This is Latino USA, the radio journal of News and Kurturre Latino uscix let Latino USA. I'm Maria Inojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the wrest of the media. And while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of black and Latino Studio United Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement. I'm Maria Inojosa.
Nose bayan.
Or La Latino Usa. Listener, Here's an episode the Los Archivos. Before he kicked the habit, Robert Bedda shot heroin for almost fifty years.
Drugs always been a problem for me. And when you shoot drugs, you use drugs, and you have drugs, you don't have no problems a drug, use it with drugs as a happy person. It's when you don't have it that the problem again, you know.
And Robert's problem with drugs led to legal trouble. He was in and out of jail for most of his life, starting when he was just eleven years old. Today, Robert lives back in his hometown of Fajarre, Puerto Rico, he's a wiry sixty nine years old.
I don't look it and I don't act it, but I am.
A little under.
Ten years ago, Robert was picked up by the police and convicted for possession of stolen articles. The court in Puerto Rico gave him an option go to prison for three years or spend eighteen months in a place called ogargrea. Oga means home in Spanish, and Grea could mean create or to believe, but it's also an acronym. It stands for Comnidad barralare lugascion readictos, or in English, community for
the re Education of Attics. It's a drug treatment program and their representatives are all over the island of Puerto Rico, even in the courthouse.
I didn't know they were coming. I didn't ask for them to come. They were at the court room when I got there, and they asked me would I like to go to go to jail.
Robert chose to go to Grea. He thought, why not, I'll try this out. During his stay at Grea, Robert lived with about twenty other guys in a barrack style concrete dorm building, one of several on the property. Everyone in the compound was on the same schedule.
By five o'clock, you got to be I get in a line by blah blah blah. You gotta say it a positive statement for the morning. Then you wait a while. They called breakfast, You eat breakfast, and then the day starts. You go on to therapy.
But therapy in this case is not what you normally think about when you think of therapy. This one involves putting on a bright yellow T shirt, going door to door and selling baked goods. Oh god, Grea I calls this sales and representation, therapy.
Sales and representation. That's one of the therapy sessions that they got. I'm laughing because it's comical.
And if you've spent significant time in Puerto Rico, chances are you've experienced their famous sales pitch yo. After detox. As soon as they can walk right, Grea residents are sent into the streets to sell things, mostly cakes and custards produced by an industrial sized bakery owned by Grea itself. They're outside in the hot sun all day. They're often given no food or water, and they can't return until they've sold everything. Once they're back, they fork over all
the cash they made to Grea. The theory is that soliciting, sometimes literally standing in busy intersections selling cookies and cakes, will help addicts to stop doing drugs. It also just so happens to bring in a lot of money for Korea. Robert thought he knew what o God Krea had in store for him. He went in hoping it would do him some good and maybe even help him get off of heroin. But quickly he found out that wasn't the case.
Great exist for a long time, so I figured it would be more professional. I figure it would be more helpful, but it wasn't. Nobody there but the knowledge you know to help you.
From Futuro Media and PRX, It's Latino Usa. I'm Marien no Hoosa today the story of the controversial drug treatment program that dominates in Puerto Rico and some of the strange things that are reported to happen inside. You've probably heard about the surge and opioid and heroin use that's been ravaging many regions in the United States, but what you might not know is that the crisis is worse in Puerto Rico, and it has been for over half a century. There are as many as sixty thousand people
who inject drugs in Puerto Rico. That's about two percent of the island's population. That means that people in Puerto Rico, give or take, are about eight times more likely to inject drugs than the US population as a whole. The largest drug treatment provider on the island is ogri Grea. They run about sixty centers in Puerto Rico, not to mention many others on the US mainland and elsewhere in
Latin America. In addition to their own fundraising efforts, Ogdgrea receives millions of dollars in funding from both local and federal governments. Despite being the biggest and best funded rehab on the island, ogri Grea and their treatment methods have been controversial, some would even say abusive. I'm going to hand it off now to reporter What Cotler, who's been working on this story for over a year. We're going to learn about OGD kream, its background, and the larger
than life man who founded it. Oh and by the way, there's some adult language in this story, which we've believed.
