Historical Documents of Temperance, Post-Pat’s Day Guilt and Remorse Edition

Spending a quiet St. Patrick’s Day with my parents and, as many of us do at a certain age, shamelessly rifling their old personal documents, I came across this item of interest.

It is my father’s Pioneer Pledge, his oath at the age of sixteen to “abstain for life,” albeit with some language about “reparations” that may or may not apply to future “sins of intemperance” as well as past ones. He took it in 1960, near the historical peak of membership in the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart, the movement founded in 1898 by the Jesuit priest James A. Cullen.

The Little Saloon on the Prairie

With interests in heritage tourism and addiction history, I am always looking for intersections between the two. I found one unexpectedly last summer in Alaska, visiting several brothel museums that celebrated the madams’ business acumen and bootlegging success. I learned recently that Kentucky has a Bourbon Trail with the tagline “Where the Spirit Leads You,” while the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States has its own American Whiskey Trail, starring George Washington’s own distillery at Mount Vernon. Needless to say, these sites demonstrate the power of history to make political and economic arguments in the present. A fuller discussion of them will have to await my next road trip.

Ye olde employee of Beam Inc. (NYSE: BEAM).

Meanwhile, not all museums or cultural attractions want to highlight the role of alcohol, especially when they are cultivating a wholesome image befitting their connection with classics of children’s literature. As an example, heritage tourism is booming at the sites associated with the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, where visitors confront a complex mix of history, original and replica buildings, and landscapes, all viewed through the lens of well-loved texts.

Setting the Record Straight, Part 3

Editor’s note: Today Marcus Chatfield continues his series on Straight Inc., the involuntary treatment program for adolescents suspected of drug use that operated in several states between the 1970s and 1990s. Parts 1 and 2 of the series can be found here and here.

In Help at Any Cost (2006), Maia Szalavitz reveals some of the troubling history of coercive programs. The sub-title of her book is, “How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids,” and this is one of the hardest things for a survivor to describe – the deceit that protects abusive programs. Dr. Charles Huffine writes, “I cannot tell you how many youth I’ve been in contact with that do not tell their family about the painful aspects of their experiences for fear of making their family feel bad — though I can say they number in the majority. All too frequently, simply, they did not know they were abused, or worse, that the abuse was justified and necessary for them to ‘get better.’”

Straight-inspired TV movie Not My Kid (1985). Spoiler alert: they got their kid back.

Tough-love programs often ritualize emotional testimonies and require testimony about conversion experiences as a prerequisite for release from treatment. Because there is no scientific evidence to validate the safety and efficacy of coercive methods, these anecdotes are the “hook” that this multi-billion dollar industry is built upon. Many victims of thought-reform treatments, like victims of domestic violence, will defend their captors as a self-protective survival response. Similar to abusive dynamics in families, when people are beaten down long enough they may believe it’s normal, deserved, and even good for them. As one former staff member of the program said to me recently, “at the time I graduated I was so duped into believing that I’d been helped, I couldn’t even begin to see the damage caused to me.”

The Points Interview — Dan Malleck

Editor’s note: Dan Malleck is a historian of medicine on the Community Health Sciences faculty at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, and he keeps a blog on Canadian drug history. His interview with Points focuses on his recently published book, Try to Control Yourself: The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario, 1927-44 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012).

1.  Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

My book looks at the introduction and regulation of public drinking from 1927-1944, after prohibition ended in the province of Ontario. It is focused on the relationship between the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and the management of licensed drinking spaces, mostly hotel beverage rooms and clubs. It argues that the rules which seem so odd today, were part of a long process of negotiation and an attempt to build a viable public drinking system in a highly politically charged environment. 

2.  What do you think a bunch of drug and alcohol historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

The study might be called grass-roots, in that it examines the regulatory activities of the LCBO in six communities across the large province, from the border communities of Windsor (across from Detroit) and the Niagara region (across from Niagara Falls and Buffalo) to the provincial and national capitals (Toronto and Ottawa, respectively), a mixed rural and urban county with a large ethnic German population (Waterloo) and the large region in the northwest (Thunder Bay). It uses the inspection records and communication between the various levels of the LCBO (senior management and inspectors on the ground) and the beverage room operators, along with communications with politicians, interested social organizations and everyday people to develop a picture of the intricate process of regulating the politically charged issue of public drinking in large and diverse province. Historians may be intrigued or repulsed by the theoretical tools I use.

Pharma Gamesmanship in the Booming Business of Addiction Therapeutics: the Case of Suboxone

Editor’s Note: Points welcomes another new guest blogger to the ranks today. Kimberly Sue is an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate in medical anthropology at Harvard, doing ethnographic fieldwork with opiate-addicted women. Below, Kim details some very recent developments in the ways pharma companies invoke societal values around drugs in order to manage their market share, and discusses how the outcomes are likely to affect people in treatment.

Pharmaceutical companies and opiates have a complicated, intertwined history. Analgesia was and continues to be a big business as well as an ongoing medical conundrum. Opiates, as we know, are wildly popular analgesics. Yet when did opiates specifically indicated for treating addiction become such a big business, a lucrative niche market inciting pharmaceutical companies to aggressive industry maneuvers? As Penn professors John Kimberly and Thomas McLellan wrote in a 2006 article on the substance abuse treatment industry, “Pharmaceutical companies that, not long ago, refused to allow the use of even their discarded medications for clinical research in addiction now invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the marketing and sales of approved addiction medications.”

Mum, mustard, and maintenance. (Reckitt Benckiser annual report, 2011)

Does this say something about the changing cultural attitudes towards addiction—that pharmaceutical companies are no longer afraid of being branded as making drugs for drug addicts—or does it simply speak to the enormous profits to be had?

