Narconon: an introduction

Narconon is a rehabilitation programme for addicts run on a system devised by Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Experts say it is based on junk science and potentially lethal.

The way Narconon tells it, their addiction treatment programme is about as good as it gets.

Studies have shown that the programme has a 75-percent success rate, the organisation claims on its website.¹ “This is one of the best success rates in the field of addiction recovery,” it says.²

Narconon puts its success down to the unique system it follows, which was developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

“Recovery is possible,” says the website. “Since 1966, thousands have achieved productive, drug-free lives through doing the Narconon rehab program.”³

But if all this seems too good to be true, that's because it is, say the critics.

A 2008 study, commisioned by the Norwegian Health Directorate, conducted a view of the relevant scientific literature.

It looked at six studies on the effectiveness of the Narconon programme before reporting back. It concluded:

There is currently no reliable evidence for the effectiveness of Narconon as a primary or secondary drug prevention program. To the extent our extensive database search could determine, no randomized controlled trials about the program have been conducted...⁴

In the 2004, two leading critics of Scientology, Chris Owen and Dave Touretzky reached a similar conclusion.

The research in Narconon Exposed also went over the lies that Hubbard had told about his own scientific credentials as detailed by previous writers.⁵

After an exhaustive examination of the evidence advanced by Narconon in support of its claims to scientific validity and effectiveness, Owen and Touretzky concluded that their claims of incredible success rates were just that: incredible; unbelievable. They wrote:

It has to be said, in fairness, that the paucity of the data means that one can no more reliably say that Narconon does not work than that it does. There is simply too little evidence to tell either way.

What can comfortably be said, though, is that Narconon's claims of very high success levels are wholly unreliable; a close examination of what evidence does exist shows that it has invariably been misquoted, misused or quite simply lied about by Narconon. In short, its claimed success rates are not credible and should not be believed.⁶

Having it both ways

Narconon describes itself as a non-profit, secular drug outreach programme, and while mentioning Hubbard in its literature, plays down any links to Scientology. You will be hard put to find a direct reference to Scientology on its website: Hubbard is described simply as “an author and humanitarian”.⁷

Scientology, on its websites, vaunts Narconon as “the most effective drug rehabilitation and prevention programme on Earth”. But it is careful to describe it as an outreach programme that it sponsors, rather than an integral part of its operations.⁸

For a number of reasons however, the claim that Scientology and Narconon are entirely distinct entities – that there are no lines of control from the former to the latter – is difficult to sustain.

First, even a cursory look at the components of the Narconon programme reveals a striking similarity to Scientology's own courses.

Narconon, for example, runs something called the “New Life Detoxification Program”, which it describes as a “combination of exercise, induced sweating in a sauna, and nutritional supplements”.

This programme, Narconon claims, reduces or eliminates drug or alcohol cravings and the symptoms associated with addiction, such as depression, irritability and fatigue.⁹

But to all intents and purposes, this programme is the same as the one run inside Scientology itself, where it is known as the Purification Rundown.

During the 2009 fraud trial of several leading Scientologists and two Scientology organisations in France, the Paris court examined the Purification Rundown in some detail.

There, Scientology insisted it was a religious ritual.

“This is nothing to do with medicine,” one Scientologist told the court. “We are curing nothing. It is a purification rite, in which we have no pretensions towards curing anything.”¹⁰

Scientology's lawyers brought in a former emeritus professor at Paris's Sorbonne University, ethnologist and anthropologist Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, to testify as to the Rundown's religious credentials.¹¹

But they also flew in Dr David Root from the United States to support claims as to the Rundown's efficacy as a detoxification programme. Root has appeared on the Narconon website to endorse the programme.¹²

In its judgment, the court noted what it said was a blurring of the lines between the religious and the scientific and concluded that Scientology was trying to have it both ways.

For while the defendants may have described the Rundown in spiritual terms, Scientology's own literature used pseudo-scientific terms to vaunt the programme's efficacy, it noted.¹³

Three defendants were convicted on charges relating to the illegal practice of pharmacy for the sale and distribution of what experts said were the dangerously high doses of vitamins used in the Rundown.¹⁴

'Hypnotic' training routines

Another feature of Narconon is a course which, it claims, gets subjects “into better communication with others and with the environment...

