User:Gmarmstrong/Rough notes

This is a very scattered workpage of sorts. Its contents are unsuitable for mainspace, but I use it to outline ideas as I work them into something encyclopedic and suitable for Wikipedia.

My initial thoughts
I'm interested in mapping out the origins and current projects of the Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF). When I first encountered its Wikipedia article, it looked like this. In cleaning it up, I decided that the Straight, Inc. article should be merged into it. The DFAF article was blatantly in violation of WP:NPOV and other policies. The Straight, Inc. article, on the other hand, had by now reached B-Class quality after years of drama. From what I could gleam from the Straight, Incorporated talk page, it seems that the article had a history of good-faith but unencyclopedic edits from many different Straight survivors.

The DFAF and Straight pages were almost entirely disconnected, and at first glance a reader would have had no idea that the two were the exact same entity, so I proposed a merge. I fixed up the DFAF page while I waited for others to chime in on the proposal, and brought the article to this state.

It seems that DFAF has splintered into an extraordinarily large number of smaller organizations, a network which was almost entirely undocumented on Wikipedia. For example, the DFAF article made no mention of the organization's own Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice. This section of the journal's talk page, as well as this very conspiratorial-looking flowchart, made me realize that these articles had a long way to go before they would be sufficiently representative of the actual situation.

At this point, I created this rough notes page. I needed a space to organize my thoughts as I searched for reliable sources for this information, and my immediate thoughts and sources are quite plainly unfit for an encyclopedia. In this section, I hope to work through these thoughts openly while avoiding violation of WP:NOR (especially of WP:PRIMARY) or WP:RS on mainspace.

Summary of and comments on the flowchart
The very conspiratorial-looking flowchart is obviously a totally inappropriate source, but I am interested in hearing it out and investigating its claims. Some are clear, others are weak, and some seem completely unfounded.

The chart draws a direct connection between Synanon and The Seed. So far I have not found any evidence actually connecting them.

The chart then claims that "Mel Sembler, Helen Peterman, et al." were parents of patients at The Seed's St. Petersburg, FL location. I have seen this claim about Sembler before (will find a citation). I don't recall any sources mentioning a St. Petersburg location for The Seed, but I will look for one.

[...]

Structural outline of DFAF

 * Drug Free America Foundation: On their website, at the bottom of the home page, DFAF claims the following organizations as its "divisions":
 * Save Our Society From Drugs: website
 * National Drug-Free Workplace Alliance: website
 * The next logo is blurry and has no link, but an older 2018 archive of dfaf.org had the logo linking to an FSU student group. The link doesn't work, and is not archived, but the organization does have a Twitter account @fsushdp which, as of February 2022, has been inactive since February 2016. Their bio reads, "Our organization is called Students for Healthy Drug Policy (SHDP) and is a division of Drug Free America. It is the first SHDP chapter in the nation."
 * Institute on Global Drug Policy links to http://www.dfaf.org/journal/
 * International Scientific and Medical Forum on Drug Abuse also links to http://www.dfaf.org/journal/
 * The Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice also links to http://www.dfaf.org/journal/
 * The International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy links to http://www.dfaf.org/international/
 * On DFAF's "About Us" page, they also claim The Drug Prevention Network of the Americas

Miscellaneous bookmarks

 * What was the DFAF page referring to about receiving a Telly Award (see the AFD discussions at that page)? Was it somehow referring to the ones won by the Foundation for a Drug-Free World in 2009, "Love Lost" and "They Said/They Lied"? Why was the page claiming ownership of that award? FDFW is a Scientology organization, it doesn't have any (known) connection to DFAF. Perhaps it was referring to something else. But this link suggests a funding connection.
 * https://www.drugfreeworld.org/about-us/about-the-foundation.html
 * https://www.drugfreeworld.org/news/2008-03-24-news-telly-awards.html
 * https://www.dfaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Annual-Report_2015.pdf