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Herb Ninja

Download and read Peice Of Blue Sky.
That book will educate you fairly well on $cientology from the inside. Peace, HN-

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"Truth is treason in an empire of lies." -Ron Paul

 

Greenbud

Sabotaging Drug 'Education' in S.F. Public Schools

Freedom To Exhale | Mitch Earleywine-San Francisco Chronicle | Monday, June 14, 2004

Pseudoscience and misinformation plague many efforts to keep young people off drugs. These errors destroy our credibility with teens and sabotage drug-abuse prevention immensely. As Nanette Asimov documented in The Chronicle ("What Narconon tells students," June 9) our children hear outrageous ideas as early as the third grade. My personal favorite: Drugs will store in your fat cells forever but niacin and saunas will release their remnants as colored ooze.

Programs that rely on lies such as these make me very pessimistic. I wish this example of misinformation was an isolated slip, but as a drug researcher I hear comparable tales daily. A recent e-mail from a boy in Danville explained how his teacher held up a peanut to the class to emphasize the size to which their testicles would shrivel if they smoked marijuana. (I hesitate to think what the girls in the class must have thought.)

Students in my undergraduate course on drugs and human behavior also heard some real whoppers growing up. A woman from Texas learned that 1 in 3 people who try marijuana become heroin addicts. (The actual number is 1 in 333, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.)

The health instructor of a boy from Southern California explained that a single puff of marijuana would later cause debilitating flashbacks. These flashbacks allegedly would force his eyes back in his head as he fell to the floor babbling during job interviews. A woman from Alaska had a DARE program police officer threaten to arrest her uncle who successfully used marijuana to battle chemotherapy-related nausea because "medical marijuana is a myth." Obviously, research does not support the claims of these drug-prevention approaches.

The drug myths don't just surface at school. Our own tax dollars financed an elaborate and expensive series of television commercials, radio spots and billboards from the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 2003. Every semester I hear students laugh heartily as they ridicule this campaign, which linked marijuana to terrorism, date rape and the accidental shooting of a friend. Obviously, data don't support these assertions, either. We're clearly so scared of teens hurting themselves that we don't know what to do.

We're all willing to do anything to prevent teen drug problems. We've spent billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours at work and in school. And we should. Drug problems are a debilitating and preventable waste. But we shouldn't lie. Lying hurts our credibility and actually creates more problems than it solves.

Teens know markedly more than we give them credit for, especially when drugs are involved. They're excellent detectors of our little fibs, too. They need only turn to their friends to learn that shrunken testicles, heroin addiction and flashbacks are not the destiny of every marijuana user. These lies don't make them fear the drug. But they do make them suspicious of everything else we say.

Exaggerations about the negative effects of drugs boomerang, making more trouble rather than less. More than once a student has told me a story along the lines of: "When I realized that marijuana didn't lead to crack, I figured everything else they said was a lie, too. That's why I went ahead and snorted glue." This predicament is extremely unfortunate. Inhalants are dangerous, with the potential to damage the brain. But what teen would believe it from the fraud who gave them this other misinformation?

Fortunately, not all drug prevention programs resort to these tactics. Those that focus on the truth actually show great success:

* The Safety First campaign in San Francisco emphasizes that, although abstinence is best, most teens experiment with drugs, so information on how to call for help when problems arise is dramatically better than repetitions of "Just say no."

* UP FRONT, a program based in Oakland, builds confidential relationships with teens so they can discuss the concerns about drugs that matter to them most.

* Project Toward No Tobacco Use in Los Angeles corrects young people's overestimates of how many of their peers smoke and teaches them to dispute glamorized media depictions of cigarettes.

Programs like these give me hope. Replacing the Narconon presentations with one of these could make a huge difference in our schools. The simple strategy of telling the truth is the best way to keep our children from developing drug problems. Let's give it a try.

Mitch Earleywine is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and author of "Understanding Marijuana" (Oxford University Press, 2002).

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"I believe in the near future, the government will use anti-drug hysteria to set up a police state."
-author William S. Burroughs, 1947

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hkhenson

[quote=Suetaz]Narconon put on notice by schools
Scientology-linked program ordered to fix inaccuracies

Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer | June 10, 2004

A popular anti-drug program with ties to the Church of Scientology will be ousted after 13 years in the San Francisco schools unless it agrees to stop teaching what the district calls inaccurate and misleading information, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said Wednesday.

The district's ultimatum means that Narconon Drug Prevention & Education has until June 24 to revise parts of its curriculum, said Ackerman, whose health education staff no longer wants the program to make sweeping generalizations about all drugs or claim that drugs are stored in fat for years.