“Each is a specific drill on the parts of communication and how to get oneself understood and how to communicate with others.”¹⁵

Again, the Communication Course is also a key element of Scientology: the training routines, or TRs, that comprise the course are often offered to relatively new recruits to the movement.

The TRs are mainly two-person exercises: in one, you have to stare at each other without talking or moving (TR 0: confronting). In another one person shouts abuse at the other while the other tries not to react in any way: then the roles are reversed (TR 0: Bullbait).

In another, you command an inanimate object, such as an ash tray, to move, basically by shouting at it (TR 8: Tone 40 on an Object).

Former member Marc Headley, one of the movement's leading critics, has described how he did this exercise with celebrity member Tom Cruise. The details are sketchy in Headley's book, Blown for Good, but Tony Ortega coaxed some more details from him for a piece for his Village Voice blog.

“You tell the ashtray, 'Sit in that chair',” Marc told him.

“Then you actually go over and put the ashtray on the chair. Then you tell the ashtray, 'Thank you.' Then you do the same thing with the bottle, and the book. And you do this for hours and hours.”

In God's name, why? Ortega asked.

“It was supposed to rehabilitate your ability to control things. And to be controlled,” Headley told him.¹⁶

Scientologists call this kind of shouting a Tone 40 command.

Headley is not alone among former members in arguing that participants are learning not just to give orders, but to take them too. Cult expert Steven Hassan, author of Combatting Cult Mind Control, has called these training routines the most overt use of hypnosis by any cult.

The fact is that most if not all of the Narconon materials derive from Scientology, according to sociologist Professor Stephen Kent of the University of Alberta, Canada – arguably the leading academic expert on Scientology.

“I'd say that L. Ron Hubbard included in Scientology techniques, principles, morals etc, that transferred... directly into the Narcon programme,” he said in a recent court deposition.¹⁷

A final point on the link between Scientology and Narconon: the movement's own leader, David Miscavige, underlined the connection in a famous 1993 speech.

This was when Miscavige announced that the movement's battle with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service was over – and that Scientology had won tax-exempt status as a church. He made much of the fact that the “non-religious groups” that Scientology sponsored “which use LRH's tech to improve society” were also covered.

“All such groups have been recognized as fully tax exempt!” he declared. And Narconon, of course, was among them.¹⁸

Junk science

Over the years, the science behind the Narconon programme has been harshly criticised by several experts.

In 1989, when Narconon set up a 75-bed facility on Indian territory in Chilocco, Oklahama, editor of the local paper Newkirk Herald Journal started investigating. He asked Mark Palmer, a local medical doctor with some experience with other rehabilitation programmes, for his view.¹⁹

He offered the following comments after reviewing Narconon's official literature:

The material is full of generalizations that have no substantiation in fact. There are internal inconsistent statements. There is no documentation.

The Purification Rundown is somewhat patterned after many reputable detoxification programs in which diet, exercise, education and behavioral modification are used. But due to the above mentioned deficiencies as well as several outright untruths, I think that it is fair to say that the Purification Rundown is without merit.²⁰

The Journal also asked Bruce A. Roe, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Oklahoma University to review the official literature on Narconon. Roe did not mince his words either.

Overall the program proposed by Mr. Hubbard is pure unadulterated "cow pies". It is filled with some scientific truth but mainly is illogical and the conclusions drawn by Mr. Hubbard are without any basis in scientific fact.²¹

Nor has the criticism come exclusively from the United States.

In Sweden, the National Board of Health and Welfare asked Professor of Pharmacology Folke Sjoqvist to give his view of the science behind the Narconon programme.

Reporting back in November 1996, he concluded:

[T]here is no documentation to show that the Hubbard method of detoxification from drug abuse conforms to scientific standards and medical experience.

On the contrary, one may from a pharmacological point of view strongly question the idea of using enforced sweating to expel drugs from the body.

The risks and side effects of the treatment method have also not been evaluated in a serious way. Methods that have not been evaluated and/or rest on incorrect theories should not be used in Swedish medical care.

