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INTRODUCTION.   In the early 1950s accounts started coming out of Red China about a remarkable discovery to change men's minds. It was quickly called brainwashing in the West, though one prominent psychiatrist suggested "mendicide" or "death of the mind" as a more appropriate title.  After careful scientific analysis it was finally dubbed "thought reform" by the Western medical establishment. What the Chinese had devised are "re-education" schools which they call Seventh of May Academies. In reality they are prisons for political prisoners which they call "students". Academy students are deprived of food and sleep, of toilet facilities and baths, of medicine. Their hands are chained behind their backs so they have to eat their meager rations and lap water out of a bowl like an animal. They defecate like a dog or cat without being able to wipe themselves. People spit in their faces and they are beaten, scolded, and incessantly urged to "tell all" in a process called "struggling". The students live under constant fear that they may be executed at any time. In his seminal study on the subject, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, (p. 5 of 1998 printing), psychiatrist Dr. Robert J. Lifton states this:

As the Chinese thought reform student is being systematically humiliated, he is made to invent a trumped-up confession and then to spend the next three years of his life re-writing it,  perfecting it, rehearsing it, and defending it,  until,  it is felt, he actually comes to believe his own made-up story! Once it is deemed the student is sufficiently confused about his own confession,  he starts taking classes to learn Communist doctrines [re-education].  Psychologically the student becomes depressed over his present milieu and overloaded with deep feelings of guilt and shame for what he has admitted to, including confessions to turn in his friends and family members for real or dreamed-up crimes. For years he is afforded no exercise, diversions, or free time for relaxation or contemplation to think things out because he spends his three years in a small cell with eight other inmates.  No one graduates unless everyone does what is asked.  And what is asked is that they all come to truly believe their confession. There is a nightly court where a judge questions the student about his confession and tries to trip him up,  and  where guards might beat him, but it is his fellow cellmates who wake him through the day and night depriving him of sleep. It is his fellow prisoners who constantly urge him to "tell all" and who spit in his face. There is no trust. Everybody rats on everybody else in order to save himself. 

Many newage (one word rendition of "New Age", rhymes with sewage) cult leaders have read these accounts of brainwashing (just as this author has)  and some have attempted to use some of these techniques on members of their own organizations. Cult apologists, citing findings in Lifton's own work,  argue that you can't really cleanse someone's mind.  Whether brainwashing truly works or not, I'll leave that to the cult apologists to convince a judge. But I will tell you there is no denying that brainwashing is cruel, physically and psychologically damaging, and can lead to death by suicide from humiliation and depression.  And, I can also tell you  that,  many cult leaders use it because they think it works,  or at least they don't know of any better way to exert total control over their subordinates. Some cults,  claiming they can make sane men saner and smart men smarter,  have been accused of using thought control in their program. This is the so-called "human potential movement."   

The newage cults are not the only westerners who have shown interest in Chinese Communist thought reform. The United States government is another. In the 1960s the CIA started experimenting with thought reform and in the use of mind altering drugs to control one's thoughts as possible ways to combat brainwashing,  and also as a way to try to persuade enemy agents into becoming double agents for the United States.  The U.S. prison system is another government agency which has investigated brainwashing.  Their interest is in a way to rehabilitate prisoners. Incredibly, in 1962 Dr. Edgar H. Schein, associate professor of psychiatry at M.I.T.,  addressing the topic "Man Against Man: Brainwashing" at a seminar for prison wardens and psychologists chaired by James V. Bennett, the then director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, told his audience,

Thus were experimental "brainwashing" programs begun in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Marion, Springfield, and Butner federal prisons. 

Thought reform is not the only tool in the arsenal of government agencies and  mind control cults. Some newage ideas are coming right out of professional western psychology. Primal Scream, for one, where the patient lays on the floor in his therapists' office and screams to the top of his lungs. Another is rebirthing where a person is wrapped in a blanket and slowly emerges reliving the birthing experience. Two counselors are in prison in Colorado today for rebirthing a defiant little girl named Megan.  She did not come out of her the blanket alive. Aversion therapy is another popular tool for behavioral modification. One father, fearing his teenage son was gay, sent him to a program that placed an erection detector on the child's penis.  The child was shown  pictures of nude males and if the detector sensed movement in the young boy's genitals,  he was given an electric shock. The boy committed suicide.

