Rebuttal to SPLC's Expert Witness

Jan 19, 2024

During the course of my defamation suit against the SPLC (Nelsen v SPLC), the SPLC hired an expert witness to give his opinion on the viability of the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club. Here was my response:

In one of the f.a.q. from our website, in answer to the question, “Is the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club a drug treatment program?" I answer, “No. What you do with your drugs is your business.” Mr. Geis claims this disavowal is an attempt at deception on my part (to trick unwary clients into unwittingly undergoing drug treatment, I guess?), then proceeds to offer his opinion on “Mr. Nelsen’s Proposed Substance Abuse Program." In the opinion of Mr. Geis, the RJBC was not viable as a drug treatment program because it doesn't mimic his drug treatment program. This is a little like a high school football coach, after he's played a round of golf with Tiger Woods, to remark, “Now, I'm a pretty good judge of athletic ability—just look at all the people who call me “Coach”—and I have to say Tiger would never make one of my teams. Heck, in the game we just played, he didn't complete a single pass!”

Everyone who takes drugs takes them for the same reason: to feel better. Legal or illegal; prescription or over-the-counter; purchased on the dark web or in a dark alley; supplied by the government and dispensed by Mr. Geis or supplied by a cartel and dispensed by a street dealer; all drug use is motivated by the one single desire to feel better. Inside that single desire, like the energy packed into a single atom, is a whole universe of turbulence and complexities. And into that universe steps Mr. Geis to explain it to us. As Mr. Geis is a psychologist, the explanation will be “scientific.”

Unlike money-lenders, lawyers, and prostitutes, a psychologist does not practice an old profession. Psychology, the study of the human mind, began in Europe only in the last decades of the “Age of Reason," the triumphant apotheosis of the Scientific Revolution unleashed by Sir Francis Bacon in 1620 with the publication of his Novum Organum.¹ Two and a half centuries later, Science had swept the field, daily dazzling humanity with new marvels. Humans were awestruck by the power of Bacon's innovation, the scientific method, and by its stunning successes in the natural world. Quite understandably, many came to believe the scientific method was the Key to All Truth. It was during this time, with Science at its zenith, that the first person to call himself a “psychologist,” William Wundt, opened the first experimental psychology lab at the University of Leipzig in 1882. And with that began the long attempt—still going on—to make the human mind as amenable to the scientific method as the Table of Elements.

“Science” is the name we have given to the expression of human rationality in our relationship with the physical world —the objective world—around us. Our five senses tell us, from birth until death, that we, as subject, are at the center of this objective world. Just look around and you'll see that it's true. You are at the center of it. But, as we sit in the center of the physical world contemplating the objects around us, we discover that not all the objects behave as objects. Some of them are contemplating us back, which means they are contemplating us from the center of the physical world. And since there cannot be more than one center of the world, it is necessary to acknowledge a new kind of object, which we call “humans," and we must internally translate the information our senses are feeding us in order to acknowledge we are not the center of the world, a process we call “maturity," and thus we express our rationality in our relationship with humanity. This expression of our rationality we call Art. This is the realm of music and literature, but also of politics and society. And just as there is scientific progress, there is artistic progress, but it is slower because Art is more complex than Science.² And we learn the realms of Art and Science are mutually exclusive. If we try to act artistically in the scientific realm, we act irrationally (for example, if Congress were to pass a law lowering the speed of light), or if we try to act scientifically in the artistic realm we act irrationally (for example, if we attempt to transform humans into objects by enslaving them). The third and final way in which humans express rationality is in our relationships with each other individually. This is the realm of morals and ethics and love and friendship—the domain of Religion. Progress is slowest in this domain because it is the most complex of the three. Consequently, Science has progressed faster than Art and much faster than Religion. This has created the illusion of scientific supremacy, leading imprecise thinkers to install Science supreme in the realms of Art and Religion, causing untold problems and boatloads of irrationality.

Science has very little to say about the desire to feel better. The most that can be done in the physical world to satisfy a desire to feel better—the best Science can do—is numb physical pain, provide heat in the winter, and so on. But there is no pill that can make life worth living; Science will never provide a human with a reason to live.