Medical doctors are to prescribe vitamins in the doses recommended...²²

The professor joined an already extensive list of qualified professionals who have dismissed the supposedly scientific basis of Hubbard's detoxification programme and warned of its potential dangers.²³

But perhaps the most damning single document on Narconon was drawn up by the Oklahoma state investigators.

The Oklahoma report

As concern grew over the unlicensed activities of the Narconon Chilocco New Life Center – thanks in large part to the investigative series run by the Newkirk Herald Journal – state officials finally acted.

They asked for their specialists to investigate and in 1991 the state Board of Mental Health delivered its findings. The board's “Findings of Fact” amounted to a damning indictment of the facility.²⁴

It was scathing about the science underpinning the sauna-vitamins-exercise detoxification programme, rejecting Hubbard's claim that drugs could be sweated out of one's body.

“[T]here is no scientific basis for the technique,” it said.

It was not impressed either by the one-size-fits-all approach to treating addicts. "No scientific evidence was produced to show that all drug addictions are properly treated in the same manner."

The report also expressed concern about the massive doses of vitamins and minerals handed out during treatment: according to “the more credible medical evidence,” this was potentially dangerous, it said.

Worse still, it noted, the programme also "exposes its patients to the risk of delayed withdrawal phenomena such as seizures, delirium and/or hallucinations." It was all the more dangerous because Narconon used unqualified, non-medical staff who might miss or misinterpret the symptoms, it added.

“Narconon employs staff inadequately educated and trained in the care and treatment of drug and alcohol abuse clients,” it said. “Such a practice endangers the safety, health and/or the physical or mental well being of the clients of Narconon.”²⁵

The dangers of having medically unqualified staff imposing a one-size-fits-all programme were illustrated when inspectors visited the Chilocco centre. A student, the report noted, “...was found with a potentially dangerous low level of potassium which could lead to cramps, (muscular, skeletal problems) and cardiac arrhythmia.”²⁶

Perhaps unaware of Hubbard's views on psychiatry, the panel put its finger on another weakness of the Narconon programme: it failed to take into account the well-established link between drug abuse and psychiatric disorders.

“[A] chemical dependency disorder may co-exist with or be secondary to a specific psychiatric illness, such as schizophrenia or major depression, which should be treated by established psychiatric procedures,” it said.

This ignorance – or phobia – of the psychiatric dimension, had serious implications, it noted. They had seen evidence that some clients had been taken off psychiatric medication without regard for the consequences.

Whether they knew it or not however, they were knocking on the wrong door. The problem here was that for Hubbard psychiatry is the root of all evil – and that dogma had been imported wholesale not just into Scientology, but into Narconon.

The report expressed unease at Narconon's practice of hiring former students of the programme to work there straight after having completed it. There should be a delay between graduation from the programme and recruitment “...to ensure sobriety and to avoid putting patients in contact with addicts who are not fully recovered,” it said.

It expressed concern too about the amount of time Narconon devoted to activities unrelated to drug and alcohol abuse treatment or addiction issues. Apparently they did not see the value of shouting at ash trays.

The report also had a problem with the vague objectives set for the students – to have a clear mind, for example. How was one supposed to measure success here? “This objective is essentially meaningless,” the report noted.

“In order for a bonafide drug treatment plan to be effective it is essential to have individualized measured objectives which Narconon's treatment plan lacks.”²⁷

The inspectors were uneasy too, about the use of “touch assists”, a kind of laying on of hands practised by Scientologists to help ease physical pain.

This was hardly appropriate in the context of vulnerable individuals in a rehab environment, it argued: “An accepted standard in such programs is for the patients to keep their hands to themselves.”²⁸

Summing up, the inspectors said that Narconon had failed to show that its system was either safe or effective: in fact, it said, the evidence pointed the other way.

Their conclusion, in summary, was that the treatment offered by Narconon Chilocco was not just ineffective; it was also medically unsafe.

But while the state authorities denied Narconon its certification, the centre nevertheless managed to stay open.

Since it was on Indian territory, the state found it could not actually force it to close.

