One of today’s hot stories in the SF Chronicle (free registration required) is about how the schools had to discontinue a drug program run by Narcanon Drug Intervention and Prevention which, as it turns out, is run by the church of Scientology What turned the tables on Narcanon was the gross misinformation they were spreading in the classes.

When you look at this page you kind of have to wonder how the schools missed uncovering Narcanon’s foundation. It is, after all, right on the page. And check out that guy! Woo hoo! Would you want your kid in a closed classroom with someone who looks like that? Never mind that he is a convicted felon. I guess they also missed the quote from L. Ron Hubbard.

“You may have noticed that society is rapidly going downhill… And the most serious part of this is that drugs, both medical and street drugs, have disabled a majority of those who could have handled it, including the political leaders, and have even paralyzed the coming generations.”

Now there are some hard hitting facts!

Yep they missed it all but you can’t pull a fast one on 3 major and 36 other school districts for too long (they have been using this program since 2000). Eventually the truth comes out:

“Some teachers reported that Narconon instructors told students that the body can sweat out drug residues in saunas, and that as drugs exit the body, they produce colored ooze, the Chronicle reported.
Some other inaccuracies cited by the evaluation and the Chronicle – including that drug residues stay in body fat, causing people to experience repeated flashbacks and cravings – echo beliefs held by the Church of Scientology……Among other findings, the panel determined that Narconon also incorrectly told students that the amount of a drug taken determines whether it acts as a stimulant or sedative, and that drugs “ruin creativity and dull senses.””

Oh Happy we! We send our kids to school and they come home and tell us that the anti-drug film they saw in PE made drugs look really fun or they tell us that the D.A.R.E officer started the program by showing them a board with different sized holes in it, each representing the result of a particular caliber of bullet. That one was almost my favorite. Then I found out that Officer Jackass was winking at the girls and calling them ‘honey’ in the most patronizing way possible. Better yet, I learned that Officer Jackass told the kids that your heart only has so many beats in it so you really should be careful about how much exercise you get or you’ll wear it out and die young. True story.

D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is a national program run by police departments that purports to be “the highly acclaimed program that gives kids the skills they need to avoid involvement in drugs, gangs, and violence. ” I’m sure that is true in some places. I’m sure there are good D.A.R.E. programs with good officers who do a good job. Not in my town, but somewhere. Overall, however, the efficacy of D.A.R.E. has been shown to be marginal, at best. Heck, even USA Today figured this out over 10 years ago. Of course the Justice Dept. didn’t want to hear about it but what else is new?

So what is the answer? Is there an effective way to bring anti-drug, anti-gang, anti-violence teaching to the classroom? The folks at Safety First seem to have a clue and the clue is to stop denying that kids will experiment with drugs. The other clue, of course is to think and to investigate the programs you are bringing into the school and to execute some analysis as to their potential effectiveness. That would be a nice step forward.

One of today’s hot stories in the SF Chronicle (free registration required) is about how the schools had to discontinue a drug program run by Narcanon Drug Intervention and Prevention which, as it turns out, is run by the church of Scientology What turned the tables on Narcanon was the gross misinformation they were spreading in the classes.

When you look at this page you kind of have to wonder how the schools missed uncovering Narcanon’s foundation. It is, after all, right on the page. And check out that guy! Woo hoo! Would you want your kid in a closed classroom with someone who looks like that? Never mind that he is a convicted felon. I guess they also missed the quote from L. Ron Hubbard.

“You may have noticed that society is rapidly going downhill… And the most serious part of this is that drugs, both medical and street drugs, have disabled a majority of those who could have handled it, including the political leaders, and have even paralyzed the coming generations.”

Now there are some hard hitting facts!

Yep they missed it all but you can’t pull a fast one on 3 major and 36 other school districts for too long (they have been using this program since 2000). Eventually the truth comes out:

“Some teachers reported that Narconon instructors told students that the body can sweat out drug residues in saunas, and that as drugs exit the body, they produce colored ooze, the Chronicle reported.
Some other inaccuracies cited by the evaluation and the Chronicle – including that drug residues stay in body fat, causing people to experience repeated flashbacks and cravings – echo beliefs held by the Church of Scientology……Among other findings, the panel determined that Narconon also incorrectly told students that the amount of a drug taken determines whether it acts as a stimulant or sedative, and that drugs “ruin creativity and dull senses.””

