From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past (Part 27) TC'S More Stuff Date: 1996/10/09 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST (PART 27) TC'S (More Stuff) Continued from (Part 26) But hey, they weren't all bad. TC's, that is. No, the experience living in a therapeutic community could also be lots of fun. You start to view your journey through one like being on a mission. After a few months in one of these places, you do start to grow. You start to feel good about yourself again. You start to relate to people, perhaps in ways that you never did before. You start to get a better understanding of you and your desire for hard drugs. And you start to learn how to use some of your worst attributes when you were a junky in a much more positive way. But what could be fun, living in an artificially controlled environment, like a TC? Well, let's take a job function that you're assigned, such as being in charge of the kitchen. Or being the designated cook for the 200 residents that were in the TC I was in. Bad enough trying to maintain sanity with normal folks, but here you are dealing with 200 of the most manipulative con artists assembled in one place! If you are the cook or the coordinator of the kitchen, you get up at about 5 A.M., 3:30 A.M. if you are the cook. You got to be ready to feed the "family" by 6 A.M. No mean feat. To run a kitchen that feeds as many as 200 people each morning, you gotta have all your staff in place. That's waiters, dish washers, servers etc. Again, you're not dealing with regular hired help, you're dealing with a bunch of ex-dope fiends. Who didn't make it down to the kitchen on time? Yea, he'll hear about it in group that night. Who try's to convince you that they are sick? Uh ahh. "Sure. Go ahead stay in bed, you lazy son of a bitch." Dealing with the "senior residents?" Yea, you bet. They think, "they got it like that." Preferential treatment for the counselors and staff. You name it, it happens. If you can keep your head together, it can be riot. And this was only breakfast. As soon as breakfast was over, you had to clean the joint to be ready for lunch, and then dinner. And then the late comers who were in the "work-out" phase of the program. You usually didn't get done until around 10 P.M. Plus you had groups in the middle of all this stuff. A holy mad house. I'll tell you one story about a young resident who was my roommate. Juan was a small, feisty wiry Puerto Rican guy that had a real bad temper. He was mostly an ex-cocaine user. Unlike most of us, who had been probated by the courts to remain in one of these places, Juan came in on his own. So, the staff could not really threaten him with violation of probation as they could with most of us. Juan became the cook for the house for a while. And he didn't take any shit from anyone. Got himself in trouble over and over again, but he was a good cook and everyone sort of liked him for it. But we had this guy named Ralph who was the operations manager of the facility. This was a pretty high level paid position in the program. And Ralph was another feisty Hispanic dude, with about 10 years clean time under his belt. He was a tough looking, dark skinned, swarthy guy, who struck fear in the hearts of many residents with his big mouth, and ability to "see through" most of the residents bullshit. But Ralph was a mother fucker as well. Ralph would expect preferential treatment. Fuck, the staff usually did. They did it deliberately to "create conflict" in the house. 'Twas all in the name of "treatment!" A number of times, Ralph would call down to the kitchen and ask Juan to bring him a special order breakfast. So no matter what was being served that day, Juan would have to make Ralph an order of Fried Eggs, French Toast etc. I was there a few times as Juan would curse under his breath about this shit. He would threaten to poison Ralph, castrate him, piss in his food etc. We would all howl over this display of controlled hatred! But one morning Juan decided he wasn't going to put up with this shit anymore. He reasoned that the main thing was to feed his fellow residents. He figured, paid staff members could order food anywhere if they wanted something special. So, on this one morning, Juan called upstairs to Ralph's office and told Ralph to go fuck himself. Of course Ralph immediately came downstairs to demand that his order be delivered right away. Well, Juan who had access to all the kitchen knives etc., took a huge butcher knife and put it up to Ralph's throat. "Holy shit," I thought. "We are going have a blood bath." Fortunately, Juan backed off. But he was forced to leave the program after this. This was a sad moment, because everyone thought that Juan was right to want to serve the family first. But the fun we had, goofing about all this shit before he got ousted was a fucking blast. Eventually you got close with some of the counselors. Hell, they were just like you at one time, right? And there was activity. We had a live band, made possible by some of the musically talented residents. There were comedy plays, musicals, movie trips, & party's. There were open houses twice a month or so, where your family and friends could come and join in. And tough as some of this shit was when you were going through some of it, you could look back a few months at