Pretty much everyone in Puerto Rico either knows someone or knows of someone who has been through Ogdkrea for over fifty years. CREA has been the rehab center on the island and heroin has been the drug of choice for Puerto Ricans. OGA Crea was founded by a man named Juan Jose Garcia Rios, better known by his nickname che Juan. He eventually became such an important figure in Puerto Rico that he had a rendition of his life story released on vinyl. The record is in the style of an
old radio drama. The record chronicles chehuan struggle with drugs from the first time he smoked marijuana when he was ten.
Yeah, OK, what I say.
According to the record, he developed some bad habits when he visited New York City at age fifteen.
Come on, honey, let's damn.
At sixteen, he started using heroin. Eventually, Chihuan's arrested and sentenced to three to five years in prison. While serving his sentence, he worked in the prison library and became an avid reader. He developed the belief that Puerto Rican migration to New York City and the resulting economic stress, culture shock, and discrimination were at the root of many Puerto Rican's addictions. He also noticed that many people from the island were returning from the Vietnam War with substance
abuse problems. Chihuan founded Roger Crea when he was released from prison in nineteen sixty eight. His aim was to create a re educational program, a therapeutic community where people could live together and start over without drugs. He designed and Crea not only as a rehab center, but as a long term housing facility for people with nowhere else to go. It will become the treatment facility for everyone from national celebrities to the average citizen, and in fact,
Puerto Rican celebrities did in the Berea, especially musicians. CREA even had its own in house salsa orchestra, made up of musicians who went through the program, like percussionists Cheo Feliciano and legendary vocalist Frankie Hernandez. The group even released a salsa album on Fania Records called Impactos Crea. When CREA began, there were virtually no other drug treatment centers on the island. By nineteen seventy three, it expanded from a handful of residents living in a group home to
a federation of over thirty facilities. Before long, che Juan was looked at as a hero, he had revolutionized drug treatment in Puerto Rico. The so called therapeutic community treatment model was popular in the United States at the time. Heroin auticts, alcoholics, and potsmokers would all live together to help each other stay out of trouble, taking turns leading
group therapy sessions. It was designed to be a democratic, participant led environment where people could learn job skills, good habits, and eventually re enter society without their addictions. Based on his own experiences and readings, Chihuan added his own twists that made his organization unique. He was brilliant at raising money. Not only did he convince the government to give Krea enormous financial support, he also made fundraising part of the
treatment itself. That's the sales and representation therapy we mentioned earlier. Chihuan folded religion into his unique treatment model as well, because of the role faith played in his own recovery. Chihuan sought to bring participants closer to God, the final step in overcoming addiction. But before being built up to God, well, attics had to be broken down. They had to acknowledge
their problem. Ji Juan had a plan for that too, Confrontational therapy also known as attack therapy, it's the process of tearing down an individual's ego in order to re educate them, usually by forcing them to confront quote unquote unpleasant realities about themselves. It was a popular tactic in addiction programs on the Mainland since the fifties, especially in
boot camp programs for troubled teens. According to their website, confrontational therapy is a central part of the Kraa experience, and according to Robert Pereeda, the former Kraa participant we spoke to earlier, some days they'd make you do it around the clock, that overnight confrontation.
Twenty four hours a day, all night, without sleep, without nothing, without food. That's real, it's real, messed up.
That was the thing.
Yeah, that's yeah, twenty four hours do you confront people. It's all night.
They sit you down in a chair and take turns insulting you till you're broken. That was the worst part for Robert.
Everybody called you an animal, dog, that you ain't no good, that you yeah, don't mean, all kind of crazy. And then somebody come fu and they take you out and put another person in there. You know, and you don't have no sleep your tied. You know, they could say anything.
The idea is that once you've been broken down, you'll realize that you need to change. Only then can you be built back up, free from drugs and closer to Jesus. And if you fall out of line, well there are consequences. I spoke to drug users in two towns, Fajardo and Caguas. Almost all of them had been through KREA and had stories of strange and sometimes abusive things that they went through.
One guy told me that as punishment, they would shave your eyebrows or shave the shape of a cross into your hair.
They treat you like wars and a dog. You don't do that to the dog, but they do that to us.
Another mentioned that there were repercussions for everything.
They caught you smoking and smoking.
The guy translating here is named Panama. He showed me around Cogua.
They would do a.
Chain like a chain of cugartte butts black. If you caught your masturbating, you paint your hand your hand black and put a bell on your on your wrist. And when there were visiting days, you would have to go table by table to everybody who came to the visit and explain to them why you.