[end quote]

This is a bit late to reply, but Narconon got kicked out of the California schools entirely. There is a web site that had a lot to do with them getting the boot.

http://www.stop-narconon.org/

If you go there you might be amused by the first link to Boston.

Keith Henson

PS Scientology and all their fronts are vicious scams.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson

Suetaz

Church's drug program flunks S.F. test

Panel of experts finds Scientology's Narconon lectures outdated, inaccurate

Nanette Asimov | sfgate.com | October 2, 2004

A free anti-drug program that teaches children concepts from the Church of Scientology earned a failing grade Friday from public health officials who were asked by San Francisco school administrators to evaluate it.

The program, Narconon Drug Prevention & Education, "often exemplifies the outdated, non-evidence-based and sometimes factually inaccurate approach, which has not served students well for decades," concluded Steve Heilig, director of health and education for the San Francisco Medical Society.

In his letter to Trish Bascom, director of health programs for the San Francisco Unified School District, Heilig said five independent experts in the field of drug abuse had helped him evaluate Narconon's curriculum. Heilig declined to name them but said four were doctors certified in addiction medicine.

In its reporting, The Chronicle found that Narconon's lectures often taught students information that is widely dismissed by mainstream medical experts. This includes that drugs -- including ecstasy, LSD and Marijuana --accumulate indefinitely in body fat, where they cause recurring drug cravings for months or years; drugs in fat cause flashbacks even years after the user quits; the vitamin niacin pulls drugs from fat, and saunas sweat them from the body; and colored ooze is produced when drugs exit the body.

Bascom and San Francisco schools chief Arlene Ackerman had asked Heilig to evaluate Narconon after The Chronicle published articles in June and July showing that its anti-drug instruction rests on concepts that mainstream medical experts generally reject but are embraced by the Church of Scientology.

The medical experts minced no words in their harsh assessment of Narconon. A local Scientologist who provides the Narconon lectures has made presentations to students of all ages in San Francisco schools since 1991. At least 34 city schools have hosted the lecturer since 2000.

"One of our reviewers opined that 'this (curriculum) reads like a high school science paper pieced together from the Internet, and not very well at that,' " Heilig wrote Bascom. "Another wrote that 'my comments will be brief, as this proposal hardly merits detailed analysis.' Another stated, 'As a parent, I would not want my child to participate in this kind of 'education.' "

Heilig's team evaluated Narconon against a recent study by Rodney Skager, a professor emeritus at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, describing what good anti-drug programs should offer students.

"We concurred that ... the Narconon materials focus on some topics of lesser importance to the exclusion of best knowledge and practices," Heilig wrote, and that the curriculum contained "factual errors in basic concepts such as physical and mental effects, addiction and even spelling."

Clark Carr, president of Narconon International, disputed the findings and emphasized that the Narconon program opposed drugs of all kinds, including drugs used to treat addictions. He accused the medical society of preferring programs that rely on a useless "drug-based medical solution.''

"We have the results," he said. "The 'review' from biased sources shows that people who endorse so-called controlled drug use cannot be trusted to review a program advocating totally drug-free living. We will continue to work to help the children of San Francisco to learn factual and important truths about drugs.''

L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, co-founded Narconon in 1966. He added the niacin and sauna components in the late 1970s. Similarly, Scientology churches often feature saunas because the religion teaches that drugs and other toxins accumulate in fat and impede spiritual development. Its "tissue-cleansing regimen" is called "purification."

Church spokeswoman Linda Simmons Hight told The Chronicle that the secular version is Narconon.

Today, Narconon drug rehabilitation centers and anti-drug education programs are in several nations and states, including California. At least 39 school districts have recently hosted Narconon in the classroom.

After The Chronicle articles appeared, state Superintendent Jack O'Connell asked a Hayward-based public agency known for its rigorous reviews of health curriculum to evaluate Narconon. In July, the California Healthy Kids Resource Center agreed to spend three months reviewing Narconon. Executive Director Deborah Woods said recently that the agency had not started yet because it was waiting for Narconon to send in its curriculum.

In San Francisco, Superintendent Ackerman has barred Narconon from classrooms pending the results of Heilig's report.

She and Bascom, the school health director, said they would not comment on the new review until they had read all of the material Heilig gave them, including the UCLA report titled, "Findings and Recommendations for More Effective Drug Education for Children and Youth: Honesty, Respect and Assistance When Needed."

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