Psychology, to the extent it pretends to be a Science, is a fraud. Consider the blazing advances that continue to be made in the real sciences—the sciences that govern our relationship with the physical world. Think of the huge advances in computer science, say, or medical care since the 1970s. Enormous. Different worlds. Now compare the advances made in the “science” of drug addiction treatment since the 1970s, when methadone maintenance programs became widespread. In 2020, methadone maintenance programs are still the consensus most effective “treatment” for heroin addicts, and they are still the same dismal failures (see below) they were in the 1970s. Meanwhile, heroin abuse is more rampant than ever. In other words, if the treatment of drug addiction is a science, then this science has the very un-science-like quality of having made no progress at all in fifty years.

The Science and Practice Consensus of Drug Addiction Treatment: Principles of Effective Substance Abuse Treatment for Heroin and Other Opioids

Mr. Geis lists eight “science-supported practices and consensus treatment elements" in the treatment of drug addiction. Let's take a look at this “science."

Comprehensive, Individualized Assessment
The comprehensive, individualized assessment is the form you fill out when you first get there—like when you go to a new doctor or dentist. Everyone gets the same form. It's individualized because you fill it out yourself. Compare that to the assessment each individual would have gotten at an RJBC. The assessment would have been conducted by 17 different people, each making his own assessment. The assessment would have been made under a variety of different conditions and circumstances by those 17 observers, for whom the assessment wasn't just a job. All 17 would have closely observed the client 24-hours per day, seven days per week for 13 weeks. The insight gained from this assessment would have helped inform the group support that the 17 observers would have offered the client after the 13 weeks had ended. The client could have relied on these insights into him as a valued human being for the rest of his life. Between the two, it seems clear to me the RJBC's comprehensive, individualized assessment was vastly superior to the one provided through Mr. Geis's “science-supported practice."
Substance Abuse Therapies: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Group Process Programming and Substance Abuse Counseling
Under this science-supported practice, we learn that “Treatment is best when it is tailored to each individual’s age, gender, ethnicity, age [sic] and culture.” There is some truth to this. For example, treatment may be most effective for the population most severely impacted by opioid abuse—white males—if it is tailored to the particular challenges unique to white males. In any case, Mr. Geis had better hope the SPLC doesn't notice this aspect of his program or, before he knows it, he'll have complete strangers screaming “Nazi” at him as he walks down the sidewalk.
Psychological Counseling
According to psychologists, psychologists are indispensable.
Medicine Assisted-Treatment (MAT)
This one is so consensus it gets its own acronym. The “medicine” here is methadone or some other opioid. The “treatment” is to get you to stop taking your current opioid and start taking a different one. In general, this means stopping heroin and starting methadone. The only difference between heroin and methadone is methadone lacks the initial feeling of euphoria that heroin provides. Methadone is just as addictive as heroin, just as hard to kick as heroin, just as painful to withdraw from as heroin, but it doesn't have the pleasure component heroin does and you don't have to go with lots of cash in hand into abandoned buildings late at night to get it.

Mr. Geis quotes Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, an organization he cites throughout, and she says “medications are irrefutably the most effective way to treat Opioid Use Disorder (OUD).” That's the science-y way of saying it. The straightforward way of saying it is “opioids are irrefutably the best way to treat opioid addiction." The consensus of the experts is that methadone maintenance programs (and their public funding) are the most effective way to “treat” heroin addiction, but, really, there's no “treatment” at all. In a methadone maintenance program, the opioid addict remains an opioid addict, only now the government pays for his opioids and he's been transformed into a permanent funding resource for the owners of the clinic—a condition the clinic is happy to let remain in place for the rest of the addict's life. The success rate for addicts who attempt to wean themselves off opioids using methadone is abysmal. In one study³ involving the clientele of four methadone clinics, of the 1240 clients in the program, 184 attempted detoxification during the course of the study. After they detoxed, the study followed them for six months to assess the outcome. Of the 184 who attempted detoxification, 98 gave up and went back on the maintenance program, 48 reverted to heroin, 6 were in jail or arrested, 23 had become alcoholics, 2 were dead, and only 7 remained drug-free after six months. That's a failure rate of more than 96 percent among those who tried to detox. Eighty-five percent of the patients didn't even try. My evidence-based assessment of Nora Volkow's “most effective way to treat OUD” is “failure." But, even if it weren't such an utter failure, she still has no right to say her methadone maintenance program is “irrefutably” the most effective treatment. She has no idea how effective cold turkey withdrawal is, nor how common, because addicts who quit on their own don't report the results to Nora Volkow—nor to anyone else.

