I recently heard the story of a woman in California who was lied to by a Scientology-based addiction treatment facility, Narconon, and is now suing them to try and regain some of her lost money.
I went to investigate the website of the facility in question, the Narconon facility in Vista Bay, CA. The website is impressive and appears very professional, and uses many of the buzzwords common to nonscientific treatments, including vague promises of “lifelong recovery”, warnings against medication, and an unspecific list of treatments including “vitamins, exercise, and… our sauna”. They claim several times that their method is “proven”, but nowhere on the site do they offer any scientific journals, papers, or research studies that support this claim, and a few of the statements about addiction supposedly made by M.D.s on the Narconon staff are dubious at best. One of many opposing sites, Narconon Exposed, makes an attempt to catalog the problems with Narconon, especially those relating to the organization’s supposed ties to Scientology.
The suffering of those who have been misled by Narconon’s advertising is cause for outrage, but Narconon is also merely a symptom of larger problems in the addiction-care system. I’ve written previously on this blog about the lack of standardization in addiction care, and the tragic consequences it can have for underinformed addicts and their families. The sad fact is that Narconon is licensed by the state of California to administer addiction treatment, a fact which is flaunted at great length on the website, which includes scans of many impressive-looking official documents. It would be very, very easy for someone who wasn’t aware of the many problems to be taken in by Narconon’s marketing, and sign themselves up for treatment that is not only ineffective, but potentially harmful.
The licensing of Narconon has been blamed on the understaffing and low budget of the California government offices responsible for vetting and approving treatment facilities, and it is likely that as our nation faces growing cuts to public services in the face of the recent budget crisis, such oversights will only grow more common. It is more vital now than ever before for people suffering from any illness to inform themselves on all their treatment options, and carefully investigate any facility before they pay for what may be fraudulent care. Snake oil salesmen thrive in times of uncertainty, and decades of misinformation have made people suffering from addiction prime targets.
Narconon is unusually harmful, even cruel, but there are many, many more centers out there that claim to treat addiction with regimens that are stunningly ineffective. I’ve written a great deal about various 12-step programs on this blog, and I am sad to see that Narconon displays many of the same traits that 12-step programs use to market themselves; a warning against all medications, an emphasis on permanent recovery and “cure”, and affiliation with a religion or “spiritual” approach. It just happens that Narconon is affiliated with the Scientologist religious model instead of the vaguely Judeo-Christian one that most 12-step programs are based on.
Snake oil salesmen of this type have been around as long as humanity, and the only way to weed them out is to combat their misinformation with proven medicine, sound science, and rigorous oversight. It has happened in other fields of medicine, and it will undoubtedly happen in the field of addiction, though it may take several years. I am confident that, if we continue to move ahead with research and treatment using medicine to treat the disease of addiction, that the patients who are being taken in by these scams now will be among the last to be fooled.