Oh Happy we! We send our kids to school and they come home and tell us that the anti-drug film they saw in PE made drugs look really fun or they tell us that the D.A.R.E officer started the program by showing them a board with different sized holes in it, each representing the result of a particular caliber of bullet. That one was almost my favorite. Then I found out that Officer Jackass was winking at the girls and calling them ‘honey’ in the most patronizing way possible. Better yet, I learned that Officer Jackass told the kids that your heart only has so many beats in it so you really should be careful about how much exercise you get or you’ll wear it out and die young. True story.

D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is a national program run by police departments that purports to be “the highly acclaimed program that gives kids the skills they need to avoid involvement in drugs, gangs, and violence. ” I’m sure that is true in some places. I’m sure there are good D.A.R.E. programs with good officers who do a good job. Not in my town, but somewhere. Overall, however, the efficacy of D.A.R.E. has been shown to be marginal, at best. Heck, even USA Today figured this out over 10 years ago. Of course the Justice Dept. didn’t want to hear about it but what else is new?

So what is the answer? Is there an effective way to bring anti-drug, anti-gang, anti-violence teaching to the classroom? The folks at Safety First seem to have a clue and the clue is to stop denying that kids will experiment with drugs. The other clue, of course is to think and to investigate the programs you are bringing into the school and to execute some analysis as to their potential effectiveness. That would be a nice step forward.

I know I’ve been a lousy blogger and haven’t posted much. What I have posted hasn’t even been interesting. I’m pretty sure I have something to say and I’m pretty sure I’ll say it soon and I will do my level best to make it interesting.

Until then – thanks for hanging in there. I know there are 2, maybe 3 people who keep checking back and I do so apologize for not making that click worth your while!

What kind of a State allows a kid to be sentenced to 30 years in jail for a crime he committed when he was 12? Personally I can’t imagine how you ascribe adult motive to a 12 year old who is fresh out of a psychiatric hospital because he was threatening to commit suicide. It is also known that he was on Zoloft (after being rapidly switched off Paxil) and that he was all fidgety and complained that his skin burned and crawled. He was a psychiatric mess and on psychoatcive substances and the prosecution successfully argued that the only thing the jury needed to consider was whether or not he knew right from wrong. And they picked ‘wrong’.

Am I the only one who finds this shocking, baffling and depressing? These cases depress and trouble me because I can imagine a child I know or a child in my extended family doing something wrong – possibly even illegal – and then being treated with barbaric harshness and a complete lack of compassion simply because we have become a nation governed by fear.

Here is the real corker, though. This happened in South Carolina, a state that depended on slave labor and that fought fiercely to defend its right to enslave and brutalize people in the name of economics. South Carolina has quite a history of lynchings, crimes by whites against blacks committed to establish white supremacy. Tossing this history to the wind, the prosecutor in this case declared : “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t care how old he is, the state submits that this is as malicious a killing, a murder, as you are ever going to find.”

I think not. I’m sure South Carolina has seen far worse. You don’t have to look around very hard before you find lots of documentation regarding KKK activity and lynchings in the great state of South Carolina.

Getting back to the Pittman case, here are some experts from various accounts of what happened:
From CNN
Pittman was a troubled child from an unhappy home headed by a single father who was a stern disciplinarian. The boy ran away from home and then threatened suicide. He was sent to a psychiatric center in Florida for six days before his grandparents brought him to their home in rural upstate South Carolina.

When the boy got into a fight with a younger child on the school bus, his grandfather talked of sending him back to Florida. That night, the youth lay awake in his room, then got his shotgun, loaded it with birdshot and walked into his grandparents' bedroom while they were asleep.

Got it? The kid was very disturbed – very disturbed. His meds were switched. He was 12 years old but he was tried as an adult.

Are we so fearful that we have need to manipulate the law to qualify a child for the worst possible sentence?

From Court TV.com
Although the defense worked hard to prove that the antidepressant Zoloft made Christopher temporarily manic and psychotic, defense attorney Andy Vickery urged jurors in his closing argument to find the boy guilty or not guilty ? and disregard the possible verdicts of guilty but mentally ill or not guilty by reason of insanity.
The surprise move forced lawyers on both sides to focus on whether Christopher knew right from wrong.

