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The idea that we should seek knowledge about addictive substances from addicts grows from the temperance lecture, a popular nineteenth-century stage entertainment in the United States and the UK. Now, claiming the mantle of science, the sinner who has seen the light has come to be a moral instructor cum addiction expert. How Mrs Ford, Ms Wright, and other alcoholics or addicts have become models for children and others, while we ignore people who have drunk and lived moderately, is quite a remarkable phenomenon. Is our society undergoing a psychotic episode, where failure is conceived as success, where loss of control is thought to be the path to control, and where we are so unconcerned about wrongdoing that we make drug-abusing criminals (the majority of felons) our heroes? The New York Times reported (October 14, 1986, p. 30):
Thomas (Hollywood) Henderson, the former Dallas Cowboy linebacker who has been jailed in California since 1984 on sex charges involving two teenage girls, will be released this week and has already been scheduled for a paid speaking tour to talk against drug and alcohol abuse. Henderson was an admitted drug user.
Abusing the Youthful Drug Abuser
The same system that elevates out-of-control people to positions of prestige and command victimizes others. The most common victims are the young.
Programs intended to 'resocialize' troubled or troubling youth sometimes have resorted to holding youth incommunicado, refusing to allow them to wear street clothes, keeping them in isolation for prolonged periods of time, or forcing them to wear self-derogatory signs, engage in other humiliation rituals, or submit to intense and prolonged group confrontation.
Such 'treatments', which have been all too common in juvenile justice and substance abuse programs, are based on dubious psychological theory . . . attempts to strip away a supposedly 'missocialized' or antisocial character structure through intense confrontation or humiliation may destroy the youngster's already fragile self-esteem. The effects of such treatment are thus much more likely to be iatrogenic than ameliorative (Melton and Davidson, 1987, p. 174).
This article argues that children need to be protected from therapy and government agencies!
The fundamental model for drug education programs in the US is the lecture by the recovered addict who indicates that anyone who takes drugs will follow the same route to perdition as the addict. The body of the lecture (as was the case in the temperance lecture) is devoted to recounting the horrors of the addiction, the addict's misbehavior, and especially the addict's lack of self-control. The lectures, from temperance to the modern drug scare program, are completely noninteractive. Both in form and content, the program assails the audience, impressing especially those whose self-management and self-image are already weak. Although these programs dominate the American scene, they have been shown to be ineffective. According to the chief of the prevention research branch of the National Institute on Drug Abuse: 'Those programs that use scare tactics, moralizing and information alone may actually have put children at increased risk' (Some school drug efforts faulted, 1986).
Why do such programs remain so popular? They are no doubt very self-gratifying for the lecturer, and they give vent to the anxieties of parents and authorities who wish nothing so much as to act forcefully, even without assessing the consequences. The goal seems most clearly to be to have the audience admire and emulate the speaker. A favorite program of this type for combatting crime in the US has been the so-called 'Lifer's Juvenile Awareness Program', in which recidivist criminals are allowed a free hand in lecturing youngsters (who may or may not have already committed offenses themselves) about the fruits of crime. A film entitled Scared Straight! (which won a special Academy Award) depicted criminals screaming at and threatening children, who often then break down. A follow-up of the program entitled Scared Straight! Ten Years Later, recently shown on American television, advertized as follows: 'If you resist, you will be raped. If you report us, they'll put you in solitary. If they let you out, we'll kill you'.
The original film and the follow-up made outlandish claims of success for the program (90 - 95 % of the children are typically said never to have engaged in further delinquent or criminal activities). In fact, nearly every evaluation of the Lifer's (or similar) programs has failed to show their efficacy. Indeed, several comparisons of children sent through prison 'awareness' programs and those not sent found outcomes that favored the control group. In one systematic comparison of a treated and untreated group, twice as many delinquent children who went through the program committed a crime in the following six months as did those in a comparable group who did not receive the training. Even a study favorable to the program indicated that 85% of participants committed delinquent acts afterwards [for a review see Finckenauer (1982)].
Nonetheless, the popularity of the Lifer's program remains high nationwide. The 1987 follow-up Scared Straight! film interviewed participants in the program, all of whom reported they had really been impressed by it. Why is the program such a failure and yet Pollyanna results such as these are accepted so uncritically? Convicts physically intimidating children is really more of the same of what got them where they are, while to the extent they impress children, these children are most likely to emulate the convicts' hyper-aggressiveness and brutishness. Meanwhile, the audience masks its own feelings of ineffectuality with a moralistic faith that deterrence works and browbeating children will bring them to their senses, even though most such supporters could never imagine acting this way toward children they knew personally. Do the film's on-screen stars (Peter Falk and Whoopie Goldberg) and producers humiliate and threaten to maim their own children when their youngsters do something wrong?
Fear Itself
Albert Stunkard and his colleagues (1986) have recently claimed in investigations of adopted children that obesity is largely inherited. This result seemed to contradict work Stunkard conducted as part of the famous Midtown Manhattan study, research that indicated lower socioeconomic status (SES) girls were nine times as likely to be obese by age 6 as upper SES girls (Goldblatt et al., 1956). Overall, Stunkard in that research found SES was a powerful predictor of obesity, so much so that when people changed social classes their weights approximated the norm of the group they entered (Stunkard et al., 1972). A British group replicated Stunkard's several decades of work by claiming both that obesity was largely genetic and depended on social class. In this study, permanent obesity appeared in people's 20s rather than childhood. Nonetheless, the onset of obesity was linked to poor education and lower SES, and people often changed their physiques when they rose in social class (Braddon et al., 1986).
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