The Narconon Program Description
The
program steps are entirely drug-free; that is, the Narconon program
does not use drugs or medications to solve the problems caused by
drugs, but does use nutrition and nutritional supplements as an
important component of its delivery. Thus the program is neither a
psychiatric nor medical, but a social education model of drug rehabilitation.
Persons
enrolling in the program must receive full medical physicals, an M.D.'s
permission to do the program and periodic medical review as
individually needed. However, Narconon clients are not considered or
treated as "patients" but as "students" who are learning to regain
control of their lives. This is an important distinction. A Narconon
student does not enroll to recover from an illness; he enrolls to learn
something that he doesn't already know. He addresses the disability
caused by drug use with new abilities, new skills for life.
Narconon
staff prepare graduating students with re-entry programs to follow as
they re-start their lives on a new foot. But the full Narconon program
is intended to produce graduates who can stand on their own feet and
live drug-free, ethical lives thereafter. A Narconon graduate does not
go to weekly meetings for months after completion, nor does he describe
himself as "recovering."
A
student who has graduated from the Narconon program has recovered. He
or she has obtained a new orientation in life. The premise of the
Narconon model is that a former addict can achieve a new life. This
goal applies (and is routinely achieved) whether the program is
delivered in a free-standing center, daily after work, or even in
prison.
Once
well, if he uses the tools he has practiced and learned to use at a
Narconon center, a Narconon graduate can stay well. This is not
theoretical. There are three decades of graduates who will swear by it.
If
graduates do run into serious difficulties, they return to their
Narconon center where they inevitably find a specific part of the
program that they earlier failed to fully understand and therefore
could not apply in the travails of daily life. But the majority get it
the first time through.
The
Narconon program takes four to six months. During this time, some might
consider the Narconon program a "therapeutic community", but it would
be more appropriate to say that Narconon clients are going "back to
school" this time to get real tools for real life.
· Who has completed the Narconon program;
· Who knows he is, in fact, capable of living a drug-free life thereafter;
· Who has improved his or her ability to learn and thus can accept new ideas on how to change life for the better;
· Who has personally absorbed the fundamentals of ethics and morality well enough that he or she can be productive and contributive to society and will have no further troubles with the justice system;
· Who knows how to solve the problems of life in a rational manner to the best of his ability, without the use of mind-altering drugs.
Each
narconon program graduate is expected, no matter the severity of his or
her earlier life experience, to achieve and to live a stably drug-free,
ethical life, one for one.
There
is no such thing as a "victim" in the Narconon program way of thinking.
Even if life has dealt one a bad hand of cards, the road out is through
personal recognition of responsibility for one's own condition.
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