What is really frightening is that the jury bought that argument and returned a verdict of guilty.

This is where I’m supposed to say something pithy and sum this up in a memorable way. I’m still working on it but for the moment I’m in a state of dismay and at a loss for words.

What kind of a State allows a kid to be sentenced to 30 years in jail for a crime he committed when he was 12? Personally I can’t imagine how you ascribe adult motive to a 12 year old who is fresh out of a psychiatric hospital because he was threatening to commit suicide. It is also known that he was on Zoloft (after being rapidly switched off Paxil) and that he was all fidgety and complained that his skin burned and crawled. He was a psychiatric mess and on psychoatcive substances and the prosecution successfully argued that the only thing the jury needed to consider was whether or not he knew right from wrong. And they picked ‘wrong’.

Am I the only one who finds this shocking, baffling and depressing? These cases depress and trouble me because I can imagine a child I know or a child in my extended family doing something wrong – possibly even illegal – and then being treated with barbaric harshness and a complete lack of compassion simply because we have become a nation governed by fear.

Here is the real corker, though. This happened in South Carolina, a state that depended on slave labor and that fought fiercely to defend its right to enslave and brutalize people in the name of economics. South Carolina has quite a history of lynchings, crimes by whites against blacks committed to establish white supremacy. Tossing this history to the wind, the prosecutor in this case declared : “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t care how old he is, the state submits that this is as malicious a killing, a murder, as you are ever going to find.”

I think not. I’m sure South Carolina has seen far worse. You don’t have to look around very hard before you find lots of documentation regarding KKK activity and lynchings in the great state of South Carolina.

Getting back to the Pittman case, here are some experts from various accounts of what happened:
From CNN
Pittman was a troubled child from an unhappy home headed by a single father who was a stern disciplinarian. The boy ran away from home and then threatened suicide. He was sent to a psychiatric center in Florida for six days before his grandparents brought him to their home in rural upstate South Carolina.

When the boy got into a fight with a younger child on the school bus, his grandfather talked of sending him back to Florida. That night, the youth lay awake in his room, then got his shotgun, loaded it with birdshot and walked into his grandparents' bedroom while they were asleep.

Got it? The kid was very disturbed – very disturbed. His meds were switched. He was 12 years old but he was tried as an adult.

Are we so fearful that we have need to manipulate the law to qualify a child for the worst possible sentence?

From Court TV.com
Although the defense worked hard to prove that the antidepressant Zoloft made Christopher temporarily manic and psychotic, defense attorney Andy Vickery urged jurors in his closing argument to find the boy guilty or not guilty ? and disregard the possible verdicts of guilty but mentally ill or not guilty by reason of insanity.
The surprise move forced lawyers on both sides to focus on whether Christopher knew right from wrong.

What is really frightening is that the jury bought that argument and returned a verdict of guilty.

This is where I’m supposed to say something pithy and sum this up in a memorable way. I’m still working on it but for the moment I’m in a state of dismay and at a loss for words.

I don’t think it’s true but according to mewing.net this is the real me:

take the WHAT INTENTIONAL TORT ARE YOU test.

and go to mewing.net. because law school made laura do this.

My kid said that to me this morning and let me tell you – you don’t hear that very often from a 16 year old. I didn’t do anything too specatular – I just pointed her in the right direction to find something she wanted to wear. All I did was suggest that it might have gotten stuffed into a purse. She crossed her arms over her chest, made a mad face and said, “I’m going to search every single purse I have!” 5 minutes later she came out beaming and holding up this little piece of fabric that means more to her than any of us could ever understand. She then annointed me smartest person in the world – repeatedly.

I love that.

Parents have a number of worst nightmares most of which involve late night phone calls to deliver bad news. I’ve brushed up against a couple of those nightmares, one of which was the topic of David Sheff’s very personal story in the NYT Sunday Magazine today (requires free on-line registration to read). The title of the story is ‘My Addicted Son’ and is about his son’s addiction to crystal meth.

