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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A mother whose son was already in the program cut Chad’s shoulder-length hair. A staff member placed Chad in the front row on the boy’s side of the large, stark meeting room. The other kids, about sixty boys and forty girls in all (many inpatient treatment programs have only twenty to thirty adolescents at a time), were performing a peculiar arm-flapping routine called motivating—waving their arms wildly to get the attention of a group leader so they could be called on to speak. Some teenagers stood behind the chairs, watching closely, ready to catch anyone who might want to run.
The kids looked drab, almost pale under the fluorescent lights. Straight’s rules for newcomers forbid makeup, jewelry, shirts with decals or writing, nylons, high heels, hair dryers, curling irons, and even mouthwash. There is also a huge sense of detachment from the rest of the world. Newcomers must temporarily drop out of school. They cannot use the telephone, speak to their parents, visit with friends, talk to a Straight member of the opposite sex, carry money, listen to the radio or record player, watch television, or read any books except AA literature or the Bible. If they need to walk in front of an adult, they must stick their arms out, fingers pointed in the direction they want to go, until the adult nods and waves them on. The kids are told to call themselves “druggies” and to refer to their pre-Straight friends as “druggie friends.” Although Straight advertises itself as a drug-free program, it does allow physicians to prescribe drugs like Thorazine for youths in its care.
For an adolescent, the program can be perplexing and terrifying. At least for the first couple of months, the kids spend from nine in the morning until nine at night sitting on their chairs, participating in the massive group-therapy sessions called raps. If the kids slump in their chairs, the oldcomers press on their backs to make them sit straight. I heard one oldcomer yell at a new kid, “If you can’t sit up, how can you say no to drugs?”
The sole physical exercise consists of stretching routines conducted in the big meeting room. To release energy, the kids also shout out chants or sing songs (“If you’re Straight and you know it, clap your hands”). The only way they can move to another part of the room is if an oldcomer “belt-loops” them or keeps one hand on their shoulder. Straight officials say that because a teenager’s behavior has deteriorated from drug use, he has to be reprogrammed and carefully monitored throughout the day so that his entire way of life will change.
To graduate from Straight—the average duration is about a year and a half—a participant must make it through all five of the program’s rigid phases, winning a little more freedom and responsibility with each promotion. First phase—which usually lasts from a month to a year, depending on the counselors’ assessment—is the strictest. A first phaser must live in a “host home,” a house belonging to a parent whose own child is farther along in the program. Host homes have alarms on the windows and doors to prevent escape. An oldcomer must supervise a first phaser in the host home—if a kid just wants to pick up a pen, he has to ask permission from the oldcomer—and the kids must call the parents of the host home “Mom” and “Dad,” as if they are part of a new family.
During second phase, which lasts about a month, the child can live in his own home, but he can’t talk to anyone except his family. Parents, at their own weekly group meetings at Straight, are told to get back in charge of their families at this time. They are required to institute no-nonsense discipline, telling their child that they will keep him at Straight through the rest of his teenage years unless he follows the rules. A second phaser can’t go outside the house, not even to the back yard.
In third phase, which lasts a minimum of three weeks, the teenager can return to school or to work on weekdays, but he must come to the Straight program for the afternoon and evening. Third phasers have more responsibility at Straight—running errands, serving dinner, accompanying first phasers to the bathroom—but they still can’t talk to Straight members of the opposite sex or go outside without permission. Fourth phasers come to the building four days a week for at least three months, and they can’t go anywhere without their parents except to AA meetings. And fifth phasers spend three days a week at Straight for about two months. They can finally talk to members of the opposite sex, but they can’t date them. After graduation, there is a six-month after-care program, in which kids come weekly for classes or raps.