In 1958 in California a recovering alcoholic named Chuck Dederich formed a foundation to treat heroin addicts which he called Synanon. The heart of Synanon was a brutal, verbal peer group confrontation called the Game (or "synanon") where addicts shouted indictments at one another. That is, addicts aided in their own recovery. Synanon was no more effective than anyone else but some slick marketing strategies plus national exposure in a book by New York psychiatrist Daniel Casriel and spreads in Look, Life and Ebony magazines  made the Synanon Game a new standard of addiction treatment. Programs like Phoenix House and Daytop are based  on synanons. 

A remarkable series of events converged on the month of June 1970  which has forever affected the way the world has come to look at addiction treatment. Woodstock had just occurred and shown us that middle class whites were using drugs. And Charles Manson and Green Beret Captain Jeffery MacDonald had scared us into believing that drugs make middle class kids want to kill. Through the winter of 1970 the nations' newspapers and magazines were forecasting a heroine epidemic amongst middle class American teenagers which would begin in June of 1970.  All sorts of drug treatment programs started springing up all over the place.  Charles Manson's trial began in June and the month before,  in May,  Narconon, the drug rehabilitation program affiliated with the Church of Scientology,  was incorporated on the west coast.  But many of the new treatment programs were Synanon-based therapeutic communities like Elan (if you've been keeping up with the Michael Skakel / Martha Moxley murder trial).  Another was The Seed which opened for business in June 1970 on the east coast in  Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  

The Seed was a synanon for  kids-only.  It was unusual  in that as a start-up, experimental program founded by a high school graduate and recovering alcoholic, it got a grant for $1 million from the federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).  The CIA had experimented with LSD on prisoners at the federal lock-up hospital in Lexington, Kentucky,  and the National Institute of Health (NIDA's parent)  had even setup an experimental synanon at Lexington which it called MATRIX.   This has made more than one conspiracy theorist to wonder whether The Seed was some sort of CIA-backed mind control experiment to turn long-hair, pot smoking American teenagers into mindful and obedient,  clean-cut kids with button-down, collared shirts who would fight our wars and vote for Richard Nixon's Republican Party. The theory gets even more intriguing when, in 1974, the U.S. Senate published a report which likened The Seeds methods to the brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans against American servicemen during the Korean War. The Senate report was a principal  reason for The Seed to stop its expansion programs. But out of the ashes of one of those Seed expansion programs, some former Seed parents including Mel and Betty Sembler,  opened their own Seed-like program which they called Straight, Inc. which grew to become the largest chain of juvenile drug rehabilitation programs in the world. It was so successful , in large part, because the man who administered the contract to The Seed, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, was psychiatrist and White House Drug Czar Robert L. DuPont, Jr. who left government service and became a paid consultant for Straight! Many Straight descendent programs continue to operate around the country and Straight Foundation (now calling itself Drug Free America Foundation) continues to operate as a think tank for American and international drug policy. 

The juvenile heroine epidemic never did materialize in June 1970  but a plethora of treatment programs to combat it did.  Now thanks especially to synanons  any businessman can open up a lucrative drug rehab program for teens.   Today there are all kinds of specialty schools for defiant, middle class teenagers and rich kids (and some wards of the state). They are variously called wilderness programs, boot camps, emotional growth schools, achievement camps, religious boarding schools, and synanon-based therapeutic communities. Kids are treated for drug addiction, sexual orientation, eating disorders, low academic performance,  or for just plain being defiant. And the programs are not cheap either,  some costing as much as $60,000 a year. Accusations of abuse have been leveled at some of these programs and there have been some deaths. Many of these specialty schools employ aspects of behavior modification including elements of Communist Chinese brainwashing, and some develop novel ways to effect these techniques to avoid criminal prosecutions. Instead of using chains to restrain ( which, criminally,  is bondage) they pick fights with clients and then have 4 or 5 of his fellow clients painfully restrain him. In Straight food deprivation is achieved by giving a kid food!--plain peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, for lunch and for supper, no jelly, just big globs of peanut butter,  for up to 30 days until the child is sickened at the thought of another peanut butter sandwich. 

Like so many involved in the human potential movement, many kids in newage rehabilitation programs are tricked or forced to tell their deepest darkest secret (confession) as a primary step towards recovery, often citing AA ("admitted to God, myself, and another human being")  as the reason.  This extorted information may then be used against the confessor, relentlessly. Many of these programs use the Chinese peer group concept--no one gets out unless everyone complies. In the Straight cult inmates actually spit in one another's faces just like their counter parts in Chinese Seventh of May Academies.   In many of these programs kids are allowed no unmonitored contact with their own parents until they earn that privilege. In many of these programs kids are not allowed to discuss what happens in the program. In order to control parents, parents are often subjected to some form of a control program of their own where they will typically attend parent meetings in the evening or attend a weekend seminar from time-to-time. 

