By Marvin Olasky,* Reprinted from World magazine
October 1995 – In front of the Alamo on July 17, approximately 325 people stood in the midday sun for two hours to sing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and listen to heated, socially conservative rhetoric. Typical of the placards they held aloft were: “Because of Jesus I Am No Longer a Debt to the State of Texas” and “Once a Burden, Now a Taxpayer.” The mostly Hispanic and black crowd was there to defend a highly successful drug treatment program called Teen Challenge of South Texas. But the resolve of state bureaucrats did not melt in the 95 degree heat. They stuck to their demand that the program that has produced such success close down or face fines of up to $4,000 a day plus jail time.
For three decades, conform-or-die bureaucrats have told drug treatment groups to rely on licensed professional counselors with theoretical training, rather than the ex-addicts and reformed alcoholics who lead many of the 130 chapters of Teen Challenge around the country. (There are 300 more abroad.) In the past, religion-based groups facing state pressure have either buckled or lowered their profiles. But Teen Challenge is holding firm.
‘THIS CHANGES LIVES’
Teen Challenge may lack counselors with fancy degrees, but it has the advantage of a national quality-control system, with local members required by the organization to conform to 98 standards dealing with everything from financial accountability to cleanliness; the San Antonio group recently passed inspection. It also has the backing of community leaders such as Sidney Watson, pastor of the First Assembly of God Church in San Antonio and chairman of the local Teen Challenge board, who says, “I’ve referred people to secular counseling. But that usually accomplishes only a drying-out. This changes lives.”
Unfortunately, the Texas bureaucracy cares only about means, not ends. “Outcomes and outputs are not an issue for us,” says John Cooke, Assistant Deputy Director, Program Compliance Division, Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. And Teen Challenge’s emphasis since its founding in 1958 on fighting addiction through religious conversion means, according to Texas officials, that “no substance abuse treatment, as defined by TCADA standards, is given.”
There’s also no denying that state inspectors get the willies when they observe Teen Challenge’s paper-minimalism (violation of standard 116a, which requires each personnel fi le to have nine specific sets of records, and standard 144b, which requires a formal, six-step client grievance procedure), and make-do tendencies in the absence of government funding (violation of standard 353h: Stairs are supposed to have uniform “non-slip surfaces,” yet on Teen Challenge stairs “Some carpeting edges need repair”).
But compare all that with the records of lives changed. At the Alamo rally the brief testimonies kept coming. One grizzled man said, “I was a junkie in the streets of San Antonio for 13 years. I was a thief. I went to the government programs. They didn’t work. Jesus set me free.” A pretty woman in her 20s recalled: “When I was a hooker the Christians would come and talk to me. I’d blow smoke in their faces, but I was sort of listening. Then I came and learned.” A brawny guy held a Bible and told how, when he was 14, “My dad said, ‘I’m gonna show you how to be a man,’ so he tied my arm and showed me how to shoot heroin. Then we were in the pen and he’d point me out to other prisoners and say, ‘That’s my boy, he’s just like me.’ Now we both know Jesus, and we’re clean.”
Teen Challenge also can point to statistical studies that over the years have shown long-term cure rates of 67% to 85% among program graduates. A government study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 1975 found that “involvement with Teen Challenge is associated with dramatic changes in behavior for a substantial number of heroin users.” A Department of Health and Human Services review panelist during the 1980s found Teen Challenge to be the best of 300 anti-addiction programs that he examined, and also the least expensive. A University of Tennessee analysis in 1994 concluded that “A dramatic change in attitude and behavior cannot be denied.”
These results are what’s important to the Rev. James Heurich, executive director of Teen Challenge of South Texas, and a drug addict and alcoholic until a Teen Challenge program in 1973 changed his life. “The state says our kitchen has problems, but the local health department has given us a good rating,” he said, showing the document that proves it. “The state says some blankets were in the way of a fi re exit door, but the county fi re inspector says we’re safe” – and another document fl ew across his crowded desktop.
“We don’t take government grants so we don’t have a whole lot of money,” Mr. Heurich continued, but “we can fi x facilities problems.” What Teen Challenge can not afford to do is to hire chemical-dependency counselors who will fight addiction the government’s way, nor would it want to. “We use a Christ-based approach here,” Mr. Heurich – his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened – said, “and it works. Their programs do not. Why don’t they look at our success rate?”
A 90-minute drive north and a world away sat TCADA’s Mr. Cooke. His desk, in a 12-story building near the state capitol in Austin, had on it two neat piles of paper and a business-card holder. The business cards showed his academic accomplishments: Ph.D and LCDC (licensed chemical dependency counselor). Wearing a pinstriped suit with a starched shirt and cuffl inks, Mr. Cooke visibly bristled when asked about the success of Teen Challenge in getting people off drugs and alcohol. “If they want to call it treatment, then state law says they must be licensed,” he insisted. “All they have to do is abide by our standards.”
What if Teen Challenge, which treats clients for $25 per day while fancy programs cost $600 per day, cannot afford or does not care to have licensed counselors? “That’s what you take on when you open a center,” Mr. Cooke said. “You have to take a look at what your overhead is. If you decide you can’t afford lights, do you open the center and burn candles?” On June 29 he sent a blunt letter to Teen Challenge of San Antonio stating that if it stays open, it will be committing a Class A misdemeanor (punishable by up to a year in jail, a fine of up to $4,000, or both, with each day Teen Challenge is open counting as a separate offense).
BEYOND WILLPOWER
Mr. Heurich says he will not close down, and notes that many of the 23 men living at the Teen Challenge facility have not been helped by state-favored programs. Their experience is like that of Dyrickeyo Johnson, 26, who was in and out of state-approved, expensive centers such as a Charter Hospital in-patient
facility near Dallas: “Oh, it was a nice place. You had your own room.... You were told to focus on your mind and your willpower. The only problem is that a drug addict doesn’t have any willpower.” Mr. Johnson returned to crack cocaine and alcohol following his stay at Charter, but then ended up at Teen Challenge. He’s been clean for the three years since he graduated from the program and is now married, with two small children.
The hardest-hitting speaker at the July rally was Bob Woodson, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and chaired Newt Gingrich’s Grassroots Alternatives for Public Policy Task Force earlier this year. “The authors of the Contract With America talked to us all about the devolution of authority, and focusing on programs that work and really help people,” Mr. Woodson roared. “What the authors of the Contract didn’t realize is that its principles of devolution and welfare reform would stir up a hornet’s nest within the poverty industry, and that their main target would be the unwanted competition from effective grassroots initiatives.... We need the Republican leadership to speak up, now.” 
* Marvin Olasky is a senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation in Washington, D.C., and is editor of World, a weekly news magazine.
