to transcend consensus reality,” as Dr. Andrew Weil phrased it.[33]

“Hunger is not volitional. Neither are inebriative instincts and urges,” says author and researcher Dan Russell.[34] “That's why it is not controllable by law. It's like trying to control sex by law. It can't be done, and has never been done. It has to do with the process of enslavement. When you take a free tribe and enslave it, if you destroy the central sacrament of its culture, it's how you commit cultural genocide, and how to domesticate them.”

Indeed, the War on Drugs has much more to do with controlling culture than it does with health. Baum writes: “In an article titled ‘White House Stop-Drug-Use Program: Why the Emphasis Is on Marijuana,’ the magazine Government Executive profiled [Carlton] Turner and summarized his views this way: marijuana, like ‘hard-rock music, torn jeans, and sexual promiscuity,’ was a pillar of ‘the counter culture.’” Turner was quoted: “‘Point is, illegal, i.e. non-prescription, use of drugs...is not only a perverse, pervasive plague, though it is that. But drug use also is a behavioral pattern that has sort of tagged along during the present young-adult generation’s involvement in anti-military, anti-nuclear power, anti-big business, anti-authority demonstrations; of people from a myriad of different racial, religious or otherwise persuasions demanding rights or entitlements politically while refusing to accept corollary civic responsibility.’”[35]

While many countries around the world are beginning not only to debate but also to implement decriminalization and legalization of some drugs[36], and while yet others lean toward harm reduction methods to help their hardcore drug abusers and society at large[37], US police, courts, and government continue to dogmatically deem all use of currently illicit drugs, whether recreational or abusive, to be morally reprehensible and criminal, as well as a sign of a disease that requires treatment with or without the patients’ cooperation. This is simply dangerous and even, dare I say, un-American.


Endnotes

1.Jansen, Karl L.R., M.D., Ph.D. “Ketamine: Dreams and Realities.” Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (2001): 260.

2. See: <www.uwsrq.com/First_Call/7y12yg7a.HTM>.

3. Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation: Broadening the Debate on Drugs and Drug Policy <www.lindesmith.org>.

4. Held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 30 May - 2 June 2001. “Conference Report: As Drug Reform Edges Closer to Mainstream (or Vice Versa), Fractures Emerge Over Politics of Treatment.” Week Online With DRCNet 189 (8 June 2001). <www.drcnet.org/wol/189.htmlconferencereport>.

5.Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs, Charles F. Manski, John V. Pepper, and Carol V. Petrie, Editors. “Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us.” Committee on Law and Justice and Committee on National Statistics, National Research Council (2001): 238.

6. Reed, Lou. “Heroin.” Performed by the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground and Nico. Verve, 1967.

7. Unsigned. “US Jail Population Hits Record 6.5 Million.” Reuters, 26 Aug 2001.

8. For up-to-the-minute statistics, see DrugSense.org’s Drug War Clock at <www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm>.

9. DrugAbuse Sciences, Inc. Press release. 24 July 2001 <www.drugabusesciences.com/Articles.asp?entry=123>

10. Ibid.

11. McCaffrey, Barry. Letter to Los Angeles Times 14 July 2000.

12. Baum, Dan. Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996: 69-70.

13. Craven, Cyndi. “A Journey in Word: A Collection of Quotes.” <www.spiritsong.com/quotes>.

14. “Changing the Conversation: Improving Substance Abuse Treatment: The
National Treatment Plan Initiative: Panel Reports, Public Hearings, and
Public Acknowledgements.” US Department of Health and Human Services (Nov 2000): 12. <www.natxplan.org>. For ease of reading, internal references in the quote have been left out.

15. Shavelson, Lonny. Hooked: Five Addicts Challenge Our Misguided Drug Rehab System. New York: The New Press, 2001: 7.

16. Gettman, Jon. “Marijuana and Drug Treatment: An Introduction.” From an article presented at the Saving Our Children From Abusive Drug Treatment conference held by the Trebach Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, 21-22 July 2001. For conference details, see: <trebach.org/conference.html>.

17. Ibid.

18. Op cit., Craven.

19. Op cit., Baum: 155-6.

20. Ibid.

21. York, David, Phyllis York, and Ted Wachtel. Tough Love. New York: Doubleday, 1982. See: Tough Love International <www.toughlove.org/default.htm>.

22. In Bethesda, Maryland, 21-22 July 2001. <trebach.org/conference.html>. Also see: Peet, Preston. “Drug Treatment for Teens: A Secret Shame.” High Times Online, 1 Aug 2001.

23. The man who founded Straight Inc. in 1976--Florida real estate developer and Republican power broker Melvin Sembler--was nominated in July 2001 by President Bush to be Ambassador to Italy. Sembler was Ambassador to Australia under the former President Bush, and resigned in January 2001 as head of the Republican Party’s national finance committee. Unsigned. “Florida Developer Tapped to be Ambassador to Italy.” Associated Press, 28 July 2001.

24. For more info about Warbis and adolescent treatment programs, see Anonymity Anonymous <fornits.com/anonanon>. For more treatment survivor tales also see: <pub70.ezboard.com/fstraightincsurvivors30607frm1>

25. Warbis, Ginger. Email correspondence with author, 25 July 2001.

26. Teen Help Adolescent Resources: Support for Families with Teen Challenges. <www.vpp.com/teenhelp>.

27. Kilzer, Lou. “Desperate Measures: ‘I Call it Teen Torment’.” Denver Rocky Mountain News, no month or day, 1999 <www.denver-rmn.com/desperate/site-desperate/day2/pg5-desperate.shtml>.

28. Ibid.

29. Kilzer, Lou. “Teenager Leaps to Her Death at Compound in Jamaica.” Rocky Mountain News 18 Aug 2001.

30. Kilzer, Lou. “Desperate Measures: Lost Boy.” Denver Rocky Mountain News, no day or month, 2000. <www.denver-rmn.com/desperate/site-desperate/0702desp1.shtml>.

31. Op cit., Craven.

32. For more on methadone, see: Peet, Preston. “M Is for Methadone.” Disinformation Website, 7 Feb 2001. <www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id838/pg1>.

33. Weil, Andrew, M.D. The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. As noted in Jansen: 150.

34. Russell, Dan. Interview with author (Feb 2001). <www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id911/pg1>. Dan Russell is the author of Drug War: Covert Money, Power and Policy (Kalyx.com, 2000) and Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda (Kalyx.com, 1998).
 
35. Op cit., Baum: 154.

36. As of August 2001, Jamaica, Canada, and Great Britain were debating decriminalizing and even legalizing personal use of marijuana; Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Portugal have decriminalized all personal possession drugs; Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela were calling for rational debate on regulating the commerce of drugs in order to do away with problems of violence and corruption, both results of current US-exported War on Some Drugs policy (which are much more damaging to society at large than any drug use and dependency). Even nine US states have passed laws allowing the use of medical marijuana, although the US government is insisting it will enforce federal anti-marijuana laws anyway, denying even the terminally ill legal use of marijuana.

37. Germany, Switzerland, and the Nederlands all have safe injection rooms for heroin, as does Australia. For more information on international harm reduction methods and implementations, see: <www.harmreduction.org>, especially the links section.