Posted on 06/08/2002 1:08:28 PM PDT by fporretto
(Note: An edited version of this column originally appeared on FoxNews.com. It ran for two weeks. After a representative from Straight contacted Fox with concerns about accuracy, the column was pulled. As yet, no one has articulated to me what aspects of the column have been challenged. I stand by my reporting. That's why I'm reposting the column here.)
In 1980, when Samantha Monroe was 13, a classmate passed out mini bottles of booze, similar to the kind served on airplanes. Samantha was given one, but quickly flushed it down a toilet when school officials were notified. A local detective was called in. That detective told Samantha’s parents he suspected she had a drug problem. That she’d been “clean” when school officials confronted her, he said, was a fluke. He suggested they enroll her in the Sarasota branch of Straight, Inc., an aggressive drub rehab center for teens. The detective also happened to sit on the board of Straight Sarasota.
Samantha spent the next two years of her life surviving Straight. She was beaten, starved, and denied toilet privileges for days on end. She describes her “humble pants,” a punishment that forced her to wear the same pants for six weeks at a time. Because she was allowed just one shower a week, the pants often filled with feces, urine and menstrual blood. Often she was confined to her “timeout” closet for days. She gnawed through her cheek during those sessions, hoping she’d bleed to death. She says that after she was raped by a counselor she calls Rob, “the wonderful state of Florida paid for and forced me to have an abortion.”
There are hundreds of stories like Samantha’s. Wes Fager enrolled his son in a Springfield, VA chapter of Straight on the advice of a high school guidance counselor. Fager didn’t see his son again until three months later after he’d escaped – and developed severe mental illness. Since then, Fager’s set out to clear the air on Straight. He has accumulated stories like Samantha’s and his son’s on a clearinghouse website. He’s collected stories of suicides and attempted suicides, rapes, forced abortions, molestations, physical abuse, lawsuits, court testimonies and extensive documentation of profound psychological abuse at Straight chapters all over the country.
Today, Straight’s founders, Mel and Betty Sembler, have enormous influence over U.S. drug policy. They serve on the boards of most every major domestic anti-drug program. They’re behind efforts to defeat medicinal marijuana initiatives all over the country. They’re also proud and unrepentant about Straight, Inc. – they mention their influence upon its founding in their official bios (here and here) -- despite the horrors that have surfaced about the program’s history. As more and more U.S. states turn to mandatory treatment instead of incarceration for minor drug offenses, as the trend toward “boot camp” style rehab centers grows more and more en vogue, and as Mel and Betty Sembler continue to flex political muscle in the power corridors of the drug war, the story of Straight, Incorporated is one worth hearing.
Straight was spun off from an earlier Florida rehab program called The Seed, established in 1972. After a Congressional investigation of The Seed turned up evidence of brainwashing and cult-like mind control tactics, Congress cut The Seed’s funding. But a Florida Congressman named Bill Young persisted. He found advocates in Republican boosters Mel and Betty Sembler, and persuaded them to start a similar rehab center in St. Petersburg, which they called “Straight, Incorporated.”
Despite allegations of abuse from escaped members and pending lawsuits, over the next fifteen years Straight, Inc. won laudatory praise in Republican circles. Luminaries from Nancy Reagan to Princess Diana visited Straight branches and touted their successes (though by most estimates only about 25% of Straight “clients” ever completed the program). Straight went on to open affiliate branches all over the country, including Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Texas and Georgia.
Soon enough, Straight’s tactics caught up to it in the courts, if not with its political cheerleaders. A college student won a false imprisonment claim of $220,000 in 1983, and another claim cost Straight, Inc. $721,000 in 1990. A Straight, Inc. spin-off called “Kids of North Jersey” settled a $4.5 million abuse claim in 2000. Straight chapters across the country began to shut down, culminating with the last branch in Atlanta closing in 1993.
