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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But some parents and kids who have been through Straight feel otherwise. Stephen Combs, a six-foot-four-inch sixteen-year-old who was in the program from April 1989 until last February, when he ran away, says he was restrained the second day he was in the program. “Some guys were yelling at this little guy, and I got tired of it and said to stop yelling at him, and then five or six guys jumped on me, trying to push me back in my chair. I fought back, which made them hit me harder.” Combs says he saw a boy thrown down so hard that he was knocked out; he also saw a girl get slugged in the face. “Heck, as soon as we got up in the higher phases,” says Combs, who reached third phase before leaving, “we all wanted to restrain people. It was like they had done it to us, so let’s do it to the new ones. On February 1, the day before I left, some kid was singing to himself, which is against the rules, and when he wouldn’t shut up, I stuck my hand in his face and pushed him on the ground.” Combs chuckles.”That’s what we called a restraint.”
Dena Latham, from the East Texas town of Athens, entered the program in the spring of 1988, at the age of thirteen. “They found this lighter and razor blade in my pocket the day I came, and they accused me of doing cocaine,” she recalls. “I had never, ever done cocaine. But they kept screaming at me about it and jumping on me. It was so humiliating. They kept it up every day. One time, I just couldn’t take it and tried to get out of my chair, and these other girls were on me in a second, four-pointing me to the floor. They took my knees and elbows and twisted them and pulled my hair.”
Rob Stegall entered Straight in April 1988 and stayed six months, the entire time on first phase. “At first I was rebellious against the program,” he says. “They said, ‘You’re going to be sober and you’re going to like it.’ They did all the usual things—throwing me on the floor, pulling my legs apart like a wishbone—and one day I just stopped fighting it. I just remember going away someplace in my head, thinking that was the way to survive.”
His mother, Lynne Armstrong, saw him only occasionally on Family Night. “I didn’t know what was happening to him because they wouldn’t let me talk to him,” she remembers. “They called after six months and said I should come get him because he was acting depressed and they wanted to medicate him. When I came to get him. I could barely recognize him. The day I brought him home, he was incapable of completing a sentence. He went into his room and just stared at the books on his shelves for ten minutes.” Her voice breaks. “And then I asked him to come outside. It was such a beautiful day, the birds were chirping, and there I was, discussing the weather. It was so overwhelming for him that he had to go back into his room. He hadn’t seen the outside in four months. My God, I couldn’t stop crying. I felt like my son was a POW back from the war.”
Today Rob has a job at a department store and goes to AA meetings to stay sober. He even credits Straight for informing him about AA. “I just don’t think they needed to try to warp my brain to tell me drugs were bad,” he says.
Carol Koenecke. the director of Straight in Irving, denies the existence of such violence, dismissing the talk simply as bitter allegations from those who failed the program. “You’re dealing with highly dysfunctional kids and highly dysfunctional families who haven’t come to terms with who they are,” says Koenecke. “There are always going to be clients in a program like ours trying to rebel. And there are going to be times when we have to quickly stop them from hurting others or hurting themselves. We are not a violent program. Anyone who thinks this program should be a lot easier needs to educate himself about adolescent substance abusers.”
Chad’s Rebellion
Fifteen months after Chad was admitted to Straight, the program’s administrators called his parents and said Chad wasn’t making any progress. He would just sit through the day in his blue chair, doing nothing. A psychiatrist had given him anti-depressants, thinking that might raise his level of energy, but Chad didn’t respond. Whenever someone confronted him. Chad would just shrug.
Donald and Gail Barnes thought that fifteen months at Straight was a long time, especially when there was so little to show for it. “We thought maybe Chad had developed a clinical depression or an emotional problem or something,” says Donald. “We didn’t know. So we decided to withdraw him on a medical discharge.”
Chad had been biding his time like a prisoner, knowing that if he just waited, his parents would finally give up. “I was so sick of all this drug treatment I just wanted to be left alone,” Chad says.
In late 1988, the Barneses took Chad off the anti-depressant medicine, hoping he would feel better. He did feel a lot better. He began using drugs like crystal and cocaine. He hid his drug use from his parents until the spring of 1989, but when they finally discovered it, his mother, hysterical, said Chad could not live in the house any longer.
The family was falling apart. Chad and his father moved into an apartment in Plano, where Donald got another job with the post office. Gail remained in Corsicana with their two daughters. While Donald was at work during the day, Chad turned into a first-class juvenile delinquent. He got high. He got into fights. He stole his dad’s car and drove it to Corsicana to buy drugs. He was taken into custody for vagrancy.