It would  be another decade after June 1970 before the established psychiatric hospitals would catch on to the the lucrative market of teenage drug addiction;   that's another story altogether.  But the message about any program which treats teens is this.   If a child can be sexually molested in a Catholic Church,  can he not be sexually molested in a treatment program for teens--or physically assaulted or psychologically abused?  How can a parent consent to place a child in any program where he can not contact that child at reasonably specified time periods?  How can a parent consent to not ask his child what happens in this program?  And how can a well-meaning judge sentence a teenager to such a place or even recommend such a place?  Look,  everybody knows there  are kids with problems who need help,  and there are many fine programs available which are genuinely concerned with helping kids in trouble.  But judges need to realize that all of these places,  like private prisons,  are, after all,  businesses.  A warden in a publicly operated prison has incentive to get a prisoner rehabilitated and back to society at large as a productive citizen.  In a privately owned prison,  the longer a prisoner stays,  the more money the warden and guards make.  Is this not an inducement for prison wardens and guards to pick fights with prisoners to stop early paroles?   And while we are on private prisons, the conspiracy theorists among us ask why George H. W. Bush, former director of the CIA, is so interested in Straight which  is a private prison.   And why is Wackenhut, the nation's second largest operator of private prisons, so filled with former CIA men?  Why is George H. W. Bush so close to Straight founders Mel Sembler and Joe Zappala, two Floridian construction moguls.?  And why is a Florida-based private prison operations company running private prisons in Texas?   

Well that's a lot of general background to set the stage for modern-day  addiction treatment.  This web page is about just one of these newage programs; the biggest chain of juvenile drug rehabilitation programs in the world--Straight, Inc.
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Straight.  From 1976 to 1993 Straight, Inc. ran the largest chain of juvenile drug rehabilitation programs in the world with treatment facilities in major US metropolitan areas. Straight marketed to the parents of middle class and above white American teenagers. Straight's methods combine an implementation of  Synanon Church's "the Game" or "synanon" which uses brutal, vulgar verbal confrontations; brainwashing;  a bastardized implementation of AA (7 Steps later modified to align with AA's traditional 12 Steps) and Rational Emotive Therapy (RET).  Straight claimed it was a Tough Love program, but it is not.  In 1995 Phyllis York, founder of  Tough Love, denounced Straight's brutal methods in an article in Insight on the News. [Insight on the News, Feb 6, 1995 v11 n6 p15(3)].  Many continue to think of Straight as a Marine Corps-style,  character builder program for teens.  Indeed, a favorite approach of cult apologists has always been to say, "look at the Marines."  Marine recruits are insulted and deprived.  DI's break boots down and then build then back up in the Marine-image--don't they.  But what is done at Straight, Inc. has little in common with what happens at Paris Island, South Carolina.  We'll talk about that momentarily.  

There has never been a Straight, Inc. treatment camp, not one, that has not been accused of child abuse. And yet, as Straights closed all over the country while under criminal investigations or facing civil suits, several former Straight officials opened their own Straight-like programs, many of which continue to operate. The part of the subtitle for this web page stating "the Destruction of Young Egos" pertains only to those treatment facilities called Straight, Inc. as stated in the main title.  This document makes no claim that any of these follow-on, Straight-like programs "destroy young egos" or that they are abusive,  although there have been complaints of abuse in some of them. For example, in 2000 Reverend Doctor Miller Newton, Straight's former national clinical director, and his psychiatric staff, settled out of court with a female client for $4.5 million for abuses she claimed she sustained at his Straight-like program called KIDS in New Jersey.)  It was the intent of Straight,  Inc. to breakdown or destroy that part of a young person's thinking which Straight felt was inappropriate and to reconstitute that person's thinking to conform to the GROUP's conscious of appropriate thinking.  

What is extraordinary about the Straights is the incredible number of former Straight students who are now deceased--many by suicide! Another extraordinary statistic which continues to follow the Straights is the backing the Straights have received from prominent Republicans.  Straight's founder Mel Sembler, AO has been the finance chairman for the national Republican Party.  And here you can see George H. W. Bush  making a TV plug for Straight right out of the Oval Office.