To everybody else.
The guys I'm talking with tell me about Vans that.
They got him recruiting addicts in the street.
They drive around town looking for down and out people to pick up and then roll out a center.
That's the boss right there.
In the very moment they're telling me about this, a blue and yellow passenger band with Claire's logo printed on it drives right by us right there. Got them, but it's everywhere, like at the traffic light. They guys selling the plastic bags.
Yeah.
As as a reminder, this isn't some small, weird rehab It's the biggest treatment network in Puerto Rico. Despite the sometimes strange things that happened inside CREA's doors, the organization was hailed as a success in Puerto Rico and beyond. They expanded to the Dominican Republic in nineteen seventy five. By nineteen eighty one, CREA had branched out to the mainland, opening a facility in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where, according to CREA's website, chi Juan was even given the key to the city.
By the eighties, CREA was also in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Colombia, among other countries in Latin America. In the nineties. Back in Puerto Rico, CREA continued to thrive. The Puerto Rican government was privatizing medical care throughout the island and as a result pretty much dissolved its own drug treatment programs. After that, there were even fewer alternatives to CREA, and taxpayer money both in Puerto Rico and the mainland flowed
into the organization. Jehuan's hometown of Trujillo all don't even dedicated a street in his honor. CREA was here to stay, selling it to make goods and saving souls around the hemisphere. Coming up on Latino, USA.
Was the main actor of violating human rights of drug users in Puerto Rico and Dominican rebubble.
That's coming up. Stay with us, Yes, hey, we're back. And when we left off, we were telling this story of the meteoric rise of a drug treatment program in Puerto Rico Calledrea and the story of its founder, Chijuan Gria was growing and growing and expanding overseas. Money was coming in from donations and government grants, but also from great residents who were out selling faked goods, remember sales
and representation. At the same time, concern was growing among people in the drug treatment world about just what was happening behind Grea's doors and about the potential for abuse in their confrontational therapy model. Joaquin Coutler picks up the story now.
By the nineteen nineties, allegations of physical and sexual abuse in CREA centers started piling up, particularly in the mainland US branches. In Pennsylvania, nineteen former participants filed charges cousin CREA's top administrator on the mainland to resign. CREA had long been denying that abuse was happening. In nineteen ninety four, responding to the Pennsylvania allegations, Chejuan said, quote, the character of an addict is that they are liars manipulators. CREA
would eventually lose their charter in the state. In Puerto Rico, Ogar, CREA was also starting to face scrutiny. Certain people in the drug treatment world were questioning the value of what CREA does.
All what they do is work, pray in the morning and do more work. And I have groups of of assaulting each other.
Doctor Salvador Santiago Negron is a former director of AMSCA, Puerto Rico's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association. He's a public health advocate and researches the effects of stigma and confrontational therapy on people who use drugs.
There is a new data that confrontational therapy is not good for patience because that we mean there self imish is not helping them at all. We have a lot of discussion with this program because they were insisting on using that technique, but it's not premn at all.
So to summarize that, was the former head of the government agency in Puerto Rico that deals in addiction, and he just said that based on updated science, he believes CREA, the island's largest treatment organization, isn't actually treating anybody. Despite being the biggest rehab in Puerto Rico, CREA had never been fully evaluated by an outside entity. Its outcomes were at best a mystery. But in the year two thousand that was set to change. The Puerto Rican government was
going to start regulating drug treatment on the island. A law was set to pass requiring all rehabs in Puerto Rico to have their methods and results evaluated. The idea was to hold treatment centers accountable and establish some transparency about where government money was being spent. CREA didn't seem to like that. They lobbied to have the bill changed with the help of powerful evangelical leaders. Santiago na Grone said, lawmakers changed their minds literally overnight.
They agree with all student the day eleven o'clog night, the CREA and all the groups met with very powerful politicians and they introduced that boss they are in their law.
During a late night handshake deal, the Speaker of the House introduced a clause that essentially undermined the very existence of the law. This clause protects any organizations providing spiritual or pastoral guidance from any type of government regulation, including a valueuation. The bill passed with the clause. Since CREA is a private, faith based program, they would be legally exempt from government evaluation. This meant that CREA's questionable therapy
techniques could continue unmonitored. The legislator who introduced the clause was the speaker of Puerto Rico's House of Representatives.