Sheff recounts how as a boy his son was adamantly individualistic. When he was teased for wearing tights to school he shot back with ‘Superman wears tights’. Like a lot of kids he experimented with pot in Jr. High and got caught a couple of times so the realities of his experimentation were not lost on his parents. They knew. Sheff was told by one of the school counselors not to worry, that it was normal. He, like most of us found himself wondering when to worry and when to chalk his kid’s behavior off to normal development.

When his kid’s drug use started to become a problem Sheff told him about his own drug use – in particular his experimentation with crystal meth. He hoped, like we all do, that because he had first hand experience his son would listen and believe his warnings. No such luck. His son went in and out of addiction, ending up living on the street completely strung out for years.

I’ve never had a kid get addicted to crystal meth but I have watched one of my kids head for the same slimy slope I started to slide down in adolescence and Lord knows I’ve had more than my fair share of experiences with addicts.

Being an addict doesn’t necessarily mean that you are nonfunctional. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t get out of bed in the morning without ingesting your substance of choice. It doesn’t necessarily mean you would sell your grandma’s china in order to buy. It may or may not manifest as those behaviors but what is incontrovertible about addiction is that it means that getting high on whatever it is you’re addicted to is the single most important thing in your life. It means that your relationship to your drug is your primary relationship, usurping all others. It means you abuse drugs regularly in spite of continued negative consequences like loss of friends, loss of jobs, inability to perform in school, etc. and that you blame that destruction on anyone but yourself. This is the problem I was confronted with. I could envision my son ruining his life and cutting himself off from all opportunities for a successful future and it terrified me.

Like Sheff I was aware that my son had tried smoking pot but I assumed it would be okay. I found out about his use when he was about the same age I had been when I started smoking pot – about 14. When he was in Jr. High I didn’t connect the fact that he was perpetually on the brink of flunking out with smoking pot because I didn’t know it was happening. This was not for lack of open dialog about drug use. We talked about it quite a bit. The most alarming conversation we had was one that started with him telling me that they had seen a movie about using drugs during a D.A.R.E presentation and then said, “Mom – they made it look like a lot of fun.” Great, just great. I told him it could be a lot of fun and therein lies the biggest danger of drug use. I talked about how they make you feel so good you start to want to quit anything else you enjoy and just spend all your time getting high.

We also had lots of conversations about addiction. Both his father and I come from a long line of drunks and his Dad is a recovering alcoholic. The recovery part didn’t start in earnest until after we split up but once it started he was very open about it. He even took the kids to meetings for families.

When my son was in 9th grade he got kicked off the swim team for smoking pot on an out of state field trip. I was devastated. My shining star, the guy who was on the varsity swim team as a freshman had humiliated himself, his sister and his mother and had been tossed out on his ear. His Dad was even more alarmed and enrolled us, the divorced but still nuclear family unit, in an early intervention program. While he was in the program they tested him every week so he had to stay clean. A couple of months after the program ended I caught him on a New Year’s Eve so high he didn’t even know what to do when I called him to see if any parents were present at the party he was attending (there were not). Back to the program we went and again he stayed clean for the few months that it lasted. Then his Dad started giving him sobriety chips every month. When he was about to hit his 1 year anniversary he fell apart and said he couldn’t take the 1 year chip his Dad was so anxious to give him because he had been using.

At that point I was done with this program. It was geared primarily at providing education and support to parents which meant that his Dad and I spent more time in meetings than he did. It also was clearly not working. I told him he could go straight or I would send him off to one of those residential programs where they don’t even let you call home for months. A couple of his friends had been sent so he knew what I was talking about. I declared my right to administer random piss tests and I did. Finally, a year later he was still straight, had made new friends and was doing well in school.

So why the worry about pot? After all, as Ayelet pointed out no one ever dies from smoking pot. It doesn’t even increase the risk of a car accident because it tends to slow you down so much you can stop before you hit anything. What it can do, though is seriously nuke a kid’s life. With my son it was clear to me that if he kept smoking he would never make it through high school. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, marijuana really is addictive and that brings us back to my history with addiction.

