Recently, Alternet reporter John Gorenfeld wrote about Bush's Ambassador to Italy, Melvin Sembler, and his proud legacy of torturing teenagers under the guise of keeping them drug-free:
The story begins in 1976 when Sembler, who'd made his fortune in Florida real estate, founded STRAIGHT from the ashes of The Seed -- an earlier program suspended by the U.S. Senate for tactics reminiscent, said a senator, of Communist POW camps. But as the Reagan years rolled into view, and a climate of fear nurtured a Shock and Awe approach to teens, the Semblers found a new world of acceptance for an anything-goes treatment business, meting out punishment in privately run warehouses. Endorsers from Nancy Reagan to George H.W. Bush lent their names to the program, celebrating a role model weapon in the "war on drugs."
...
Even Princess Diana had graced the clinics with a visit, celebrating STRAIGHT as a humanitarian institution. George H.W. Bush named the program among his "thousand points of light." But many called it Hell.
Radley Balko, writing for Fox, profiled Samantha Monroe. After two weeks, this article was
pulled from the Fox website without explanation.
Samantha Monroe was 12 years old in 1981 when her parents enrolled her in the Sarasota, Fla., branch of Straight Inc., an aggressive drub rehab center for teens.
Barely a teen, Samantha also had no history of drug abuse. But she 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 closet for days. She gnawed through her jaw during those "timeout" sessions, hoping she'd bleed to death.A website theStraights.com has chronicled the horrors unleashed by Melvin Sembler's pet project for keeping kids off drugs. From there, you can see stories like that of Marcie Sizemore:
I traveled to St. Petersburg Florida with my mother to enroll in the program. When I arrived at the Straight, Inc. headquarters in St. Petersburg, I was taken into a room by two other teenagers for intake. I was kept in the room for approximately five hours, and couldn't eat or use the bathroom during those five hours. Two girls sat in front of the exit door to the room. I couldn't leave, and I was told that it I didn't enroll in the program that they would put me in a mental institution. They also told me that if I didn't sign myself into the program that I would be put into the program by court order for a period of two years. I eventually signed myself into the program, was strip searched, and then entered into the Straight program.
Or Leigh Bright:
She testified that they picked her up and threw her to the floor. One girl pulled her up and down by the hair until her head was numb. She kept telling them she had to go to the bathroom, but they wouldn't let her go. When they finally did, they kept trying to pull her off the commode as she was using it. When she had finished, she stated, a girl started twisting her arm until another girl told her to stop or she would break it. They made her use a paper towel to scoop her own feces out of the toilet.
It's bad enough that Mel Sembler hasn't been in jail, let alone serving as this nation's ambassador in Rome. And the parallels to the war on terror should be clear. There's an overriding belief among the Bush Administration and its strongest supporters that we've been losing both the war on drugs and the war on terror because we haven't been 'strong' enough in the face of a hardened enemy. For them, no measure is too extreme, and any willingness to sympathize with the 'enemy' is a defeat. In fighting a real state-based enemy, these things are absolutely necessary. But as we've found out in fighting both the war on drugs and the war on terror, dealing with individual human behavior is much more complicated. Just as Straight assumed that all teens who rebel are drug addicts, the Bush Administration has assumed that all foreigners who don't trust us are terrorists. And in turn, we are badly losing both wars.
When Mel Sembler's wife Betty was challenged on the actions of Straight, she 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." The Bush Administration's overly simplistic "good-vs-evil" view of the world (which has sadly been adopted heartily by former pragmatists like Dick Cheney and Condi Rice), has led to the belief that 'good' is able to do whatever they want, simply because they are the 'good' fighting 'evil'. It has also led to some world-class hypocrisy. As Bush spoke of an "axis of evil" consisting of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, his current Attorney General was attempting to copy the Iranian model of having laws more in line with religious doctrine, his future Attorney General was finding ways to allow for Iraqi-style torture, and his ambassador to Italy was a man who built a chain of teenage drug rehab centers modeled after North Korean brainwashing techniques.
In other news...
The King County (WA) Bar Association is hosting a conference on December 1-2 called "Exit Strategy for the War on Drugs: Toward a New Legal Framework". I have to work those days, but hope to make it over there for part of it.
The Drug Policy Alliance held a conference last weekend in Long Beach, CA. Here's a roundup from Nikos at the D'Alliance
A new blog called the D.A.R.E. Generation Diary has been launched. It will probably provide me with more news and sharp insight than I can post here every week, so I'll just try to pick out highlights. I'll start with this and this.
Here's an article on the Steve McWilliams Truth in Trials Act, which "would allow individuals accused of violating federal marijuana laws to introduce evidence in federal court that they followed state law for the purpose of alleviating suffering." (via Drug WarRant)
Last One Speaks finds a former North Carolina State Supreme Court chief justice who has come out for legalizing drugs.
Here's a medical marijuana success story.
In the Rocky Mountain News is an opinion piece in support of the voter approved initiative legalizing adult marijuana use.
Here's an article about one of the few people left who still receive medical marijuana from the U.S. Government, Irvin Rosenfeld.
Cyprus is easing up on its harsh drug laws.
Nigeria's DEA (the NDLEA) has arrested 483 people for cocaine and heroin possession since 2001. In the article, it was made to sound like this is a success; however for a country with over 100 million people with citizens being arrested all over the world for drug trafficking, that's not very many for 4 years. They must be learning PR from our guys.
Young residents of Fiji are now empowered to conduct searches in the name of stopping marijuana trafficking.
The UK is concerned about a scale-back in customs agents tasked with stopping the heroin trade.
A British survey shows that many pets are treated for cannabis consumption.
Public support is growing for marijuana legalization.
Here's an anonymous editorial in the Virginia Tech newspaper The Collegiate Times saying that we're not ready for legalizing marijuana. The logic is astoundingly bad. Here's an example:
In a country full of people who cannot even handle alcohol, legalizing marijuana is ludicrous. The United States arguably has some of the strictest laws pertaining to alcohol; however, drunken driving statistics are higher than those of most other countries, if not all.
I guess if I wrote something this stupid, I wouldn't put my name on it either.