The study just cited, by the way, noted that “[i]n comparison with patients in an in-house program, or a hospital environment, the study group did relatively poorly." In other words, methadone programs in which the addict detoxifies (weans off methadone) in a closed environment under constant observation for an extended period have a higher success rate than the addict who tries to detoxify in an outpatient clinic like the ones Mr Geis runs. But it isn't Nora Volkow's “medicine” that makes the difference for that better outcome, it is the fact that the patient is in a closed, supervised environment for an extended period of time—you know, something like a 13-week residency program that includes rigorous academics, exercise, healthy eating, and boxing.
Co-Occurring Disorders Treatment
The fifth science-based practice on Mr. Geis's list recognizes that sometimes drug addiction occurs at the same time other bad stuff occurs, like depression, anxiety, and so on. Scientists like Mr Geis call this “Co-Occurring Disorders." Everybody else calls it “life."

If an addict with Co-Occurring Disorders wants a shot at being one of the lucky four percent who successfully break free of opioid dependence by taking Nora Volkow's opioids, then it's necessary for the addict to seek out the services of a highly trained psychologist like Mr. Geis. But if an addict is at the point where life doesn't seem worth living, and they just need a safe place where they can step off the ride for 13 weeks, flush the toxins out of their bodies, get in shape, learn that they and their people actually aren't the cancer of the human race, experience—maybe for the first time—the fierce rush of powerful poetry, eat food they produced themselves, become a boxer (of all the unexpected and wonderful things), and maybe even make a true friend, if, in other words, they just need a life treatment, then they could have come to the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club.
Medical Care (Co-Occurring Medical Care)
In the sixth science-supported practice we learn that if someone needs to go to a hospital, the scientific consensus is to take them. And even if they need to go for two different reasons at the same time (Co-Occurring Medical Care), you should still take them.
Functional, Vocational and Living Skills Development.
The seventh science-supported consensus treatment element says it's good to have skills.
Group, Substance Abuse Programming Issues.
The eighth consensus treatment element says you should have lots of rules and regulations because a whole bunch of bad stuff could happen⁴, then Mr. Geis lists some examples. We had already addressed the issues he raises by making the program “closed campus," and, if a client left the premises, he couldn't return until the next slot opened up in a future class, at which point he would have to start over. If a client did “tap out” and wanted to leave, our policy, as stated, was to take the client back to wherever he was when we first picked him up, thus preventing the possibility of the RJBC program being a source of problems to our neighbors. Otherwise, for other bad stuff that might happen, the rules of civil society would have applied. If one of our men assaulted a staff member, say, we would have done the same thing the RA in a freshman dorm would do if a student assaulted a staff member, the same thing the manager of a grocery store would do if a customer assaulted an employee—call the police.

Theories of Change: The Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club Program vs. the Principles of Evidence-Based Addiction Treatment

Mr. Geis tells us that, when it comes to opioid abuse, the way he and the other scientists do it is they try different stuff to see what works, then, if one thing works better than another, they go with the one that works better.⁵ In his words:

Contemporary substance abuse theory, practice and science centers on scientific evaluation and research leading to “best practices” (strategies based on scientific consensus) and “evidence-based treatment” (interventions and techniques based on scientific research). Science organizes learning, using empirical methods, by developing various theories of change and evaluating, modifying and improving elements of these theories systematically over time.

Mr. Geis then goes on to state, “The RJBC Theory of Change is distinctively different than the contemporary Evidence-Based Treatment (EBT) Theory of Change.” I guess the first thing to do is to try to unpack what Mr. Geis means by “Theory of Change." Does the term carry a special meaning that can't be expressed using common language, and is it so particular it requires formal capitalization? Or is “Theory of Change” just a huckster's grandiloquence, a trick used to innoculate the huckster from a too-close inspection of the goods—a device to warn off the villagers—by signaling the status of an initiate into the higher mysteries of Science?