With only one lapse, a kid either starts over or gets moved down to a lower phase. Kids have been dropped to lower phases for trying to escape, fighting, yelling at their parents, talking to a girl, or smoking. I met one young man, twenty-year-old Brett Sharp, who had spent two years at Straight and had graduated in 1988. Earlier this year, walking by a neighbor’s house, he was offered a beer and accepted. When he told his parents what he had done, he agreed go back to Straight. “These are unmanageable, druggie kids,” says his father, Colonel John Sharp, an Air Force doctor in San Antonio, “If you don’t control their behavior right at the start, then you can count on them going out of control.”
Boot Camp For Druggies
The controversy that has plagued Straight nearly since its inception centers on this very matter of control. Straight’s goal is to force a kid to see how much damage his drug use has caused his family and himself, but in this authoritarian environment, casual counseling doesn’t have much of a place. Group therapy usually turns into harsh encounters, conducted not by experienced, trained therapists but by other teenagers. Straight calls this “positive peer pressure.”
“You’re lying!” a higher-phased girl screams at a teary-eyed newcomer in one session. “You think you look nice, and you think you’re making us believe you’re improving, but you’re lying! You hurt inside! You still want drugs!” The newcomer, looking frightened, tries to control the trembling of her lips. “Now you better tell us everything you’re lying about,” the older girl continues, “because lying is going to kill you, just like drugs are going to kill you!”
Even though the program has a staff of four adult counselors, the higher-phased youths and the paraprofessional graduate counselors, mostly teenagers, do almost all of the daily work with the kids. “Adult therapists have lost the perspective on what counseling is,” says Page Peary, Straight’s national vice president. “Only peer counselors can say, ‘Hey, I’ve been there.’ They can share experiences on an emotional level, and they can also see right through you when you’re lying.” But the only training is a six-week course for the paraprofessionals. There’s no such class for the higher-phased kids; all they have is their experience in the program.
What I observed were nit-picking confrontations that did nothing to encourage sharing and camaraderie within the group. “I heard you talking about playing with a Ouija board!” one girl yells at another. “You think that’s going to help you become honest?” A boy confesses that he has been having thoughts about girls, a feeling that seems rather natural for an adolescent male. Immediately, an oldcomer leaps up. “Maybe you ought to look into those sexual thoughts,” he yells,” because it shows you’re not taking any pride in yourself!” When another boy is accused by an oldcomer of leafing through a Playboy at school, he drops his head. The oldcomer presses him. “Why would you ever look at a magazine like that? Is your self-esteem that low? You don’t want to help this group out. You just want to get out of here!”
At Straight, as in boot camp, everyone is forced to work toward a common goal; the group breaks a kid’s selfishness. There is such constant talk about supporting and improving the group that Straight begins to resemble a teenage cult, with its own rituals and codes. The kids talk about “being aware,” “copping out,” “receiving attitudes from others,” and “acting FOS”(“full of shit”). They are told never to speak to anyone who has dropped out of the program. They can’t talk to outsiders about the treatment program. Parents aren’t allowed to sit in on any of the daily raps. Sometimes, among the group, one can see kids who look as if they have barely a vestige of self-esteem left, too scared to talk in front of the others, their egos too devastated to try to make a conscious change in their own lives.
In Straight Beliefs, a list of guidelines for the counselors, is the phrase, “Defiance is dealt with by the Group.” Those kids who talk about straightening up are accepted: those who don’t are confronted. “The reason you change is because you get tired of being confronted,” says fifteen-year-old Marilee Kossack, a fifth phaser who’s been in Straight for fifteen months. “I knew if I didn’t start acting better, I wouldn’t be a part of the group.”
This is the key to sobriety at Straight: For months, a kid is relentlessly nagged and browbeaten until he breaks down and confesses. Through the group’s guidance, he learns to regulate his behavior and express his feelings instead of avoiding them through drugs. He also finds new role models in the program’s young leaders.
“There are a lot of professionals who think Straight is the best treatment program around. Its model for treatment is unmatched by any other program,” says Dr. lan Macdonald, the former director of the Drug Abuse Policy Office at the White House. “Its structure can deal with the most severe kids in our society, forcing them to change, giving them discipline.”
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