Radley “The Agitator” Balko noted yesterday that the former National Education Director of Straight, Inc. has a new program in Ohio called “Kids Helping Kids.”
According to KHK’s website, it is more effective than other programs — note the absence of the word “treatment” — because it “uses the positive peer pressure model, the 12 steps of AA and treats the whole family.” Apparently, financing from SLM Financial, a subsidiary of the student loan servicing company Sallie Mae, is available.
What is the “positive peer pressure model” in the context of drug treatment? If the legacy of Straight, Inc. is any guide it includes persistent verbal berating, broken digits, wallowing in excrement, and other techniques that some have called tantamount to “psychic murder.”
For the lowdown on Straight, visit this website, or this one.
Last year, Mexico shut down three “treatment centers” that appeared to use Straight-style techniques.
It’s patently deplorable that these types of organizations are still allowed to prey upon the fears and anxieties of parents. But that very fear and anxiety is what fuels the larger war on drugs. Beyond the monetary waste, real lives are ruined under the auspices of “recovery.”
That doesn’t stop Mel Sembler himself, a longtime “money man” for the GOP, from touting his “success” on his company’s website.
Yes, these are “the folks” who have the President’s ear when it comes to drug policy. Is it any wonder why the ONDCP is increasingly honing its propaganda by employing the lexicon of public health? The Drug War has never really been about the pursuit public health. At bottom, it is about naked statist coercion — the tutelary control of increasing numbers of citizens that shreds fundamental constitutional values related to the preservation of individual liberty and the limits of state action.
The increased use of medical terminology by drug war extremists is an extended exercise in gimmickry of the highest, most absurd order.
One need only look at some of the phraseology used to push random student drug testing, which I have heard firsthand from the Drug Czar John Walters and former Deputy Drug Czar Andrea Barthwell. To wit, addiction is a “pediatric onset disease” whose spread is “comparable to tuberculosis.” Testing is sold as “non-punitive” and “non-invasive,” with the stated goal of “[guiding] those who test positive into counseling or treatment.”
So the Drug Czar wants every student to perform an excretory function at the behest of a government bureaucrat, so that they can then dive headfirst into the dark universe of Sembler-style “treatment,” often at their worried parents’ expense?
It’s beyond chilling.
Posted by Nikos Leverenz.
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