The team at the Narconon Redwood Cliffs drug addiction treatment center has been providing effective drug rehabilitation services to the people of Monterey Bay for many years. In the course of this time, they have consistently engaged in community outreach programs to help cut down on the rates of drug abuse in the town of Watsonville and in the surrounding areas. For example, they have for the past three years co-hosted the National Night Out event put on by local law enforcement. Since 2004, the drug prevention education team from Narconon Redwood Cliffs has educated more than 50,000 elementary and high school students in schools across Central and Northern California. They have passed out countless numbers of anti-drug education pamphlets such as The Truth About Drugs and Ten Things Your Friends May Not Know About Drugs. They have organized holiday season toy drives, and have hosted Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless in coordination with the Salvation Army, among other activities. Recently, representatives from Narconon Redwood Cliffs paid a visit to the local Kiwanis Club, where they appeared as the club’s weekly guest speaker.
About the Kiwanis Club
The Kiwanis Club is an international volunteer organization founded nearly a century ago in 1915. With a total membership well in excess of half a million men and women worldwide, it is among the most widespread and well-known volunteer groups in existence. Locally, the Kiwanis Club engages in a wide variety of community service projects, with a focus on helping children in the area. Their officially stated goals are listed as including:
- Lessening of neighborhood tensions
- Promotion of human and spiritual values
- Combating community deterioration
- Addressing juvenile delinquency
- Contributing to the advancement of medical science.
These purposes are right in line with the objectives of Narconon Redwood Cliffs. Narconon centers in California and throughout the world are all working to help drug addicts find stable recovery and a fresh start in life, and they also deliver anti-drug lectures and educational materials in the communities where they are located. In this light, a partnership between a Narconon center and a Kiwanis club is a natural fit.
Narconon Redwood Cliffs Presentation at Santa Cruz Kiwanis Club
At the recent meeting, the representatives from the Redwood Cliffs center delivered a presentation on the history of Narconon. This began with the origins of the program, when a drug addict named William Benitez was serving time in an Arizona state prison and happened upon a copy of the book The Fundamentals of Thought, by American writer and philosopher L. Ron Hubbard. Based on what he found in Mr. Hubbard’s writings, Mr. Benitez was able to develop an effective program for getting an addict off drugs stably and for good. Over the course of more than 40 years, the program has expanded to the point where there are now dozens of Narconon addiction treatment centers located across six continents worldwide, in addition to widespread prevention and education activities globally. Following the short history of Narconon, the presentation covered details about the program’s approach to treating addiction. Narconon addresses clients on a combined physical and mental basis, with a unique sauna detox step to flush out the accumulated toxic residues of years of drug use, followed by counseling and life skills courses to achieve true rehabilitation of the person’s self-respect, competence, ability and stability in life after the program. Furthermore, they covered the significant impact that Narconon creates on the community through its Drug Education and Prevention program for the local schools. The Kiwanis members enjoyed the presentation and many of them expressed great interest following the conclusion of the presentation, expressing their sincere support for the work that the Redwood Cliffs organization is doing.