But the Straight philosophy was far from finished. Many chapters and directors reopened new clinics that employed the same tactics under different names -- such as “KIDS,” “Growing Together,” and “SAFE,” the latter having been visited and praised by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, despite the fact that a Miami television station reported widespread Straight-like abuse at the facility in a 2000 expose.
Cult expert and intervention specialist Rick Ross says there’s an unfortunate market for “rehab” centers that take burdensome children off the hands of troubled parents. “It amazes me that despite the pattern of complaints and abuse allegations, Straight chapters can simply change their names and continue to operate,” he says.
As the bad publicity and lawsuit losses mounted throughout the 1990’s, the umbrella organization Straight, Inc. changed its name in 1996 to the Drug Free America Foundation, which thrives today under federal subsidies, including $400,000 in the year 2000 and $320,000 from the Small Business Administration.
Most troubling, however, is the considerable and continuing political clout of Straight, Inc.’s founders. Former President Bush once shot a television commercial for DFAF, and designated the Semblers’ program as one of his “thousand points of light.”
Long a presence in Florida Republican circles, Mel Sembler was tapped as ambassador to Australia in 1989. Today he serves the younger President Bush as ambassador to Italy, and he served on the board of the 2000 Republican National Convention.
Betty Sembler co-chaired Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s campaign committee. In return, the governor declared August 8, 2000 “Betty Sembler Day” in Florida, due, he said, to her work “protecting children from the dangers of drugs.” She also serves on the board of DARE, the largely failed anti-drug program for elementary school students.
DFAF also worked with then-governor Bush on anti-drug programs in Texas, and today claims to have his ear on national drug policy as well. Indeed, Arizona prosecutor and Sembler favorite Rick Romley was on President Bush’s short list for drug czar. Though Romley wasn’t nominated, Bush did tap staunch drug warrior John Walters, which caused Betty Sembler to remark, “ . . .we have lacked the leadership and support of the White House . . . until now.”
The cult expert Ross, a self-described Republican, is awed at the adulation still heaped on the Semblers. “It’s really shocking,” he says, “that the Semblers are still lauded and honored after all that’s come out about their organization.”
Staunch drug warriors like the Semblers believe a win-at-all-costs approach is the only way to remove the scourge of drugs from society. Such is why they can be unrepentant about the lives destroyed within the walls of Straight facilities, and in fact still boast that a program they founded “cured” 12,000 teens of drug abuse.
Last year, a reporter from Canadian marijuana advocacy magazine Cannabis Culture asked Betty Sembler in person about the horror stories he’d read from Straight survivors. Sembler replied, “They should get a life. I am proud of everything we have done. There's nothing to apologize for. The legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing.”
That’s the attitude of the drug war’s power duo. Shattered lives, suicides, forced abortions, fractured psyches – all necessary casualties of the drug war, and nothing to apologize for.
As one who shares the general, and justified, horror of drug abuse, I've often felt an immense frustration at the difficulty of getting Drug War boosters to address the question, "How high a price is too much to pay for whatever benefit you think we get from the Drug War"? The story of the Semblers and their "rehabilitation" center strikes me as the sort that, were it adequately publicized, might get the country thinking.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
and to house and feed their keepers and the whole bureaucratic edifice.
If society = the states, and said regulations and restrictions do not violate the Constitution, we are in concert.
Society has no rights, only individuals do. But don't feel alone, many Americans are confused with such thinking, thinking government has rights, or society has rights, or animals have rights.
Nonsense there is an absolute Societal right which is made up of the idividuals to shape that society as they see fit. That is why we have the vote.
Society certainly has rights. Society is made up by individuals, by the people. And the will of the people shall always prevail.
Name one right listed in the BOR that applies to "society". Rights belong to individuals, not groups.
Really then why in opening of court sessions the phrase "the State of (pick one) vs, John Smith" is used? Look this "society has no rights" nonsense is just a throw away phrase intended to mask the lack of any other rational argument.
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