Sunday, July 10, 1988Drug Abuse Program Is Much Too Brutal Fifteen months later, officialdom has ponderously moved to revoke the license of KIDS of El Paso. In no less than three written reports, the public has been told of physical, emotional and psychological abuse on the rampage behind the windowless war of this torture chamber posing as treatment center. Victims as well as perpetrators have come forward to tell us of these things. Parents perpetrating these same acts on their children in their own homes would go to jail and lose custody of their children. But child abuse by proxy wins the doting approval of the mayor, who says it's the only rehabilitation program that works; a state senator who, for some undisclosed sum, says the end justifies the means, and your newspaper's editor who says, "It's a tough program." "It's tough all right: shoving a child's face into a bag containing the child's feces which became available because the child was refused access to a toilet or making another child sit in his urine for the same reason. Can it be said that a program that diverts a child's dependency from drugs to itself, nevertheless precluding the child's viability as an independently thinking, psychologically healthy adult, is that a program that works? If the end really justifies the means, why don't we introduce the same brutal methodology into our prisons and further diminish the difference between ourselves and those we condemn? We're told this is all love, somehow I don't think that the Author of love would agree. Somehow, I can't see him spitting in a child's face or throwing a child to the floor or into a wall or cursing a child. So long as this evil exists in our community, I shall resist it. The test is not how many people can be packed into a courtroom or how many people can be intimidated by death threats and other forms of harassment by these desperadoes. The test, rather, lies in compliance with the law, professional standards, and conventions of decency and real love.