William Benitez was one man who struggled for years with the emotional distress as a result of an addiction to heroin. He went to see doctors who tried to treat the symptoms his addiction, further diagnosing him and providing no real solution to his substance abuse problem. Under the care of doctors and psychiatrists, he never got better. As a result he ended up continuing to use drugs, eventually got arrested, and was looking at serving a lengthy sentence in Arizona State Penitentiary.
“After 19 years of trying,” said Benitez, “being probed and picked at by psychiatrists and psychologists, everybody was evaluating for me, telling me what my problems were. I noticed that all of us [addicts] were in the same boat. We didn’t know what the problem was.”
Looking for some type of help, Benetiz went to a prison guard who he asked what he should do. The guard replied to Willie; suggesting that he give him his prison gun and Willie go behind a building and end his life. Willie knew that giving up was not the answer. Determined to find a solution to his problem, Benetiz found a book in the prison library that, for the first time, gave him a way out of the mess he had made for himself. After reading the book and applying some of the principles in it, William Benetiz stopped using drugs for good.
Knowing how powerful this technology was, Willie set forth to help other people like himself. He started a program right in the walls of the prison where he began to work with other addicts, raising their abilities and as a result, helping them to get and stay off drugs permanently. Benetiz named the program Narconon, meaning “no drugs” or “narcotics none.”
More than 43 years later the Narconon drug and alcohol rehabilitation program still focuses on the same premise – raising the abilities of the individual to get and keep them off drugs permanently. Many other schools of thought identify addiction as a disease and often dually-diagnosing addicts with illnesses such as bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia and treating them with further drugs. The Narconon program takes a totally drug-free approach to handling substance abuse issues and stably achieves an over 70% success rate.
Narconon has freed more than 25,000 people from addiction just since 1995 and the program now has more than 120 centers in 44 different countries. One such center is the Narconon Freedom Treatment Center located in Albion, Michigan.
“The reason why the Narconon technology works,” says Ramsy Darwish, Director of Intake at Narconon Freedom Center, “is because we help the individual to become more able. We understand what a drug or alcohol addiction can do to a person and we want help the person to deal with the underlying issues of why they started using drugs and/or alcohol in the first place.”
