Friday, March 17, 2017

March 17

On this day in 2009, Mr. Warren Babcock of Nashville, TN travelled to Detroit, Michigan, at the request of officials at Wayne State University, where his son, Phillip, was a sophomore. After several on and off-campus incidents involving Phillip's IV drug use, campus security, social workers, and administration agreed that an intervention was necessary, for the young man's own good, and had asked Mr. Babcock to make the trip to Detroit, without alerting his son. Mr. Babcock arrived and met with the crisis intervention team, who took him on a tour of the posh Bloomfield Hills residential rehabilitation facility they had chosen for Phillip. The staff at Wellspring Manor, where Phillip would be expected to complete a 28 day program, explained that, in addition to on-site group counseling, one-on-one therapy, stress-relieving massage and acupuncture, and no less than two hours a day at the rehab's may arts and fitness workshops, Phillip would also be enrolled in a methadone program, to gently ease him out of his heroin dependency. Staff explained that methadone was not offered on-site, but that clients requiring this particular treatment were taken to the Orangelawn Street Methadone Clinic, in Metropolitan Detroit, by SUV. When Mr. Babcock asked to be given a tour of the Orangelawn Street Methadone Clinic, rehab staff reluctantly drove him to the urban setting, where he was horrified to see no less than 40 men and women in a queue, waiting for their daily dose of methadone. "Have you all taken leave of your senses?!?!" he demanded of his tour guides, "You expect my son to come to this place, in this neighborhood, among these people? These are junkies! My son is just sowing his wild oats, and having a good time, as young college men are wont to do. He'll come home with me, enjoy some of his mama's good cooking, forget about the rigors of university for a spell, and be as good as new." 

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