Financial woes shuts residential care site
July 3, 2009
By Charles M. Bartholomew, Post-Tribune correspondent
CHESTERTON — Thursday was the last day for office workers at the Pathway Family Center, the residential care and referral facility for teens and their families who face substance abuse problems.
Clinicians will see the last clients next Thursday, according to Pathway CEO and President Terri Nisseley, who described her mission as, “We save kids.”
After that, families seeking help will have to take their troubled teens to the agency’s facilities in Indianapolis as much as several times a week, as they had to before Pathway opened its Porter County location in 2007 at the invitation of the Community Action Drug Coalition.
Among the center’s free services that will stop are a hot line that handled 420 calls last year and a community education program for youths, teachers and health care workers that served 24,320 people, Nisseley said.
“Not having residential care here puts them in a bind. I know first-hand working with kids … the importance of a residential treatment center,” said Portage High School Resource Officer Troy Williams, a member of the local board for Pathway.
Local officials agree with Nisseley’s claim that the center’s adolescent treatment programs are “very successful” in turning young people away from drugs.
On the Web site www.pathwayfamilycenter.org , Porter County Sheriff David Lain says that Pathway “has proven to be successful in this fight. They are having an impact with the most vulnerable victims of addiction; adolescents and their families.”
Nisseley said this week the county still has a “huge” need for this kind of treatment, but the demand necessary to support the center financially never materialized.
“You know the saying, ‘Build it and they will come?’ I now know that idea will not work.”
She said the center had been started with high hopes of those who had asked Pathway to come here. The center sought $1 million in local funding in support. They started with $200,000 from the Porter County Council and the amount from the Drug Coalition, but fundraising and referrals never covered the costs.
In addition to the recently-recession, she blamed ongoing Hoosier insularity.
“I think there was political pressure for people in positions of referring kids for help not to change their referral patterns,” she said.
She said those positions included “anybody working in the justice system, school systems, local treatment programs.”
“I wouldn’t go there,” said Pathway board member Robert Taylor, coordinator of the Porter County Drug Task Force with the county Prosecutor’s Office when asked to comment on her statement.
But he agreed strongly with her about the effects of the economy and the financial obstacles to families seeking treatment.
“Treatment at the center can cost $15,000 to $20,000. Most people have to borrow — it’s like sending your child to college,” he said.
He said he often referred teens to the center and will continue to do so.
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chesterton
Andrew G. Marshall writes: From May 14-17, the global elite met in secret in Greece for the yearly Bilderberg conference, amid scattered and limited global media attention. Roughly 130 of the world’s most powerful individuals came together to discuss the pressing issues of today, and to chart a course for the next year. The main topic of discussion at this years meeting was the global financial crisis, which is no surprise, considering the list of conference attendees includes many of the primary architects of the crisis, as well as those poised to “solve” it.
The Agenda: The Restructuring of the Global Political Economy
Before the meeting began, Bilderberg investigative journalist Daniel Estulin reported on the main item of the agenda, which was leaked to him by his sources inside. Though such reports cannot be verified, his sources, along with those of veteran Bilderberg tracker, Jim Tucker, have proven to be shockingly accurate in the past. Apparently, the main topic of discussion at this years meeting was to address the economic crisis, in terms of undertaking, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.” Other items on the agenda included a plan to “continue to deceive millions of savers and investors who believe the hype about the supposed up-turn in the economy. They are about to be set up for massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” and “There will be a final push for the enactment of Lisbon Treaty, pending on Irish voting YES on the treaty in Sept or October,”[1] which would give the European Union massive powers over its member nations, essentially making it a supranational regional government, with each country relegated to more of a provincial status.