My Dad died when I was 8 years old and my mother turned to alcohol for solace. She was what is known as a periodic binge drinker so there were long stretches when she didn’t drink at all. And then therewere other times when she would pour Scotch in a coffee mug in the morning and be completely gone by noon. She was lonely and angry and scared and she would rage and rail against us. As a kid I was accused of being manipulative and trying to take control of the house because I cleaned it up when the chaos got to be too much. I was called a worthless little shit and a whore as often as I was held in her arms up close to her boozy breath and told how much she loved me. Probably more often.

Predictably enough I married a drunk who treated me to the same bi-polar existence. One day it was flowers and chocolate and the next I was called a cunt because I didn’t want to wake up at 4AM and hear about what a great game of pool he shot down at the bar.

It was with this behavior in mind that I came down so hard on my son when he started to show the first signs of addictive behavior. I’m reasonably certain he doesn’t smoke pot any more but has told me that he will drink – that I might as well just stop worrying about it. He is well aware of the risks of becoming an addict (alcoholism seems to run in familes). He is certain that he will never become addicted because he’s been through these programs and he knows the score. I keep reminding him that no one chooses addiction, that everyone thinks it won’t happen to them, that no one knows they are addicted until the addiction is starting to bring them down and by then the addiction has won and the addict is in a fight for life.

At this point that’s all I can do. I just have to watch and wait and hope that I never have occasion to write my own story called ‘My Addicted Son’.

Parents have a number of worst nightmares most of which involve late night phone calls to deliver bad news. I’ve brushed up against a couple of those nightmares, one of which was the topic of David Sheff’s very personal story in the NYT Sunday Magazine today (requires free on-line registration to read). The title of the story is ‘My Addicted Son’ and is about his son’s addiction to crystal meth.

Sheff recounts how as a boy his son was adamantly individualistic. When he was teased for wearing tights to school he shot back with ‘Superman wears tights’. Like a lot of kids he experimented with pot in Jr. High and got caught a couple of times so the realities of his experimentation were not lost on his parents. They knew. Sheff was told by one of the school counselors not to worry, that it was normal. He, like most of us found himself wondering when to worry and when to chalk his kid’s behavior off to normal development.

When his kid’s drug use started to become a problem Sheff told him about his own drug use – in particular his experimentation with crystal meth. He hoped, like we all do, that because he had first hand experience his son would listen and believe his warnings. No such luck. His son went in and out of addiction, ending up living on the street completely strung out for years.

I’ve never had a kid get addicted to crystal meth but I have watched one of my kids head for the same slimy slope I started to slide down in adolescence and Lord knows I’ve had more than my fair share of experiences with addicts.

Being an addict doesn’t necessarily mean that you are nonfunctional. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t get out of bed in the morning without ingesting your substance of choice. It doesn’t necessarily mean you would sell your grandma’s china in order to buy. It may or may not manifest as those behaviors but what is incontrovertible about addiction is that it means that getting high on whatever it is you’re addicted to is the single most important thing in your life. It means that your relationship to your drug is your primary relationship, usurping all others. It means you abuse drugs regularly in spite of continued negative consequences like loss of friends, loss of jobs, inability to perform in school, etc. and that you blame that destruction on anyone but yourself. This is the problem I was confronted with. I could envision my son ruining his life and cutting himself off from all opportunities for a successful future and it terrified me.

Like Sheff I was aware that my son had tried smoking pot but I assumed it would be okay. I found out about his use when he was about the same age I had been when I started smoking pot – about 14. When he was in Jr. High I didn’t connect the fact that he was perpetually on the brink of flunking out with smoking pot because I didn’t know it was happening. This was not for lack of open dialog about drug use. We talked about it quite a bit. The most alarming conversation we had was one that started with him telling me that they had seen a movie about using drugs during a D.A.R.E presentation and then said, “Mom – they made it look like a lot of fun.” Great, just great. I told him it could be a lot of fun and therein lies the biggest danger of drug use. I talked about how they make you feel so good you start to want to quit anything else you enjoy and just spend all your time getting high.

We also had lots of conversations about addiction. Both his father and I come from a long line of drunks and his Dad is a recovering alcoholic. The recovery part didn’t start in earnest until after we split up but once it started he was very open about it. He even took the kids to meetings for families.

