“A further significant task during 2006 was an assessment of NDPA’s future role and workscope. Funding was certainly no easier than previews years, with libertarian organisationscontinuing to have a stranglehold. At the same time, the principal operatives are now well beyond retirement age and there is no sign of successors. An attempt to employ NDPA’s 30-something Youth Director as the new NDPA Director foundered because funding could not be found to give him a living wage.

The conclusion has been that NDPA’s work scope must in future be reduced. All training programmes, including Teenex, Tribes, and Parenting for Prevention, has already been shelved during 2006. Other will be limited by not actively seeking the work.”

That didn’t stop spokesman and Executive Council member David Raynes spouting misinformed nonsense at the recent ACMD review into the classification of cannabis.

Raynes appears to think there’s some kind of conspiracy going on, a typical reactionary response, and you can read his views of the day here (2).

NDPA spout the usual unscientific drivel on their website which we could take apart until the cows come home and probably will at some point.

That’s not the story here though.

Neither is the fact that trustee A. Stoker trousered six grand in 2006 for doing what seems to be very little.

We won’t even mention that the charity got through almost 40k in 2006, most of this in salary payments but not forgetting six thousand on travel expenses - these guys get around.

We’re not even interested that as of their last accounts (3) they didn’t seem to have paid the tax which their employees will have had deducted from their salaries.

And as for their website’s section on Geoffisms (4), the comments made by Chairperson Geoffory Davies, well sometimes you can’t even take the piss.

As for the fact they have Christian group Yeldall Christian Centres as members of their Executive Council showing a perhaps otherwise hidden agenda, well this is of no interest to us at all.

What interests us is the grant of £31,581 that they received from Drug Free America.

Now there are two organisations bearing this name, the Partnership for a Drug Free America and the Drug Free America Foundation (often abbreviated to DFAF).

One of these is a boring educational type bunch of prohibitionists of little interest to us (yet).

However the Drug Free America Foundation are a bunch of Bush loving ultra-Republicans who’s founders created a drug prevention programme described as child abuse by thousands of the kids who had to endure the vicious manifestation of prohibition.

And it’s the Drug Free America Foundation who paid the NDPA 30 grand to organise a conference for them in London.

Ambassador Mel Sembler and wife Betty Sembler are the patrons of DFAF who include amongst their official advisors such enlightened souls as election fix-it man Jeb Bush.

In the 80’s the Semblers founded the Straight programme. Here’s what Fox News had to say about them in a piece that was pulled within a week (5) of being published:

Samantha Monroe was 12 years old in 1981 when her parents enrolled her in the Sarasota, Fla., branch of Straight Inc., an aggressive drub rehab center for teens.

Barely a teen, Samantha also had no history of drug abuse. But she spent the next two years of her life Straight Inc. She was beaten, starved and denied toilet privileges for days on end. She describes her “humble pants,” a punishment that forced her to wear the same pants for six weeks at a time. Because she was allowed just one shower a week, the pants often filled with feces, urine and menstrual blood. Often she was confined to her closet for days. She gnawed through her jaw during those “timeout” sessions, hoping she’d bleed to death.

She says that after she was raped by a male counselor, “the wonderful state of Florida paid for and forced me to have an abortion.”

She was far from alone in her experiences. The piece goes on to say:

Soon enough, Straight’s tactics caught up (6) to it in the courts, if not with its political cheerleaders. A college student won a false imprisonment claim of $220,000 in 1983, and another claim cost Straight, Inc. $721,000 in 1990 (7). A Straight, Inc. spin-off called “Kids of North Jersey” settled a $4.5 million abuse claim in 2000 (8). Straight chapters across the country began to shut down, culminating with the last branch in Atlanta closing in 1993.

Whilst the bad publicity generated by the cases forced Straight Inc to change their names to the current Drug Free America Foundation the methods utilised by Straight Inc live on in programmes known as “KIDS,” “Growing Together,” and “SAFE” amongst others.

Several websites (9) exist providing testimony to the abuse suffered at the hands of these programmes but Betty Sembler is unrepentant.

When asked by a Cannabis Culture journalist about the horrific methods used by Straight Inc Sembler replied: “They should get a life. I am proud of everything we have done. There’s nothing to apologize for. The legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing.”

So there you go folks, the unpleasant truth behind the funding of at least one prohibitionist group in the UK.

Who mention none of the above on their website which is a shame because we’d like to hear a Geoffism on working in parnership with child abusers.

(1)  http://www.drugprevent.demon.co.uk/New%20look%20of%20Website/homepage/mainpage11.html
(2)  http://www.drugprevent.demon.co.uk/New%20look%20of%20Website/Stop%20Press/stopress.htm
(3)  http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/registeredcharities/ScannedAccounts%5CEnds35%5C0001023135_ac_20061231_e_c.pdf
(4)  http://www.drugprevent.demon.co.uk/New%20look%20of%20Website/homepage/mainpage11.html
(5)  http://www.theagitator.com/drug-war-casualties/
(6)  http://www.rickross.com/groups/straightinc.html
(7)  http://www.rickross.com/reference/straight/straight17.html
(8)  http://www.rickross.com/reference/straight/straight52.html
(9)  http://www.webdiva.org/straight/

 http://johnnyvoid.blogspot.com