Shortly after the meetings began, Bilderberg tracker Jim Tucker reported that his inside sources revealed that the group has on its agenda, “the plan for a global department of health, a global treasury and a shortened depression rather than a longer economic downturn.” Tucker reported that Swedish Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister, Carl Bildt, “Made a speech advocating turning the World Health Organization into a world department of health, advocating turning the IMF into a world department of treasury, both of course under the auspices of the United Nations.” Further, Tucker reported that, “Treasury Secretary Geithner and Carl Bildt touted a shorter recession not a 10-year recession … partly because a 10 year recession would damage Bilderberg industrialists themselves, as much as they want to have a global department of labor and a global department of treasury, they still like making money and such a long recession would cost them big bucks industrially because nobody is buying their toys…..the tilt is towards keeping it short.”[2]
After the meetings finished, Daniel Estulin reported that, “One of Bilderberg’s primary concerns according to Estulin is the danger that their zeal to reshape the world by engineering chaos in order to implement their long term agenda could cause the situation to spiral out of control and eventually lead to a scenario where Bilderberg and the global elite in general are overwhelmed by events and end up losing their control over the planet.”[3]
On May 21, the Macedonian International News Agency reported that, “A new Kremlin report on the shadowy Bilderberg Group, who this past week held their annual meeting in Greece, states that the West’s financial, political and corporate elite emerged from their conclave after coming to an agreement that in order to continue their drive towards a New World Order dominated by the Western Powers, the US Dollar has to be ‘totally’ destroyed.” Further, the same Kremlin report apparently stated that, “most of the West’s wealthiest elite convened at an unprecedented secret meeting in New York called for and led by” David Rockefeller, “to plot the demise of the US Dollar.”[4]
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article10903.html
It looks like the pot debate just got real. As the nation faces its worst economic crisis in generations, California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has introduced a trailblazing bill to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol. Hard on the heels of Michael Phelps’ nationally-resonant bong demo, Ammiano’s gesture is a whole lot more intentional. One hopes it will stir the long-overdue national examination of the financial and human price that we pay for criminalizing pot.
The most widely used illicit drug in the western world, marijuana is a fact of life that’s been sampled by upwards of 100,000,000 Americans. Officially prohibited since 1937, we finally seem on the threshold of a promising moment in our nation’s tortured relationship to the drug. On November 4 alone, Massachusetts decriminalized personal pot use, Michigan became the thirteenth state to allow its medical use, and we elected a president who’s openly admitted to smoking it. National polls and the yawn that greeted the Phelps media frenzy indicate that Americans are reconciled to pot’s largely benign role in our culture.
Nevertheless, the mindless prohibition enforcement machine rolls on. In 2007, over 800,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana-related crimes (nearly 90 percent of them for possession), with upwards of 85,000 of them serving sentences in jail or prison. In the U.S., incredibly there are more arrests for marijuana possession each year than for all violent crimes combined. This astounding human toll from enforcing the ban on marijuana costs taxpayers roughly $8 billion each year. And those wasted resources are further compounded by the total capitulation of the massive pot market to an underground economy to gangsters who laugh all the way to the bank.
Amidst a national economic meltdown, California’s budget turmoil is the worst in the nation. After an excruciating three-month deadlock, the dysfunctional Sacramento legislature closed a $42 billion deficit by slashing aid to the most vulnerable in the state, raising a host of taxes and fees, and kicking the can down the road with billions more in borrowing. Meanwhile, California’s largest cash crop was studiously avoided in the frenzied search for politically-viable revenue sources. California’s marijuana yield is conservatively valued at $13.8 billion annually – nearly double the value of the state’s vegetable and grape crops combined.
Maia Szalavitz
Posted January 30, 2009 | 05:48 PM (EST)
There is a silver lining to this bleak economy: Abusive and ineffective “tough love” programs for teens are failing right and left.
In just the last few weeks, the notorious Tranquility Bay program in Jamaica, Spring Creek Lodge in Montana, and Pathway Family Center in Detroit and Ohio have all been shuttered.
Tranquility Bay was known for making kids kneel on concrete for days and using “restraint” so harsh that it broke bones. Both Tranquility Bay and Spring Creek Lodge were part of a network called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP or WWASPS)–and the group’s philosophy involves constant use of emotional attacks and humiliation in a rigid, structured day in order to break teens’ spirits.
Spring Creek was notorious for a frigid, small isolation room called “the Hobbit”–sometimes teens were left there for months.
From Pathway–which was descended from the infamously abusive Straight Inc.–I received two separate accounts of suicide attempts by girls which were not reported to their parents, and many stories of the usual attack therapy and humiliation. Unfortunately, neither WWASP nor Pathway is completely dead yet: WWASP still has centers operating in the US and abroad, and Pathway has sites in Indiana: Porter and Indianapolis.
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