Help at Any Cost

"This is an exposé of the juvenile drug-treatment racket and the cruelties that get practised in the name of tough love. They programmes are privately run or some are contracted by various government agencies, but they are mostly exploiting the fears of middle-class parents. Yes. They practise physical and psychological abuse against people who are not yet adults, and there is some sexual abuse, though obviously that’s not part of the programme. But deliberate degradation and humiliation is part of the programme. They’re hauling them up and shouting at them, or the kids are required to wear a T-shirt that says ‘I’m a junkie’. Physical restraint, stress positions, hunger, sexual humiliation. I have somewhat blocked out the full horror of it. The book is survivors’ stories and analysis. Most of the kids don’t need to be in a residential treatment programme and, in any case, nobody is helped by being abused. Some of them, yes. But some have real serious drug problems – but even for them their treatment problem is more serious than their drug problem. I think that’s a half-truth. There are people whose primary problem is that they got into a bad habit around some drug and if they didn’t have that bad habit then they’d be all right. But the primary problem is lack of self-command. They don’t have good control over their habits. Of course, they’re likely to be people who face other stresses that made drug abuse seem like an attractive escape, but many of them can stop using drugs under the right sort of persuasion, without fixing whatever their other underlying problems are. In any case, most of their basic problems are probably not helped by taking amphetamines. So I have no objection to programmes designed to get people to stop using. But there ought to be some limit to the damage done in the process. I don’t not want people to take drugs. I want people to not have bad habits and hurt themselves and other people as a result. There are lots of people whose drug use is bad for them, in ways that they mostly know. The problem is that the reward of using is now and the cost of using is later. I don’t regard drug use as mysterious in the way that some people do. I don’t think there is some fundamental disorder about using drugs. There are bad habits and some people have them."