In 1992, Narconon won an injunction from the Oklahoma State Supreme Court to stay a lower court order that had backed the state's bid to shut Narconon down. This allowed it to keep operating while it appealed that lower court ruling.²⁹

Narconon eventually found a way to stay open by winning accreditation from a private agency rather than the state – the Arizona-based Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities. And this allowed it to seek – and win – exemption from state accreditation from the Oklahoma state authorities.

By the end of 1992, despite the damning report from its own medical experts, the state authorities appeared to have thrown in the towel and granted it exemption from accreditation.

It was a decision that was to come back and haunt them.³⁰

Next in this series: Narconon is 'Casualty Contact'

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1You can find this claim on the Narconon International website.

2From the Narconon FAQ at its website.

3“Drug Rehab”: from the Narconon website.

4“A brief summary and evaluation evidence base for Narconon prevention intervention”, a 2008 report commissioned by the Norwegian Health Directorate. The quote is from page 16 of the document.

5See in particular the section: “L. Ron Hubbard and Medicine” at the Narconon Exposed website. The definitive works covering Hubbard's fictitious credentials remain Jon Atack's A Piece of Blue Sky and Russell Miller's Bare-Face Messiah.

6From “Does Narconon Work?” at the Narconon Exposed website.

7“About the Narconon program”.

8Narconon video at the Scientology video channel: about a minute and 15 seconds in. Scientology also claims that Narconon's success rate “is not merely the world’s highest, it is four times better than international averages.” But then as Hubbard once wrote: what's true is what is true for you.

9“Drug Detox Program: The Narconon New Life Detoxification Program” at the Narconon website. It also helps the participants think more clearly, improves memory and attention span, boosts energy and increases one's sense of well-being, the movement claims.

10This was Scientologist Eric Roux: not a defendant, but representing the Paris Celebrity Centre, one of two Scientology organisations targetted by prosecutors. The Purification Rundown was about spiritual liberation, he said (“The Celebrity Centre II”).

11One defendant described the Rundown to investigators as a religious ritual comparable to fasting in other religions '“Purification Rundown: defendants”); another specifically compared it to the Muslim period of fasting over Ramadam (“Alain Rosenberg I”). Scientology's lawyers even tried to argue that prosecuting Scientologists over the Rundown violated their right to religious freedom. See for example, “...for the defendant Jacquart”

12"Scientific and Research Studies of the Narconon Program”.

13Page 88 of the original 2009 judgment.

14These convictions were confirmed on appeal in February 2012.

15“Narconon Drug Rehab Program: we get results”, at the Narconon website.

16From “'Tom Cruise Told Me to Talk to a Bottle': Life at Scientology's Secret Headquarters”, at Tony Ortega's Village Voice blog. Ortega now runs his blog at Ortega Underground, having quit as editor-in-chief at Village Voice to write a book on Scientology.

17Deposition of Dr Stephen Kent in the lawsuit over the death of Patrick Desmond. The quote is from pp124-125. More on the Desmond lawsuit in future posts.

18 See Chris Owen’s transcript and analysis of Miscavige's 9th anniversary event of the International Association of Scientologists on October 8, 1993. Tony Ortega, at his new blog, Ortega Underground, recently posted old footage from one of David Miscavige's rare interviews. Back in 1992 on Nightline, he was singing Narconon's praises and effectively claiming their supposed achievements as Scientology's.

This sense that Scientology is trying to have it both ways, enjoy the tax benefits of both its spiritual status and its supposedly scientific method, is nicely summed by one of the movement's own terms: “religious technology”.

Scientology even has something called the Religious Technology Center, which holds all the trademarks of the “powerful technologies of Dianetics and Scientology” and ensures that the “tech” is correctly applied. Miscavige is its chairman. See the RTC website.

19You can find the full Herald Journal investigation, which unfolded over several years from 1989, over at Mark Bunker's xenutv.com website here.

20Dr. Palmer's letter, from the Source Documents section at Narconon Exposed.

21Professor Roe's letter, from the Source Documents section at Narconon Exposed.

22“Expert advice on Narconon given to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare” translated from the Swedish by Catarina Pamnell. Of course it was the prescribing of massive doses of vitamins by unqualified people during the Purification Rundown that led to some of the 2009 Paris convictions.