When my son was in 9th grade he got kicked off the swim team for smoking pot on an out of state field trip. I was devastated. My shining star, the guy who was on the varsity swim team as a freshman had humiliated himself, his sister and his mother and had been tossed out on his ear. His Dad was even more alarmed and enrolled us, the divorced but still nuclear family unit, in an early intervention program. While he was in the program they tested him every week so he had to stay clean. A couple of months after the program ended I caught him on a New Year’s Eve so high he didn’t even know what to do when I called him to see if any parents were present at the party he was attending (there were not). Back to the program we went and again he stayed clean for the few months that it lasted. Then his Dad started giving him sobriety chips every month. When he was about to hit his 1 year anniversary he fell apart and said he couldn’t take the 1 year chip his Dad was so anxious to give him because he had been using.

At that point I was done with this program. It was geared primarily at providing education and support to parents which meant that his Dad and I spent more time in meetings than he did. It also was clearly not working. I told him he could go straight or I would send him off to one of those residential programs where they don’t even let you call home for months. A couple of his friends had been sent so he knew what I was talking about. I declared my right to administer random piss tests and I did. Finally, a year later he was still straight, had made new friends and was doing well in school.

So why the worry about pot? After all, as Ayelet pointed out no one ever dies from smoking pot. It doesn’t even increase the risk of a car accident because it tends to slow you down so much you can stop before you hit anything. What it can do, though is seriously nuke a kid’s life. With my son it was clear to me that if he kept smoking he would never make it through high school. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, marijuana really is addictive and that brings us back to my history with addiction.

My Dad died when I was 8 years old and my mother turned to alcohol for solace. She was what is known as a periodic binge drinker so there were long stretches when she didn’t drink at all. And then therewere other times when she would pour Scotch in a coffee mug in the morning and be completely gone by noon. She was lonely and angry and scared and she would rage and rail against us. As a kid I was accused of being manipulative and trying to take control of the house because I cleaned it up when the chaos got to be too much. I was called a worthless little shit and a whore as often as I was held in her arms up close to her boozy breath and told how much she loved me. Probably more often.

Predictably enough I married a drunk who treated me to the same bi-polar existence. One day it was flowers and chocolate and the next I was called a cunt because I didn’t want to wake up at 4AM and hear about what a great game of pool he shot down at the bar.

It was with this behavior in mind that I came down so hard on my son when he started to show the first signs of addictive behavior. I’m reasonably certain he doesn’t smoke pot any more but has told me that he will drink – that I might as well just stop worrying about it. He is well aware of the risks of becoming an addict (alcoholism seems to run in familes). He is certain that he will never become addicted because he’s been through these programs and he knows the score. I keep reminding him that no one chooses addiction, that everyone thinks it won’t happen to them, that no one knows they are addicted until the addiction is starting to bring them down and by then the addiction has won and the addict is in a fight for life.

At this point that’s all I can do. I just have to watch and wait and hope that I never have occasion to write my own story called ‘My Addicted Son’.

Every day on my way to work I worry about terrorism. I ride BART and it seems to me that if terrorists wanted to do something bad, BART would be a great target. It frightens me. This morning I sat down next to a guy who was clearly Middle-Eastern and who was reading a book full of some sort of Middle-Eastern type writing. I know enough to know that I don’t know what language it was. Could have been Arabic, could have been something else. I found myself discreetly scrutinizing this guy trying to figure out if he was wearing a body bomb.

I hold the axis of evil (that would be our President, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld) responsible for my feelings. These fear mongers have turned the world on its head and generated more acts of violence per unit time than the world has seen in years and years – probably since the Vietnam War. The 3 latter guys, are old hands at this game (I don’t know where Bush was – probably blowing coke or something). They played it back when Nixon and Kissinger made some diplomatic progress and ended the cold war. They claimed that Russia had a vast store of nuclear warheads and that we needed to remain hostile and wary. Of course Russia had nothing. The country couldn’t even feed it’s own people, much less launch a war but how do you build a power base against a defenless country? You don’t. You manufacture a problem and teach little kids to duck and cover.

I finally decided this morning to put my book behind my head, close my eyes and relax . If the guy was going to blow up the train then so be it – there was nothing I could do. Of course I didn’t really think he had any bad intentions. He was just a person like me, reading a book on the way to work.

Too bad I have to work so hard to process my surroundings so that I’m not terrified. feh.