It is so miss La al Daroldo, ex President de La Camera.
In two thousand and one, he resigned from his position in Puerto Rico's Lower House after being accused of extortion, money laundering, and witness tampering unrelated to Crea. He was later convicted of corruption and sexual abuse of a minor. But while his personal legacy is tainted, Crea is still protected from government oversight. But there is one academic report about Ugacrea's treatment model. It's not an official evaluation of treatment, but the authors found, to put it plainly.
Crea was the main actor of violating human rights of drug user in Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic.
That's the voice of Rafael Toua, a co author of the report.
Human rights abuses were committed under the auspices. So basically two or three things, but two mainly one. Confrontational therapy for drug users only makes things worse. How retraumatizing an individual that already has been traumatized, as if pushing you to that edge and breaking you down emotionally would make you understand and you to stop using drugs. That's why we talk about a revolving door. If you keep re traumatizing somebody, they keep coming at you, and you keep charging,
you're making money. And then the second thing that we founded the report. That was horrible is that not only do you re traumatize them, then you tell them that for their own treatment to get better, you have to sell my good and work for me for free, almost the definition of slavery.
Raphael and Intercambios for libel, essentially trying to get them to retract their report.
We were in a court case because CREA really didn't like the report that exposed this. They said, no, we have all the right to do what we do. We're going to launch a lawsuit against you. Let's call a slapsuit.
The slapsuit went on for almost three years, but unfortunately for CREA, in May of twenty eighteen, they lost.
They lost, like really bad. What happened is they looked like the shady organization that they seem to be.
One moment.
Please.
In August of twenty seventeen, when I first started reporting on CREA, I reached out to them to hear their side in Corpore. Unfortunately, connecting with them wasn't easy. Press night, I sent a bunch of emails and called over twenty times trying to get hold of their director at Dorfriguetoa or anyone else that would talk to me is not available at the moment. It was amazed extensions, voicemail boxes and dead ends. There is not enough message todays to make a recording exit in the systems.
Goodbye.
Eventually, I showed up in person at their headquarters outside San Juan in January. Even in person, I still got the run around if I give you your email, en, but I also got a new email address and a cell number to have it. Eventually, after weeks of phone tag, someone claiming to be the director of treatment emailed me back in May of twenty eighteen, declining to comment on
their history, their styles of therapy, the lawsuit, or anything else. Fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that's responsible for the surge of overdoses in the United States in recent years, has been ubiquitous in Puerto Rico's heroin supply since Hurricane Maria. Hard numbers on overdoses in Puerto Rico are hard to determine, but we do know that statistics around AIDS and hepatitis on the island, both diseases associated with intravenous drug use, are staggering.
Puerto Rico is an injection island.
Half of the people that are infected with HIV AIDS are infected because of their history with injection drug use. It's just a monumental problem.
That's Camilla Helpia Costa. She's a researcher on intervenous drug use among Puerto Ricans.
Puerto Rico is the fourth MSA metropolitan statistical area in the entire United States, the fourth in hib eight's deaths. Ninety pc of our injectors in the island ninety am, I do you understand? Nine zero? Virtually all of them have hypathetic Okay.
On top of this, what's known as the treatment gap in Puerto Rico is staggering ninety two percent. That means only eight percent of people on the island in need of substance abuse treatment are getting it. Because of their size, their influence, and their political connections, Ogricrea is still Puerto Rico's main residential treatment center. Ogorcrea receives about eight million dollars a year from government grants and programs. In other words,
eight million dollars of local and federal taxpayer money. Tax audits also show that they own more than twenty five million dollars in assets, land, vehicles, equipment, et cetera. As of twenty fifteen, they operated sixty facilities in Puerto Rico, with fifteen hundred participants at any given time. The government currently runs just four facilities. CREA is what's known as
an abstinence only program. It's an old fashioned philosophy, often accompanied by a religious component or the surrender to a higher power. This kind of zero tolerance does work for some people, and many former addicts do credit CREA with getting them off drugs, but critics like Camilla say that just say no doesn't necessarily work for everyone. They say abstinence only doesn't address the underlying of drug use or the danger of deadly diseases from needle sharing. It can
actually make things worse. Camilla runs a much smaller organization called El Punto and La Montagna. Among other services, they do needle exchanges, providing sterile syringes for people who are going to use drugs anyway so they don't spread diseases. They also provide narcan, a drug that prevents overdoes deaths, to family members and friends of drug users. Unlike CREA, Camilla says her organization and others like it get essentially nothing from the government.