23For a useful summary of some of the more damning comments from those better placed than Hubbard ever was to comment on the science, see source documents listed at the Critical Evaluations section of Narconon Exposed.

24“Findings of Fact regarding the Narconon-Chilocco Application For Certification by theBoard of Mental Health, State of Oklahoma” from the Source Documents section at Narconon Exposed.

25The report also referred to what it said was “substantial medical literature” suggesting that sauna therapy could pose a significant risk to intravenous heroin addicts. The problem was that “such drug use may impair normal physiological response and problems associated with high temperature saunas which could be detected.”

26As we shall in future posts, the issue of unqualified staff is one that has become an important factor in at least one lawsuit against Narconon.

27Acquiring a clear mind may have been meaningless for the authors of the “Findings of Fact”: but attaining the state of Clear is a prized objective for any practising Scientologist (regardless of whether it actually means anything or not). Among the definitions Scientology offers for a Clear – someone who has reached the state of Clear – is “...a being who no longer has his own reactive mind (another Scientology term), the hidden source of irrational behavior, unreasonable fears, upsets and insecurities.” So that's clear then.

As we shall see in future posts, another parallel between Scientology and Narconon is the use of “success stories” in which people testify to their “wins” after completing a course. This, presumably, was one way Narconon measured the successful completion of the vague course objectives to which the experts were objecting.

28It is worth quoting in full the report's reservations about the use of “touch assists”.

“Touch assists involve massages between patients in rooms by themselves. Narconon has both male and female patients who are involved in the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.

“This practice of touch assists could likely lead to improper sexual contact between drug addicts or alcoholics in the process of recovery. An accepted standard in such programs is for the patients to keep their hands to themselves.

“The practice of touch assists between male and female patients who are recovering drug addicts or alcoholics in private rooms renders the program unsafe in this respect.”

There have been a number of allegations of rape at Narconon centres.

29 “Court Sets Aside Order; Narconon to Stay Open”by Michael McNutt, June 17, 1992, The Oklahoman.

30 “Kaws Defy Tonkawas In Narconon Approval” by Michael McNutt, July 10, 1992, The Oklahoman; “Narconon Gets State Mental Health Exemption” by Michael McNutt in The Oklahoman, August 15, 1992; and “Narconon gets Licence” in the news-in-brief section, November 1, 1992, The Oklahoman. See also the background information contained in Oklahoma State Representative Brian Renegar's August 24, 2012 statement, “Renegar to Revisit Rehabilitation Certification in Light of Deaths at Narconon”.

And Jenna makes three...

Jenna Hill, the niece of Scientology leader David Miscavige, is to publish a memoir of her life in the movement. If it's anything like the devastating open letter she wrote to the movement in 2008, they need to batten down the hatches.

And Jenna makes three...

First there was the book project on Scientology announced by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Lawrence Wright following his devastating New Yorker article on celebrity defector the film maker Paul Haggis.

Then Tony Ortega, who towards the end of his five-and-a-half years stint as editor-in-chief at Village Voice wrote a column on Scientology that became essential reading for anyone following the movement, quit his day job.

He too is off to write a book on Scientology, with a trailerload of goodwill from the ex-member community – and a full contacts book.

But now it seems that Jenna Hill, the niece of the movement's current leader, is going to beat them both to print.

Hill is getting ready to publish a memoir of her childhood inside Scientology – and how she rebuilt her life as an adult outside the movement.

Beyond Belief: My Life in and out of Scientology, published by William Morrow, is due out in January next year.

Jenna first went public about Scientology in January 2008, when Scientology was busy trying to rubbish Andrew Morton's recently released Tom Cruise: an Unauthorized Biography.

Jenna took exception to a 15-page denunciation of Morton's book in which Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw dismissed it as a “bigoted defamatory assault replete with lies”.

One thing in particular outraged her.

Pouw had categorically denied that the movement forced members to break off contact with relatives considered hostile to the movement.

This practice, known as disconnetion, means former members who have either quit or been cast out of Scientology lose all contact with loved ones still inside.

Jenna knew from personal experience that this particular claim was a lie.

As you well know, my parents officially left the Church when I was 16 in 2000, she wrote to Pouw in a January 2008 open letter.

