Can Kids On Drugs Be Saved?
Chad Barnes had been through three drug-treatment programs by the time he was thirteen. None of them worked. As a last resort his parents sent him to the toughest program in Texas. But Chad vowed to beat it.
Jane says: please add in the pictures. i was there at the time, i would love to see that hell hole again. it was a nightmare, kudos to you guys for even writing a story on it. (March 6th, 2010 at 9:36pm)
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Admission to a program is no guarantee of cure, of course. The problems start with the diagnosis. Frequently, kids are labeled as having two problems: chemical dependency and serious emotional disorders. Although experts rarely dispute the idea that hard-core drug abusers have other problems, many teenagers with less severe maladies end up being hospitalized. One psychologist who studied adolescent treatment centers found kids being diagnosed with “adjustment reactions and behavior disorders.” When he asked what that meant, he was told, “The kid fidgeted.” What many treatment programs ignore is that adolescence itself is like a developmental disorder. This is the time when teenagers experiment with attitudes and lifestyles—including drugs. By their senior year in high school, more than 90 percent of our nation’s youths have tried alcohol, and 57 percent have tried an illegal drug. A fact of life in this society is that teens are going to try drugs.
There needs to be a way to treat truly sick teenagers. But how sick are most kids in treatment programs? Sorry, no one is sure. “The sixty-four-dollar question is trying to figure out which kids need treatment,” says Elizabeth Rahdert, a psychologist with the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “And when you figure that out, then what kind of treatment do you give them? No one knows.”
Every Parent’s Nightmare
Donald Barnes, a quiet manager with the post office, knows all the ins and outs of the adolescent drug-treatment business. For the past four years he has been caught up in a system that sometimes appeared to have no exit. In 1986 he sent his son, Chad, then twelve, to a hospital program for drug-abusing teenagers. Chad had been caught smoking pot behind the YMCA in Corsicana, the North Texas town where the Barneses were living. Donald and his wife, Gail, were stunned. They weren’t sure what the incident meant; they hoped it was just a phase. The Barneses didn’t admit that there might he a problem until Chad confessed that he had been using drugs for more than a year and that he had even blacked out once after drinking alcohol.
Donald Barnes did what any worried parent would do. He announced that he would find the best care for his boy, regardless of the cost. He was like a distraught relative picking out a casket after a loved one dies—Barnes wasn t even sure what he was getting for his money. Chad spent seven weeks at the hospital, at a cost of $11,000, none of it paid by Donald’s insurance. Chad, the youngest person in the program, looked at his stay as something of a vacation. “I was away from my parents,” he says. “The other boys taught me how to fight, which I needed to learn.”
The treatment only exacerbated Chad’s problems. “When Chad came out,” recalls Donald, “he was worse. He was a twelve-year-old who had spent his entire time there idealizing older kids, and now he wanted to be treated like a sixteen-year-old. He went into the center wearing one earring and came out wearing five. His language was more profane, and he had all this new information about things like how to mix cocaine.”
Chad’s parents noticed little change in their son. Shortly after his release from the hospital, he admitted to them that he was using pot and drinking again. Not sure what else to do—Donald said he got much of his information about treatment from reading treatment centers’ advertisements—the Barneses decided to try a hospital again. This time they sent Chad to a hospital in Denton for two more months, at a cost of S3,000. This program tried to make Chad recognize that he was unable to control his drug problem. “You had to figure out what to say,” Chad recalls, “stuff about being powerless and wanting to change, and they’d smile and tell you that you were getting better.”
In fact, Chad was worse. The program did nothing to alter his rebellious behavior. He was allowed to smoke and cuss and dress any way he wanted. By the time Chad got out, he had a new attitude: He was belligerent and he would pick a fight over anything. “One time I told him to turn off the television set and he came at me,” says Donald. “We scuffled around the room. He began cussing at my wife to the point where she was scared to death. Then he’d run away for three or four days. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.”
Every parent’s nightmare had barged its way into the life of Donald and Gail Barnes, and it didn’t take long for the two to begin blaming themselves. “We wondered if we had the right kind of disciplinary structure for Chad,” Donald says. “I started blaming my wife for being too strict with him, and she blamed me for being too lax.”
In desperation, the Barneses took Chad to a psychiatrist, who suggested that he was clinically depressed and needed a psychiatric hospital. At thirteen. Chad entered his third treatment program, at a psychiatric hospital in Waco. The cost for 45 days was $30,000. By then, Donald’s life savings were wiped out. “We were told Chad’s problem was an ‘oppositional disorder’—if we said yes, Chad said no,” Donald says. “With that, they sent our son back to us. And things just got worse.”