Setting the Record Straight, Part 2

Editor’s note: Today guest blogger Marcus Chatfield continues his series on Straight, Inc. and the research it used to burnish its reputation in the 1980s.

As part of my research I sent a questionnaire to 12 former clients of Straight, some of whom I was in treatment with. My purpose was to collect testimony that would help explain the findings of Friedman et al., and to help raise awareness about the abuses that went on in Straight. I asked participants to reflect on their experiences in Straight and compare their current perspective with their perspective immediately following treatment. Their reports also included descriptions of broken relationships with parents, intensified drug use in the first few years after graduation, and long-term trauma resulting from coerced participation in the program. All of the participants reported being “extremely dissatisfied” now but most reported high levels of satisfaction with their treatment during the time soon after their release. As one former staff member responded, “my answers to these questions are completely different than they would have been immediately after completing aftercare because I was still brainwashed by Straight’s doctrine well beyond my involvement with Straight.”

“Large group therapy process” (Straight brochure)

The only peer-reviewed research specific to clients of Straight was conducted by Straight’s own Medical Director, Richard Schwartz. Looking at the history of the program, it appears that this research began during a financially critical time.

Failed Frontlash: How Liberals Furthered the Case for Mass Incarceration

The response to the Civil Rights Movement initiated one of the most punitive interventions in United States history. Beginning with the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 and onward, the state took on a new role in crime and drug control. State and federal governments revised their criminal codes, imposing mandatory minimums and effectively abolishing parole. Moreover, juveniles were now incarcerated in adult prisons, chain gangs returned—as did a malicious policy of felon disenfranchisement—all while prison rates soared, increasing six-fold between 1973 and the turn of the century.

Compared to its advanced industrial counterparts, the United States imprisons at least five times more of its citizens per capita. Are we inherently more criminal than other nations? Or, do we manufacture criminality? For the most part, the United States and most other human societies across time and space have always had problems with drugs and crime. This is not unique. How the United States has chosen to combat said problem, as well as its unfortunate results, are unique. Legal scholar Jonathan Simon argues that in the United States, crime has become “a, if not the, defining problem of government.” How did we get here?

Vesla Mae Weaver’s work—particularly her use of “frontlash”—offers some important clues to understanding the punitive impulse. 

The Points Interview — Herman Ronnenberg

Editor’s Note: “Dr. Beer,” Herman W. Ronnenberg, responds to Points’ questions re his latest book: Material Culture of Breweries (Left Coast Press, 2011).

1. Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

This book traces the development of beer brewing facilities, equipment and techniques in America from the first English brewing at the lost Roanoke Colony to the early 21^st Century. It also covers the preparation of brewing materials and the containers used to deliver beer.  Many methods were used to make barley into malt, to grow and dry hops, to try to keep yeast pure.

2. What do you think a bunch of drug and alcohol historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

Many students of alcohol history know little about the manufacturing techniques or the science behind alcohol production.

Setting the Record Straight: Part 1

Editor’s Note: Points is pleased to introduce a new guest blogger today. Marcus Chatfield is currently writing a book about coercive therapy in the “troubled-teen industry,” based on research he has conducted as a student at Goddard College. A client of Straight, Incorporated from 1985-1987, he is associate producer of the upcoming documentary film, Surviving Straight Inc. Marcus’s five-part weekly series for Points focuses on the research that enabled this program to win the trust of families, media, and high-ranking officials during its operations in nine states between 1976 and 1993.

“The problem, of course is that Straight really does not know what happens to a good many of its graduates. And it will be criticized for this in the future.” Andrew I. and Barbara E. Malcolm, report to the White House drug czar, 1981.

The building that housed the Straight Inc. program in Springfield, Virginia.

Straight Incorporated is one of the most infamous adolescent treatment programs in the history of America’s War on Drugs. Straight was an intervention and prevention program, established in 1976 with a federal grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA). The LEAA funded hundreds of behavior-modification programs in America and many of them were found to be dramatically unethical. The coercive methods that were used at Straight were not only ineffective, but quite harmful for a large percentage of clients. This essay is a critical examination of an article published in 1989 by the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment (JSAT), entitled “Outcome of a Unique Youth Drug Abuse Program: A Follow-up Study of Clients of Straight Inc.” Authors Alfred S. Friedman, Richard Schwartz, and Arlene Utada claimed that Straight was highly effective at reducing drug use and that 70% of the former clients from the Springfield, Virginia facility were “satisfied” with their treatment. Program executives presented this statistic to parents and the media as scientific proof that Straight worked.

The Question of Temperance in Idaho’s Constitution

Author’s Note:  Washington State’s privatization of liquor sales in 2011 has stimulated renewed interest in this option in neighboring Idaho, where liquor sales fall under the monopoly control of the Idaho State Liquor Division.  The claim that the ISLD has a constitutional mandate to promote temperance harbors a number of rhetorical utilities for the anti-privatization camp.  But is such a claim justified?  Below, I take another look at the history of Idaho’s state constitution to find out.  – Ron Roizen   

William H. Claggett, president of the Idaho constitutional convention

Does the Idaho State Liquor Division have a constitutional responsibility to “promote temperance”?

As it happens, the word “temperance” appears in one place only in Idaho’s constitution:

Article III, Section 24, which is titled “PROMOTION OF TEMPERANCE AND MORALITY,” reads as follows:  “The first concern of all good government is the virtue and sobriety of the people, and the purity of the home. The legislature should further all wise and well directed efforts for the promotion of temperance and morality.”

This temperance provision dates back to the original 1889 text of Idaho’s constitution, making it more than 120 years old.