I, having been separated from them at the age of 12 and thoroughly engulfed in the beliefs of the Church since birth decided not to go with them.

Not only was I not allowed to speak to them, I was not allowed to answer a phone for well over a year, in case it was them calling me.

Her letters were intercepted, she wrote, and passed on to senior executives.¹

Only after they had seen the letters and decided it was ok for me to see them would I receive some of them while sitting in a board room while they watched me read them and asked me to comment on them, she continued.

Between the ages of 16 and 22, she wrote, she was allowed to visit her parents once a year, for a maximum of three to four days – even that was only after her parents had threatened legal action if Scientology tried to prevent it.

Even then, she wrote, she had to submit to a “Security Check Confessional” before the visit and immediately after her return.

That involved being questioned about if she intended leaving Scientology; and whether her parents had said anything bad about the movement.

During these interrogations, she was hooked up to one of Scientology's electropsychometer, or e-meters, the deviced used in the movement's auditing, or therapy sessions.

On this occasion though, they served a different purpose. Hill described the e-meter as “similar to a lie detector”.

This happened every time she visited her parents, she wrote.

Disconnection is compulsory

Jenna went on to give examples of how Scientology's leader David Miscavige, her own uncle, had effectively torn his own family apart by enforcing the disconnection policy.

For as per policy, relatives still inside the movement had announced they wanted no further contact with those who had left – regardless of whether they were openly critical of Scientology.

As I have explained in detail elsewhere on this site, disconnection is not the freely taken choice of any Scientologist: it is a compulsory measure taken against anyone the movement designates as beyond the pale.

One sentence from Introduction to Scientology Ethics, by the movement's founder L. Ron Hubbard, spells it out. For among the high crimes Hubbard listed for which one can be declared a Suppressive Person and cast out of the movement, is the following offence:

Failure to handle or disavow and disconnect from a person demonstrably guilty of suppressive acts.²

Hubbard’s disconnection policy, which he first introduced in 1965, was so controversial and attracted so much negative publicity that he cancelled it in 1968.

But it was gradually reintroduced in the 1970s and was fully reinstated in a September 10 1983 policy letter.³

In her 2008 open letter Jenna went on: I can name at least five friends off the top of my head [whose] family members are not allowed to speak to them without being themselves ousted from the Church and prevented from communicating with other members of their family and even their children still involved in the Church lest THEY too be ousted!

These were people who could not speak to their own children because they had quit Scientology, she wrote.

This is a widespread practice … these people's families are crying every day because they can't speak to their children who did nothing but leave the Church of their own free will.

Jenna closed her letter with a suggestion – an appeal, almost – that the movement divert its energy from attacking its perceived enemies to repairing the damage wrought by disconnection – starting with the family of David Miscavige himself.

Hell, if Scientology can't keep his family together – then why on earth should anyone believe the Church helps bring families together!

It was powerful stuff and at the time emboldened a lot of other Scientologists who were still hesitating to speak out – but it had no discernible effect on Scientology policy.

For as the relevant news groups and Internet forums confirm on an almost daily basis, Scientology enforces disconnection with the same ruthless efficiency as it ever did.

Ex Scientology Kids

Jenna was one of those who in 2008, along with Astra Woodcraft and Kendra Wiseman, set up the Ex-Scientology Kids website (“I was born. I grew up. I escaped.”)

ESK has influenced a range of people, including ex-members who went on to become one of the movement's leading critics.

Jeff Hawkins spent 35 years inside Scientology – most of his adult life – before joining the recent wave of defectors and rebuilding his life.

He credits ESK for having finally convinced him to speak out.

As he put it at his blog, Counterfeit Dreams: “You could say they shamed me into it.

“If they were willing to put their names on the line and face whatever Scientology dished out, then what was I afraid of?”⁴

ESK attracted an eclectic mix of visitors including second-generation members who, like the site's founders, had since quit the movement.

Many of them took the time to tell their often quite distressing stories.

And the website received floods of correspondence – and not just from former members. Other readers wrote in to tell them how the site had opened their eyes to Scientology's abusive nature.

