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Scared Straight to Hell

I'm been hearing a lot from survivors of the program Straight, Inc. Brainchild of Melvin and Betty Sempler, good buddies and large contributors to the Bush family campaigns, and now ambassador to Italy; it was founded at a time when the concept of tough love was the favored pop psychology of the moment.

The hair-raising accounts of those who lived through the horror of their methods still surface to the present day as its former inmates come to terms with the indignities they suffered. The program was eventually shut down amid a storm of lawsuits and bad press over the mistreatment of the children committed to its care.

Due to the bad publicity, the corporation changed its name in 1996 to the Drug Free America Foundation, which enjoys the strong support of the prohibition promoters and distributes its propaganda today under federal subsidies, including $400,000 in the year 2000 and $320,000 from the Small Business Administration. That would be your tax dollars folks.

The Semplers involvement in the current war on drugs doesn't end there. According to Radley Balko:

Today, Straight's founders, Mel and Betty Sembler, have enormous influence over U.S. drug policy. They serve on the boards of most every major domestic anti-drug program. They're behind efforts to defeat medicinal marijuana initiatives all over the country. They're also proud and unrepentant about Straight, Inc.; they mention their influence upon its founding in their official bios (here and here) -- despite the horrors that have surfaced about the program's history.

Sembler is now suing Richard R. Bradbury, 38 year old survivor of Straight, who has been agitating against the harms of the program since his release as a teenager. At issue is a penile pump that Bradbury lifted from Sembler's garbage, then posted on eBay last year for $300,000. However as fellow survivor Wesley Fager, 58 puts it, "The story is not about a man's penis pump -- it's about child abuse."

The Semplers call it Bradbury's trash picking, "an invasion into the sanctity of our home and our bedroom." His lawyer Thomas McGowan, said, "I see this as a First Amendment case. . . . There is no right of privacy in garbage." And there's the real point. Law enforcement tactics against cannabis consumers and other non-violent substance imbibers routinely include trash picking by investigators. The courts have long held that there is no expectation of privacy for the defendants, the same must hold for well-connected plaintiffs.

And while I generally do not rejoice in other's discomfort it seems just, that the Semplers now suffer some small measure of public humiliation in return for the private hell they imposed on thousands of our children.