The New Catechism
The Barneses had walked right into a world that presents itself as science but in fact is full of jargon and mystery. Although adolescent drug treatment is usually supervised by doctors, very little medicine or science is actually connected to it at all. Shockingly little clinical research has been completed on how to treat adolescent drug problems. The studies that have been done are contradictory. One found, for example, that the longer a kid is in treatment, the better his chances of staying sober; another reported that the more time a kid spends in treatment, the less productive the treatment becomes.
Because no one knows what will work, treatment centers offer a dizzying variety of techniques, searching for something that will press some magic button in a kid that will persuade him to turn away from drugs forever. Rapha, a self-proclaimed “Christ-centered” psychiatric program established in Houston in 1986, stresses the love of God as the way to break drug dependency. At Bear Creek Recovery Center in Irving, when a kid thinks he is ready to give up drugs, he and the group participate in a “funeral”: They march down to a lake and bury the “drug” (such as a bag of Sweet ‘N Low representing cocaine) by tossing it out into the water. At Bedford Meadows, the kids go on a “mythical journey,” in which they are asked to view adolescence as a rite of passage. Then they are asked to recognize that they can be reborn as healthy adults, ready to face life—without drugs. Other programs offer leisure therapy, in which the kids play team games to get a sense of group support. Higher-priced centers now have outdoor ropes courses, the newest wrinkle in drug treatment, in which kids learn to accomplish a formidable task together, using ropes to help one another climb over and around tall poles and walls.
The one form of therapy that almost all treatment centers, including Straight, use is the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which kids are asked to see their drug problems as a deadly lifelong disease that can be stopped only by surrendering to a higher power. Regardless of how effective the twelve steps might be as a guideline for adults, many kids are too unsophisticated to even begin to grasp AA lingo like “let go and let God.” One wonders if God Himself could explain the concept of “powerlessness” to a rebellious drug-using teenager. Nevertheless, many treatment programs force kids to memorize the steps and recite them, as if spirituality can be drilled into someone’s life.
Some centers use a shotgun approach, trying all kinds of therapy—individual, group, behavior modification, peer pressure—at once in the hope that one random pellet might hit a kid and help him change. “But research finds that no matter which program you go through, the relapse rate will still be about the same,” says Richard Dangle, a social work professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. The question Dangle has about these treatment rituals is: “Do they make any lasting difference, or is it that a kid’s senses, for the month or so he’s in a treatment program, become so bombarded with the message not to do drugs that he decides, at least for a while, not to do them?”
But as I visited several centers—watching kids make their beds, head off to the first group session, go to school for a couple of hours, and then spend the rest of the day in therapy sessions—they seemed less like modern medical programs and more like old-fashioned church youth camps. At church camps, kids get away from their parents, sit around in a circle and talk, play group games, admire strong leaders, and try to get some spirituality in their lives so that they can live better. The only difference is that in most treatment programs there is talk about drugs. If it works, that’s great. But what if it doesn’t? Parents often get to a point where they wonder if any treatment method works. They ask if there is anything else they can do for their children. And that’s when some of them turn to Straight.
The Last Hope
By August 1987, Chad Barnes had flunked the seventh and eighth grades, and his parents were wondering how much longer they could keep him in the house. He would wreck his bedroom, throw stuff at his parents, hide in his closet and do inhalants, sniffing spray paint or whatever he could find. Then Gail Barnes heard about a new program in Irving that had a Marine Corps approach to treatment. It turned out to be Straight. The program, which lasted at least a year, was not as expensive as the others had been—about $11,000. The Barneses were typical of many parents who come to Straight—they were at the breaking point, willing for anyone to do anything with their child as long as it got some results. For them, it was a relief to find a program that ignored all the psychiatric talk and got right down to berating the child for his behavior. Chad knew about Straight. He and his drug-using friends would trade stories about the different programs—which ones were the easiest, which ones had the best gyms, which ones were lax in checking your suitcase if you wanted to sneak drugs in. When his father came to tell him that he was headed for Straight, Chad stiffened.
“Anywhere, Dad, but there,” he said. Donald begged Chad to at least give Straight a chance.
The kids do not come to Straight easily. Some are brought in by their parents under false pretenses—a father might ask his child to accompany him on an errand—and others literally have to be carried into the building. On August 17, 1987, however, Chad Barnes was numb with shock as staff members escorted him away. “I heard about torture and beatings in there, stuff like that,” says Chad. “I couldn’t believe I was going into that place.”
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