In recent years however, its levels of activity have fallen off dramatically (Kendra, for one, has moved on to other things). It was also the target of some quite ferocious spamming that for a while made it all but unusable.

But a visit to the site shows recent signs of life: both Jenna and Astra have updated their media profiles.

And both take the time to express their solidarity with Katie Holmes, the most high-profile defector from the movement, who this summer ended her five-year marriage to Tom Cruise.

Media reports have suggested that Holmes was determined to prevent daughter Suri from being drawn further into Scientology.

And Jenna writes: “As a mother myself, I offer my support to Katie and wish for her all of the strength she will need to do what is best for her and her daughter.”

My experience in growing up in Scientology is that it is both mentally and at times physically abusive.

I was allowed to see my parents only once a week at best – sometimes not for years.

We got a lousy education from unqualified teachers, forced labor, long hours, forced confessions, being held in rooms not to mention the mental anguish of trying to figure out all of the conflicting information they force upon you as a young child...

While it is very unlikely that Suri Cruise would have the same upbringing as me (due to her parent's celebrity status), any organization that is capable of mistreating and neglecting the needs of children, regardless of their social status, and which has a long history of breaking up families is no place for an innocent child.

Amazon – and no doubt other outlets – are already taking prepublication orders for her book.

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1 Ironically, these senior executives were Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder – who themselves have since quit the movement. They are now leading figures in what has become known as the Independent Scientology movement which still accepts the value of Scientology, but rejects the regime as it is run by David Miscavige. See Rathbun's blog Moving Up a Little Higher, to which Rinder is an occasional contributor.

2 From Chapter Seven of An Introduction to Scientology Ethics. But this originally came from a December 23 1965 Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, “Suppressive Acts Suppression of Scientology and Scientologists” – so it can hardly be said to be a corruption of Hubbard’s policies by the current leader Miscavige.

3 “An Ethics Officer can encounter a situation where someone is factually connected to a Suppressive Person, in present time,” wrote Hubbard.

“This is a person whose normal operating basis is one of making others smaller, less able, less powerful. He does not want anyone to get better, at all.

“In truth, an SP is absolutely, completely terrified of anyone becoming more powerful. In such an instance the PTS isn't going to get anywhere trying to handle the person. The answer is to sever the connection.”

“PTSness and Disconnection”, September 10, 1983.

4 Counterfeit Dreams remains one of the best accounts by a former members of his time inside and is also available as a book.

Headleys' supporters rally round

-- UPDATE: the appeal reached its target total on Tuesday, Sept 18 --

Marc and Claire Headley have refused an offer from Scientology to inform on fellow critics of the movement in return for having their hefty legal costs waived – and now their supporters are rallying round.

Marc and Claire Headley, faced with a $40,000 legal bill after unsuccessful lawsuits against Scientology, have nevertheless refused the movement's offer to waive the fees in return for informing on fellow critics.

In response to their plight, well-wishers have raised nearly half that sum for them within 24 hours of an appeal fund being set up.

In the latest in a steady stream of scoops, Tony Ortega at Village Voice on Thursday reproduced a letter from Scientology lawyers that set out three conditions to be met if they want to avoid paying their $42,852.06 legal bill.

The settlement would have required the Headleys to:

• stop all campaigning against Scientology, both to the media and on the Internet;
• turn over the rights of Marc's book, Blown for Good, which details the abuses set out in his lawsuit and many other incidents only now being picked up in the mainstream media;
• provide information on other Scientology critics, in particular Marty Rathbun, a leading figure in the so-called independent Scientology movement.

Rather than cave in to these demands, they decided to pay the bill in full.

“I sold my van,” Marc told Village Voice. “We're selling the kids' swing set. I also sold a ton of my tools and equipment.”

They also had to use up all the savings they had put aside for a new addition to the family: Claire is currently pregnant with their third child.

Ortega reported that Actor Jason Beghe, another former Scientologist turned outspoken critic of the movement, persuade Marc Headley to set up a fund to help recoup the money the Headleys paid out to Scientology.

Beghe has put a thousand dollars of his own money into the fund, which has a target of $45,000.

“The idea that the Headley's would have to pay even a dime to those criminals is unacceptable and shameful,” Beghe wrote in a message kicking off the fund.