If the government could guarantee money for us to do this work. It would also be allowing us to rally the masses, to educate the communities, and to actually wake everybody up on the need for drug Politzer reform, cariod to save lives. But we don't have that funding. We don't have that support from the government. Zero zero, and they know we exist.
For Robert Padeda, the lifelong drug user we heard from at the beginning, Cray didn't help him quit heroin. He didn't even serve out his eighteen month crey A sentence. He left early, went to prison for three years, and kept using. But in the back of his mind, he kept wanting to lose the habit for good.
You know, I've kicked maybe over a hundred times my life easy, over a hundred times. After all the years, I still used. I used, I used you. The problem is I didn't have anything better to do.
But eventually he made the decision to quit on his own.
I had served my sense, and now I was shooting drugs and the projects Cassio down the street there, and I came out to shooting when I got to the corner and I just I said, man, I'm tired of this bush. You know, and I prayed. I said, damn God, I'm tired of this. I gotta stop.
So he took it upon himself to find some suboxone, a medication that's provided by a few doctors on the island and available on the street. It contains an opioid, but you can't overdose from it, and it takes away the jonesing. It doesn't really get Robert high, and it's a lot safer than street drugs.
And there was a friend of mineus I used to work real loosely, not a friend, but somebody I know, And I asked him could he buy me something? Some boxing with a prescription. I mean people get him from prescription, but they sell them. A lot of people sell them. At that time, it was ten dollars each. I think I got a couple in my bucket. That's a little stript. Yeah, and you cut it.
Use the piece now. Robert himself is a mentor of sorts, a former heroin user who spends his time helping other people who use drugs.
If you really really feel like you want to stop using drugs, my name is Robert. I help you all I can. I know what it is, I know what it's like.
Robert is an outreach worker. He visits the shooting galleries every day to check on people, offering fraternity and support and sometimes life saving advice, and he believes that the work he's doing is more effective than Claire.
But I really want want to help people to live a stable life. I would like for somebody to be able to get up every morning without being sick, without not coming out of their nose. Their stomach's all messed up, they can't walk, can't hardly breathe because they dope got you all messed up. And I don't think nobody should go through that. I try to do things for people so they won't commit the same mistakes I make. And
it's gonna happen. You're gonna wind up in jail, you're gonna wind up dead, or you're gonna wind up sick for using old saybringes. People don't realize that they're looking at at themselves ten twenty thirty years from now, and all that time it's gone and you're not gonna get it back. I lost all that time, I lost my kids, I lost my wife. But you know, a lot of money and you shouldn't lose it.
The founder of okram Chi. Juan died in two thousand and two, but his vision lives on. Grea's current director, ek Door Figueroa, has claimed that the abuse of practices there have stopped, but he has decided to stick with confrontation, sales and representation, and the faith based.
Re educational model.
A new law in Puerto Rico that would open the door for drug policy reform has been under debate since early twenty seventeen. It would establish a medical standard by which treatment programs like GREA are evaluated, and it would ramp up the availability of medications like suboxone. The bill is currently stalled in Puerto Rico's legislature. This episode was reported by Juaquin Kotler and edited by Marlon Bishop, with additional editing by Ruxandra Guidi. It was made possible by
a fellowship from the Marguerite Casey Foundation. This episode originally aired in December of twenty eighteen. It was reported by Juaquin Cockler and edited by Marlon Bishop, additional editing by Druxandra Guili. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebau. The Latino USA team includes Victori Estrara, Renaldo Leanos junior Andrea Lopez Rusado, Joni mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Nor Saudi and Nancy Trujuillo. Benilee Ramirez is our co executive producer. Our
senior engineer is Julia Caruso. Additional engineering support by gabriel Lebiez and jj Carubin. Our marketing manager is Luis luna Ar theme music was composed by Segne Rubinos. I'm your host and executive producer Maria noo Josa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on social media. I will see you there and remember yes Lunka Baye.
Funding for Latino USA is coverage of a culture of health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, and the Heising Simons Foundation Unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities. More at hsfoundation dot org