something that was enough to make you want to kill, and laugh about now. You did grow up in these places if you stayed long enough. The people became a kind of family to you and it helped you get through it all. You learned how to deal with shit in a non-drug like way. This alone, was worth the price of admission. So how effective are TC's? Good question. Probably about as effective as any attempted treatment available for substance abuse. TC's would usually claim about a 35% to 50% cure ratio, but this was bullshit. First of all it depended on the criteria they used. Were they talking about what percentage of residents that "finished" the program stayed clean for 12 months after? Five years? Did they count the hundreds of people that never made it all the way through to completion? Depending on how you did your sample, you could have a cure rate that was as low as 3% to as high as 70%. There just statistics, right? And we all know that the programs had to make it look like they were doing a bang up job of curing us or their funding went out the window. In the early days of TC's, back in the late 50's and early 60's, TC's were pretty unfunded entities. They were mostly self-funded converted apartment buildings that housed between 10 and 20 residents at a time. There was not much of a hierarchy, as they were way to small to have that. But once the funding started they got big, and along with big, they got corrupt. By the time I got into one, they were pretty big programs with different modalities of treatment. There were offshoots of a program that dealt with pre-release prisoners. There were houses for battered woman, juvenile's etc. It all became big business. The corruption was typical of the kind of shit that happens in high level politics or big business. If you stayed with one of these places long enough, you started to "see it all." You started to see that staff members were sometimes the most flagrant violators of the "cardinal rules," which the programs ran by. The four cardinal rules were, 1.) No violence or threats of violence, 2.) No stealing, 3.) No sexual mis-conduct and of course, 4.) No drugs or alcohol use. The last three were broken repeatedly, not just by residents, but by staff counselors, assistant clinical directors, directors, and operations managers. It went right to the top. Counselors were particularly guilty of having sex with woman or men in treatment. This was closely followed by drug and alcohol use and stealing or misappropriation of program funds. Diverted acquisitions were another classic. Given enough time, the would get nailed. Just like in politics, sometimes they had to "clean up" there own back yard! And yet the fucking thing could still work. This seemed to be mystery at first, but once you realized that you were there for yourself, you learned to not get sidetracked by this stuff. You learned that, even if your best friend, or a counselor whom you admired got "caught out there," you had to move on, if you were going to survive. The law of the jungle again? Yea, but what are gonna do? Where can you go, where that isn't happening? So as corrupt, hard and chaotic as these programs were, they did serve a purpose that could work. Eventually, if you stuck it out, you made it past level 1, 2, & 3, to "sponsorship." That's the final part of any of the these programs. It would happen after you had lived there for anywhere from 12 to 18 months. Sponsorship saw you out working, earning money, saving for your eventual live-out status. You were virtually back in the everyday world. You had your own money, you started paying the program a small rent for the room you lived in, and you tried to reconnect with your family, old friendships and make new ones. Eventually you did in fact "move-out." And after you had lived out on your own, for about a six month period, you were notified when the "graduation ceremony," would be. This was a big deal that would usually be held in some big hall, at some major hotel. Out of the 200 to 500 or so people who came into this program during the time frame I did, only about 50 made it all the way through to graduation. Most of the ones who left prematurely, fell back into the drug world. And of the 50 or so who did graduate that year, 25% of them were shooting dope inside of a year. Another 25% would do so within the next 2 to 5 years. By the 10 year mark, you lost another 25%. See what I mean about statistics? Of course there are different ways to evaluate rehabilitation. If you want to use the hard line criteria of being totally drug free, you're going to be hard pressed to find many examples. On the other hand if you can measure success in terms of people who may occasionally get high, without fucking up their lives, you're being a little more real about it all. Personally, if someone can take responsibility for his or her life, not rip off his fellow man, stay out the criminal justice system, and occasionally get high once in a while, fine. That's success. Even if a program keeps someone on the straight and narrow for five years and then that person takes a fall, that's still better than if he or she never stayed straight at all. Ah, the days and nights of heroin and cocaine abuse. If you only knew what the road ahead was going to be like, you might actually, "JUST SAY NO." Copyright 1996 Gizmo