“After all they have done for all of us who decry the abuses of the 'church' of scientology, after all they have endured working under David Miscavige, after all they have endured fighting this case, I am proud and morally obligated to contribute to their fund.”

At the time of writing, less than 24 hours after the fund was launched, the sum raised stands at $21,457. (You can see the full Village Voice story here.)

From 2006, Marc Headley's pseudonymous postings as Blownforgood at message boards such as the one at Operation Clambake offered the first, detailed accounts of the violence and abuse at the top of the movement.

Headley wrote about the beatings handed out by Scientology's leader David Miscavige at the Int Base, near Hemet, in California, where the movement's top executives worked.

In one of his first posts he not only confirmed a report that Miscavige had beaten long-serving executive Mike Rinder but listed other victims of his violence. (Rinder and some of the other executives named have since quit Scientology – and confirmed Headley's account.)

Headley was the first to tell the story in detail of the now-notorious musical chairs incident, in which Miscavige had executives fighting to win in order to avoid being banished from the base.

And it was Headley who first told of Miscavige's operation to audition Scientologists as possible partners for Tom Cruise. (The latest disturbing twist on that story, in the October issue of Vanity Fair, has been picked up by news media around the world.)

All of Headley's allegations were subsequently confirmed by other defectors, as former members began to go public in 2009 with allegations that had until then mainly been made pseudonymously on Internet message boards.

That same year, the Headleys launched separate lawsuits claiming damages for what they had both suffered during their time in the Sea Org – and Marc Headley published his book, Blownforgood.

A California federal appeal court rejected both lawsuits earlier this year. But the judgment gave clear indications about how such actions might be best pursued in the future – and the credibility of their accounts was not called into question.

Familiar tactics...

Gagging orders are nothing new in Scientology litigation.

At least two other potentially devastating lawsuits, by former Sea Org members Daniel Montalvo and John Lindstein were settled out of court, with the plaintiffs making no public statement since.

And earlier this year, the movement had to move quickly to limit the damage after making the mistake of suing former top executive Debbie Cook.

Having taken her to court for her criticism of Scientology management, their lawyers had to stand by while she offered devastating details of abuse at the top in court testimony that was reported around the world.

A settlement with a gag clause ended what had been a public relations disaster for the movement.

Even the copyright grab for Marc's book is not without precedent.

Former member Jon Atack, who in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the movement's most effective critic, was presented with a similar offer.

Atack was subjected to a dirty tricks campaign that nearly broke him.

Private investigators tried to gather information on him; he was verbally abused on his doorstep by zealous Scientologists and denounced in noisy demonstrations; and he was dragged into the courts.

“Very few people can stand up to such an assault,” he wrote in a 1995 paper. “My own life has been savaged by Scientology. I am bankrupt... My health has suffered...”

It was just when he was this low point that Scientology made its move.

“A few months ago, I reluctantly responded to the latest in a long line of Scientology offers of settlement, willing for the first time to offer my silence in return for a cessation of hostilities and the payment of compensation.

“The offer by return was that they would leave me alone if I would give them the rights to my published work, my unique collection of Scientology papers and my permanent silence.”

Atack of course, is the author of A Piece Blue Sky, the definitive account of Scientology during the Hubbard years.

He turned them down.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the offer made to the Headleys is the explicit request that they inform on their fellow critics; that they effectively act as spies for Scientology.

Perhaps equally astonishing is that the movement was prepared to put this offer down in black and white.

Thus when the Headleys decided to say no – and to go public – the movement was wrongfooted.

Scientology of course, sees the matter rather differently.

“The church makes every effort to participate in good-faith confidential settlement negotiations,” spokeswoman Karin Pouw told the Tampa Bay Times.

“The church has no desire to engage in long-term litigation with Mr. Headley concerning his defamatory publication and his continuing harassment of the church and its parishioners.”

That the Headleys turned down this deal at no small cost to themselves, will come as no surprise to their supporters and admirers.

And it is a measure of the respect and affection that they are held that the appeal fund has risen so fast. But the target sum has still not been reached.

A couple of hours on, and the appeal fund currently stands at $22,132: you can make your contribution here.

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