On June 29, 1989, Chad Barnes, fifteen years old, woke up in his bedroom to find an off-duty police officer, several boys and fathers from Straight, and his own father standing around him.
“You’re going back,” said Donald. They handcuffed him, tied him down in the car, and still he tried to run. He cussed and kicked, and when he got an arm free, he started swinging at anyone close to him. When they reached Straight, he went wild, screaming and kicking. As soon as he was put in the meeting room with the others, he fought with the nearest boy available and was immediately thrown to the ground. Sullenly, Chad returned to his chair. He told the counselors that he would never cooperate. He was prepared to sit there until he was eighteen and could legally leave.
Though Straight will kick a kid out of the program if he is too violent or shows major psychiatric problems, the counselors decided that Chad, for all his rebelliousness, did not pose a major threat and allowed him to stay. But the Barneses also made a decision. “I realized I had been too passive with Chad,” says Donald. “I had let him get the better of me because I wanted to believe in him so much.” Now, no matter what Chad did at Straight, he wasn’t leaving.
Upon Chad’s return to Straight, Donald and Gail came to Family Night, a group meeting for kids and their families held every Friday night. The teenagers, sitting erectly on one side of the room, face their parents, who sit on the other. The children, their hands on their knees, do not smile. After an opening song and introduction, the newest members of the group are to stand and announce their first names, admit they are druggies, confess the number of drugs they used in the past, say how they have hurt their families, and then explain what their goals are. If they deviate from that spiel, a counselor loudly interrupts.
During the only moment of the week when a newcomer is allowed to see his family, he must stand alone and listen as his parents and other siblings rise to face him—he is not allowed to make eye contact with them as they talk. In the parents’ meetings held before the Family Night, the parents are pushed to express their anger and are criticized by other parents if they don’t.
“You’re not my daughter ever again until you finish this program!” one mother yelled at her weeping child. “What is the matter with you?”
“It feels so good to have a good night’s sleep,” a father cried out at his son, “knowing that you haven’t sneaked out of the house to do your drugs!”
Another father, his face red with rage, bellowed at his son: “I am so furious with you! You stole my money, you pawned my watch for drugs. Don’t you ever expect to walk into my house again until you graduate from here!”
The child can answer his parents’ comments only with the sentence “I love you.” When the time came for Chad’s parents to speak, they described how he had made their home a living hell, how they knew he would die if he didn’t get help.
When they finished, Chad raised his hand and stared at them for a moment. When a counselor asked what he had to say, Chad shouted as loudly as he could: “F— you!”
The Investigation
In July 1989, just after Chad had begun his second stay in Straight, David Tatum, an administrator at the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, received a complaint from a parent whose child had been in Straight. The parent told Tatum that Straight counselors were mistreating kids.
It is not unusual for Tatum, who directs the division that determines whether drug-treatment programs meet the state’s licensing standards, to get occasional complaints about treatment centers. Some parents get mad at the programs for not solving their kids’ problems. But the allegations that started to come in about Straight were not run of the mill. A staff member allegedly choked and kicked a client. One host-home father was said to have tied up a first phaser with an automobile towing strap to keep him from fighting. A client who received a broken nose while at Straight was reportedly not given medical treatment. There were stories of kids being forced to urinate in plastic containers and having to sleep five to a room in a host home.
The commission had already had one run-in with Straight. In 1987 it had required Straight to stop strapping sanitary napkins and towels on children who were, according to Straight officials, “acting out.” In other parts of the country Straight centers had also come under fire. In 1983 a Straight organization in Virginia was ordered to pay $220,000 in damages to a young man who claimed that Straight had illegally held him against his will. Lawsuits were also filed against a Straight center near Cincinnati on behalf of kids who say that they were painfully restrained or imprisoned in small time-out rooms for hours at a time.
Last year in Texas an Arlington woman named Tempie Worthy, whose daughter had been kicked out of Straight for insubordination after only a month, formed an organization called People Against Straight Treatment. Hoping to shut down Straight, Worthy engaged in letter-writing campaigns to the media, the police, and the Dallas district attorney’s office. She wrote and called parents whose children were still in the program. She obtained materials from Straight’s dumpster, looking for evidence of abuse. Worthy also picketed the Straight center, using a bullhorn to denounce the program for its brainwashing tactics. Last December Straight won a court order against Worthy, preventing her from coming near the premises, contacting employees, or harassing clients.
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