Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Andy Birkey, a reporter for the CIM sister group the Minnesota Independent, has an interesting article about Jim Ramstad, the Minnesota Republican who is being considered for two positions in the Obama administration, either head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) or head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Looks like Ramstad has a pretty serious problem with one earmark he requested.
Earlier this year, Ramstad sponsored a $235,000 earmark for the Minnesota Teen Challenge (MNTC), an Assemblies of God drug treatment center with a history of controversial therapies and overt religious indoctrination.MNTC is part of a national network of drug treatment and "discipleship training" centers called Teen Challenge.
More info on Teen Challenge:
Teen Challenge programs across the country typically describe themselves in these terms:"Being a Christian discipleship program, it endeavors to minister to the whole person, helping them to become mentally sound, emotionally balanced, socially adjusted, physically well, and spiritually alive through a relationship with Jesus Christ."
Teen Challenge's overt Christian message is extends to outright conversion -- at least according to its leaders. During a congressional hearing in May 2001, Congress members challenged the ability of Teen Challenge and other faith-based initiatives to offer government services without overt religiousness. Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) asked Teen Challenge Executive Director John Castellani if the organization hired non-Christians. Castellani said no. When asked if Teen Challenge takes non-Christian clients, Castellani said they did and he then bragged that some Jews who complete Teen Challenge programs become "completed Jews."
Like many similar programs around the country, judges often sentence people to complete them as an alternative to prison. This is a serious first amendment problem for obvious reasons. I've written before about the Joseph Hanas case in Michigan, where a Catholic man was required to enter a Pentecostal drug rehabilitation program that offered no actual drug treatment and was little more than a boot camp for Pentecostalism.
The ACLU of Michigan won an important federal court victory on behalf of Hanas. If the first amendment means anything at all, it must mean that the government cannot use coercion, de jure or de facto, to force people into programs of religious indoctrination.
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Comments
No matter what your religious views are you can not discount the results of Teen Challenge. As a Bible believing Christian I have some issues with the theology of the Assembly of God denomination but if I spoke to anyone fighting a drug addiction I would point them toward Teen Challenge.
Would be apposed to this program if it was one o fseveral options offered and not as the only option?
Posted by: Mike | December 11, 2008 10:54 AM
I'm not opposed to the program. I'm opposed to them getting tax money and particularly opposed to having the government require anyone to go to them.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 11, 2008 11:17 AM
Mike: Ed and I have this discussion every few months here. For my part, there are two tests to meet. 1. Are secular programs offered as alternatives? and 2. Is the treatment effective?
As to point 2, Teen Challenge has been reluctant (to say the least) to open up its premises to inspection or to release hard data as to their success rates. I imagine it would be easy enough to check their recidivism rate against those of other programs. Well, it would be easy if the researcher had access to juvenile criminal records, anyway.
So there are certainly open questions about the program. It would be nice if we had some sort of guarantee of freedom to publish articles on this sort of issue, so that the mainstream media could investigate. But that's just crazy talk, I know.
Posted by: kehrsam | December 11, 2008 11:17 AM
Heh. I remember Teen Challenge (not firsthand, mind you). I knew people that didn't mind getting sent there because the drugs they wanted were actually more readily available at the "camp".
I'm not saying that's the case at all centers, but the one in Southern WV was a joke.
Posted by: Ranson | December 11, 2008 11:54 AM
RE: "No matter what your religious views are you can not discount the results of Teen Challenge."
I dispute that unfounded assertion. There seems to be plenty of evidence that this is child abuse and probably unlawful imprisonment.
http://teenchallengecult.blogspot.com/2007/02/family-members-have-unanswered.html
What would JESUS say about such blatant proselytizing, and funded by the state at that? Got sin?
Posted by: Historicus | December 11, 2008 1:26 PM
Relating my sister's experience to kehrsam's two points.
1. Typically, a judge does not sentence a drug convict to a specific treatment program, merely to an approved program. There are typically lots to choose from, and the choice is often up to the convict, or the various attorneys.
2. In my limited personal experience, religious programs (2) aren't any more effective (and often less) than secular programs (1). The adict quickly learns to talk the god-talk and walk the god-walk, at least while in the program. They aren't stupid, just adicted. Once back on the street (or maybe sooner), they're off of god and back on drugs.
Posted by: Scott | December 11, 2008 1:44 PM
How many of their enrollees have they killed?
All these "Christian" boot camps have a habit of killing off a few.
Posted by: Graculus | December 11, 2008 4:42 PM
To Mike: I certainly can "discount the results of Teen Challenge." Teen Challenge is well known for fudging their success rates, and as journalist Amy Sullivan wrote in "Faith, Fabrications and Fantasy" (Dissident Voice, Feb. 2005), "Teen Challenge's much ballyhooed 86 percent rehabilitation rate falls apart under examination."
I spent a year at Teen Challenge. Their "ministry" is based entirely on bringing in as much money as they can; Almighty God runs a distant second to the almighty dollar there. If you become sick or injured and cannot work, you are unceremoniously dumped at the bus station, regardless of whether or not you have any money. The bottom line is that you are there to make money for that ministry. If you can't, you're gone.
http://www.teenchallengeexposed.com
Posted by: Michael Kincheloe | December 11, 2008 8:41 PM
It's not just Teen Challenge that abuses kids under the guise of helping them find God and quit drugs, only to lie about the results. Google "sembler abuse" or "dare statistics" and you will find credible research and chilling whistleblower testimony demonstrating that these groups use public donations and public funding to imprison, torture and rape children who were smart enough to use marijuana but not savvy enough to avoid detection.
The facts are that cannabinoids are good for humans, that we have evolved with these plants and that the first pages of ancient holy texts admit that these green, seed bearing herbs are good gifts from God. Besides the risks of jail, prison and the threat of loss of employment, the only negative effects of moderate pot use arise from smoking the substance, which can safely be eaten and inhaled as a vapor with the Storz and Bickel Volcano vaporizer.
Liars that claim otherwise deserve public rebuke and con artists that profiteer from public ignorance of the harms of Prohibition 2.0 deserve prison. Ask John Walters why youth pot use is lower in states that have passed marijuana decriminalization laws. Ask Ramstad if it is true or false that cannabinoids shrink cancer tumors via apoptosis, or amaeliorate pain, or stay the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Ask them both why legal poisons that have the side effects of cancer and liver toxicity are claimed by the federal government to be safer for human consumption than marijuana, when the opposite is demonstrably and irrefutably true?
It's high time to make ONDCP accountable for the increases in youth use of prescription poisons, and long past time to organize boycotts of those products and civil and criminal lawsuits against their manufacturers. As long as the new presidential administration aligns itself with drug warriors and eugenicists that peddle pills and vaccines that cause cancer, aids and sterility, they expose our great country to enormous financial and moral liability.
Are you listening, Mr. President-elect?
Inhale. That was the point, remember?
Posted by: Historicus | December 13, 2008 9:23 AM
Chong should be head ONDCP,not this loon.
Posted by: 4:20 | December 14, 2008 7:51 PM
Chong should be head ONDCP,not this loon.
Posted by: Bongwater | December 14, 2008 7:53 PM
"Why Nadelmann Should Be Our Next Drug Czar"
http://drugczarofmydreams.com/
Posted by: Historicus | December 18, 2008 3:04 PM