What has gone before:
In Part I we covered a lot of background, especially focusing on the phenomenon of Michael Quinones's "Midtown Group", an Alcoholics Anonymous ("AA") group which became infamous over public statements made to Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher regarding older members of the group passing around addicts-in-recovery like brainwashed-into-willingness sex-slaves.
In Part II, we covered more than a bit of the legal niceties of the interactions between the law-enforcement and legal/courts communities, and AA. We also pointed out an easily-believable mechanism detailing a sort of life-cycle whereby older addicts/alcoholics in recovery (or not) could "acquire" fresh new victims, or at least could attach themselves to the lives of impressionable young people with severe problems with drugs and/or alcohol.
In Part III we gave a bit more background on the psychology of addiction and wrote a fictional piece that could be all too true, about how sex addicts might manage to get themselves into control of AA/NA meetings.
Love and Espionage: I never could tell the difference, other than that I've never suspected household pets of espionage, but other than that they sure acted as if they at least liked me. I had a cat once that would literally follow me all around the neighborhood unless I locked it inside the house. This might have had something to do with me randomly feeding it pieces of bacon if it followed me around, so some might say that this wasn't love, it was just a feline victim of Skinnerian Operant Conditioning. But whether or not I had bacon, the cat followed me, for some years after I had stopped coaxing it to follow me, and tried convincing it to stay home. But as always, I digress.
While googling for "MidTown AA Sex Cult" I found some interesting information.
Earlier I had written a hypothetical and fictional depiction of how AA/NA meetings might become sexually exploitative. It seems that one AA member has actually seen this, and has blogged about it in detail:
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The men usually wore suits and ties and the women dressed up to and were instructed to go out and meet newcomers. The way they approached newcomers was akin to a used car salesman. Was some of there concern genuine? Perhaps. I usually felt there was some ulterior motive involved like a person's desire to control another person and emulate their sponsor all in the name of "unconditional love" of course. Then again, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge nutjobs told the Cambodian people the same thing as they tried to turn their beloved country into a collectivist agrarian society. [...]
I seemed to be more interested in the downtrodden looking ones from the treatment centers and would talk to them about things like football and the championship ring I was wearing. Why shove a bunch of useless cliches down their throat that they were already hearing from the camp commandants when relatable subjects like sports seemed to put them at ease? That was my theory and still is. But my "message" was not good enough according to some of these image hogs. These minions need to call us every night and be at our every whim whenever we demand it. [...]
[...] So [my sponsor] tells me that I have an assigned time to call him once a week just to let him know how I was doing with my program. As far as I was concerned, my program was to do the 12 steps and continue to live my life in an ethical manner in all of my affairs. I guess that wasn't good enough for [my sponsor] since I needed to be involved in every form of AA service known to man and have AA be the centerpiece of my existence. I went on a few service calls with him at first, but I thought a day at the gym pumping iron was more beneficial since I was still playing football at the semipro level. But according to [my sponsor], that wasn't helping the alcoholic receive "the message."[...]
[...] I would see some leecherous men try to fawn themselves over a lot of the newcomer women while telling their "pigeons" that it was forbidden for them to do so. One newcomer woman I remember fondly was named Amber. She was a very beautiful and well figured young lady. Anyway, a lot of the males in our group were seeking attention from her. She usually gave them a smile and said hi but that was usually the extent of her friendliness towards them. Anyway, she comes up to me one day and asks me "are all of the men like this in AA." I told her no and asked her why she asked me. She told me she felt that some of these men had ulterior motives. [...]
This blogger isn't alone. For example, one May Clancy declares that Midtown Group is a Cult:
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Former members like Lauren Dougherty have been more outspoken. She said she attended Midtown meetings 11 years ago as a teenager and was assigned an AA sponsor rather than choosing one. Dougherty said that members told her to cut off friends from her old life, even those who did not drink, and to get an "AA boyfriend." The final straw was when she was pressured to have sex with other members, she said.
Kristen, 26, another former Midtown member, said her sponsor cursed her out when she announced that she was leaving the group. "You will drink," Kristen recalled the older man telling her. "You will fail. You will die."
"I was so tired of being afraid all the time," she said. "I'd rather die than be in Midtown again."
Local treatment programs have also become wary of Midtown. "They start isolating people, getting them away from any feedback other than their own ... Only go to their meetings, only talk to people in their group," said Jay Eubanks, an administrator with the Kolman Clinics. "If you're seeing a therapist, stop seeing a therapist; if you're in treatment, stop going to treatment; if you're being medicated, stop seeing a doctor."
Concerns about Midtown have caused some therapists to sour on AA in general. "At this point, I am very apprehensive about referring any clients to AA even if they are severe alcoholics," said clinical psychologist Ellen Dye of Rockville, Md. "I think that it is essential that this group be eliminated from AA so that my colleagues and I can feel safe making these referrals again ... We're all saying, 'Go to AA, go to AA,' and we may be sending people into this terrible situation and not realizing it."
Midtown still has defenders in the addiction community, however. "I know people in the group that have long-term sobriety and are doing great," said Beth Kane-Davison, director of the addiction program at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. For some, she said, "Midtown has been a real godsend. It's taken them in and structured their activities, and filled the void left because they're not using anymore." Still, Davidson has stopped referring patients to Midtown because of concerns about the program.
[ ... ]
The real stunner is that quote from clinical psychologist Ellen Dye of Rockville: "...We're all saying, 'Go to AA, go to AA,' and we may be sending people into this terrible situation and not realizing it."
One webpage has a load of links about Midtown Group. It's located about halfway down the page, but all of those links are worth following and reading. This isn't all just my own unsupported opinion. Midtown Group was particularly cult-like in its efforts to get members to cut all ties with the outside world, with friends and family, and even with their physicians!
And as I have mentioned before, it's not unusual for people fighting one addiction to switch to another, in this case, sex. And as I have mentioned before, if you want to see addicts get really mean, get between them and what they need.
How long has Midtown (and evidently other AA/NA groups) been doing this? It's not entirely clear, but cults and cult-like organizations and faiths are as old as humanity. Look back in time to Charles Manson or Reverend Jim Jones (think Guyana Kool-Aid).
The thing is, you could be in a "drug free sex cult" for several decades and nobody much would notice... except perhaps for your children.
"Sex Gang Children" is the name of an English Goth rock band, who took their name from a novel by William Burroughs, a rather strange and influential "Beat Generation" genius and notable international dope fiend.
I never did like the band all that much, but they sure picked a great name.
It has been widely observed that the children of addicts are often possessed of a curious quality, having the character of, as it were, little adults. They find themselves in the position of having to be responsible for their parents, rather than the normal order of things where their parents are responsible for them. We've all heard the stories of the kids who come home from school and pour their alcoholic mom or dad into bed, or make sure they get up in time to go to work.
For children, an addicted or alcoholic parent often find their greatest strength is teamwork. Indeed, if the parent is abusive, it may be lifesaving for the kids to act as a group to defend each other as well as themselves.
Yet very frequently this doesn't go that far. Effectively, the kids may find themselves being co-dependents, and engaging in Enabling behavior. In past times, children might go to the store to pick up a bottle of booze for an elder who was too drunk to walk or be served. In the modern day, teenagers might be able to procure contraband for parents when the parents could not, due to the high level of drug availability in schools. But one has to wonder... what sort of enabling behavior would we see in the codependent children of sex addicts?
I shudder to think.
But you will want to read all of the comments in the Marc Fisher blog report on Midtown's founder's death.
More to come?
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