The long legacy of the troubled teen industry and the War on Drugs

Hello from the trenches

The author at 16. Blurry picture, blurry times.

My teenage years, from 1988-1994, were a distilled version of the War on Drugs; all prohibition and punitive measures.

When I was fourteen, my mother laid a four-page contract out on the kitchen table and made me sign it without my lawyer present. It was packed with fiddly clauses and subclauses. Lots of bullet points. Allowances were made for small privileges in exchange for lengthy chores. A curfew was established that only allowed me to walk home from school at a brisk pace. The lock on my door was removed, as was the red light bulb in my room; apparently it didn’t look groovy and psychedelic – it made the house look like a brothel.

I suppose I should be thankful this militant regime was limited to the family bunker and that I wasn’t sent off to a troubled teen camp, Paris Hilton-style. I’m also thankful that what harm-reduction advocates have always known is becoming more widely accepted: that punitive measures do not work.

I recently finished listening to season 2 of the podcast The Sunshine Place, about the controversial rehab program for teenagers, Straight Incorporated, founded in 1976. Despite the efforts of whistleblowers to shut it down, this institution survived many incarnations (such as KIDS, Kids Saving Kids, SAFE and The Drug Free America Foundation). In fact, its roots go all the way back to the rehab cult Synanon in the 1950s.

The ‘troubled teens’ sent to Straight Inc were broken down by their kid-peers in meetings, often physically beaten, as well as psychologically tortured, and forced to ‘admit to’ levels of drug taking they’d never even engaged in. On average, a teenager was isolated there for twenty months.

One 13-year-old, Lulu Corter, who was packed off to KIDs of Bergen Country, an offshoot of Straight Inc, was trapped there until she was 26. She won a settlement of $6.5 million. The kicker was that Lulu had never had drug or alcohol issues. She just had over-imaginative parents whose fears were fanned by the politicians of the day.

While it was Richard Nixon who declared the War on Drugs in 1971, in the 1980s, Straight Incorporated had supporters in Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Even Princess Diana was taken for a tour.

The body is a battlefield

When a kid’s behaviour is said to be ‘out of control’, the exact opposite may be true. They may be desperately trying to wrest back some control when they are feeling powerless. We all need a sense of autonomy, teenagers included.

For me, drug and alcohol exploration became a form of psychic emancipation in a very strict environment. I was fourteen and blind drunk every day after school. How was I managing it? Nobody knew. I was the David Blaine of drinking.

Every time the key was hidden to the drinks cabinet, I’d pride myself on finding it. In Dad’s desk drawer? Laughable. Behind the salt cellar? Come on. After a while I got my own key cut at the cobbler’s on Slough High Street so that I didn’t need to bother playing the game. When I was finally rumbled and forced to hand that over, I resorted to Dad’s terrible homebrew in the shed, which yeastily expanded the gut and sent one into quite the stupor. Tiring of that, I just broke into the locked cabinet with an icing spatula.

‘It’s like you want to get caught,’ Mum would snap, amending the contract at the kitchen table.

It was true I was careless, but I didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong. I wasn’t out joy-riding, vandalising or doing anything that required an actual lawyer. Breaking into the drinks cabinet wasn’t in order to party. It was more akin to a fox chewing off its leg: escapism. Some gentle questions might have gotten better results.

As the jaws clamped tighter around me, autonomy was achieved through more imaginative methods. Every time I felt enraged I got another hole punched in my earlobe. When Mum started frisking me at the front door as I left, I’d buzz-cut another few inches of hair off my scalp with the clippers in the bathroom. My body became our battlefield.

You cannot be trusted, Mum wrote, in a letter I found upon waking one morning. It was time-stamped with my evening’s adventures, starting with a phone call from a police officer at Paddington Station, to me delaying the train at Slough as I was carried off it. Not an unfair comment in this particular scenario, but that phrase – You cannot be trusted – had become a mantra of late, and one I would take to heart for decades.

These days, my mum is the glue that binds us all together, but during this particular period, with little support from dad (who preferred to stay out of it, other than to occasionally marvel ‘You and your mother are spitting blood’), our house rang to a Stravinsky symphony of banging doors. I’d retreat to my bedroom and put Hanoi Rocks’s ‘Dead by Christmas’ on repeat. From its opening stabs of piano to the celestial fade out, it was forthright in its message. I believe they call it trolling, these days. I knew Mum was monitoring my playlists, because she’d come in my bedroom to ban a Mötley Crüe ballad about the singer murdering his girlfriend.

My brother left home; now it was just the three of us. From a campus post box he sent little life rafts. Don’t be too hard on Mum… I know it’s difficult … Stick it out. Mum had called him to tell him I’d left my heroin at the side of the bath. It was a jar of pink and blue bath salts (actual bath salts) that I’d made at Girl Guides. On one visit home at Christmas, he wondered if he’d have to quit university and move back in.

His letters came as a surprise but they kept coming. Years later, I still get one of three voices in my head if I’m facing a fear. One’s critical. One’s anxious. The reasonable one, suggesting I take some kind of sensible option, is him.

I plotted my escape nonetheless: out of the house, out of Slough and out of the country. I started speaking in an American accent. I went to Heathrow Airport on Saturdays and haunted the terminals. (Much later I learned Mum sometimes did, too.) At night I dreamed of train stations, timetables and maps. Maybe one day I’d shut the front door behind me and keep going past school, on and on, like Laurie Lee in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

There’s a triumvirate of self-destructive behaviour that ‘troubled teens’ often use as a form of psychic emancipation. As well as drug use, there are eating disorders and self-mutilation. The three can often rotate or co-exist. Through their physicality they offer relief from inner, circular thoughts. Drinking feels like drowning oneself; taking drugs feels like obliteration. Self-mutilation takes the focus of pain from emotional to a precise point on the body. Throwing up is the literal purging of shame. Any act of aggression against one’s own body is also an act of regaining ownership of it. The flipside is that this all may result in even more ferocious scrutiny… and so the battle rages on.

From self-harm to harm-minimisation

I never had kids myself, so I can’t lay any claims to successful lenient parenting. But I do believe in lenience. Exactly thirty years after I received that contract at the kitchen table, I found myself living the other side of the world in Australia and serving as a board director for SMART Recovery, which has a tenet of harm-minimisation.

In weekly free meetings, run by a facilitator, people can learn to manage their own behaviours, using all sorts of tools and techniques, without shame or stigma. They may or not be abstinent.

I served on the SMART Recovery board for five years and I still feel strongly that harm-minimisation (or harm-reduction as it’s sometimes called) is the way to go. In 2017 I wrote an addiction memoir, Woman of Substances, which took the unusual stance of discussing harm-min, rather than promoting 12-step redemption, as the latter often has shame attached. Through my work as a consultant for the alcohol-and-other-drugs sector in Australia, I’ve met: pill-testing advocates who are making breakthroughs in safety by setting up at music festivals; needle-and-syringe exchange workers who by supplying the needles can also educate clients on safety and connect them with service providers; I’ve media-trained people with lived experience to talk about their use in an effort to reduce stigma; I judge an annual short-story competition run by the rehab Odyssey House; regularly run writing workshops for rehab clients and peer workers; and write articles about the importance of talking openly about drug use. Everyone gets a voice.

I notice that many of the survivors of Straight Incorporated also became lifelong advocates, in their case exposing dangerous therapies and institutions. What we have in common is we know how deep the ‘can’t be trusted’ narrative runs… and ironically we’ve also developed a sixth sense about what really is and isn’t trustworthy.