A quick search and we discover Theory of Change is a thing—a scientific thing, a gift to the world from the Social Sciences. Well, not a gift, exactly. You will have to send 2,000 dollars to theoryofchange.org if you want to be certified as a Theory of Change expert. From the theoryofchange.org website:

Theory of Change is essentially a comprehensive description and illustration of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It is focused in particular on mapping out or “filling in” what has been described as the “missing middle” between what a program or change initiative does (its activities or interventions) and how these lead to desired goals being achieved. It does this by first identifying the desired long-term goals and then works back from these to identify all the conditions (outcomes) that must be in place (and how these related to one another causally) for the goals to occur.

Notice, there is no actual theory being described here, but “theory” has a nice science-y ring to it, so...let's go with “theory." Basically, “Theory of Change” is my grandfather's advice, which was free, to “keep your eye on the goal, but watch your step so you don't fall in a ditch."

Anyway, now that we know “Theory of Change” means “plan," we can address Mr. Geis's point that our plan is different than their plan. His point is valid, but that's to be expected given our goals are different. Mr Geis's goal is to get heroin addicts to stop taking heroin to feel better and start taking methadone to feel better, then parlaying that “success” into funding and status. Our goal was to help men in distress reclaim their lives—to accompany a guy for whom life is no longer worth living on his journey from that place of despair to a place of hope where life actually is worth living. It is my contention that for those RJBC men who were heroin addicts when they entered the RJBC program, emerging from the program as actors in the world rather than isolated subjects to whom the world happens, with a more accurate view of themselves and their people, as part of a strong community of fellow RJBC men, fit, healthy, nourished, and with 13 weeks of sobriety behind them, it is far less likely heroin will be seen as a way to feel better than it will be for the methadone addict, who has only replaced one opioid addiction with a less pleasurable one and whose life is exactly as it was before except for the addition of forced attendance at sessions with Mr. Geis, where he lectures on the perils of relapse triggers.

“The RJBC program,” writes Mr. Geis, “is a theory in the non-scientific meaning of theory.” Non-scientific meaning of theory? The non-scientific meaning of theory, Mr. Geis explains, is “a set of conjectures," not backed by any research, that I “theorize” will “impact heroin use." On the other hand, the scientific meaning of theory, the one Mr. Geis uses, is “an evolving distillation of definable and testable practices." Leaving aside the actual definition of “theory," you can see how flawed Mr. Geis's thinking is here. Even his “evolving distillation” will require the steady application of new methods, new models, new practices to define and test in order for his “distillation” to “evolve." But a new method of doing something is necessarily first a conjecture—what scientists call, a “hypothesis”. Because it is new, it arrives without the research that only comes with giving it a try. If real scientists throughout history had dismissed every new idea that came along on the grounds it was “conjecture,” we'd still be sitting in caves squaring up the corners on the wheel we were still trying to invent. For all Mr. Geis knows, the RJBC approach to tackling the epidemic of deaths of despair ravaging our people may be precisely the direction in which his distillation needs to evolve. To condemn a new approach on the grounds it's not the old approach he champions strikes me as particularly wrong-headed—especially given the fifty years of stagnation and failure his approach has produced.

Mr. Geis and his colleagues need to recognize the fatal limitations of Science (there is no scientific argument against genocide, for example). And while the scientific-sounding jargon may impress state legislatures and budget committee members, our people need help and Science is incapable of providing it. At some point, hopefully, someone will publish a breakthrough—something like Group Think: The Art of Psychology—and we'll see real progress and utility in the field. But, as it stands, Mr. Geis, the scientist, is unqualified to speak on the viability of the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club.

Conclusion

Even the scientific method itself, when applied to the study of drug addiction, produces results that should point the investigating psychologist toward the scientific realm's exit doors. “Rat Park” is a famous series of studies from Canada that began in the 1970s. In the study, rats were given access to two water bottles, one of which was laced with heroin or cocaine. Some of the rats were held in isolation. The others were all together in “Rat Park,” a lush cage with tunnels and everything rats like. The rats in isolation dosed themselves to death on the drug-laced water. The rats in the social setting didn't—mostly shunning the drug-laced water. The experiment was rerun later with rats that had been “pre-addicted” to a drug. The pre-addicted rats were separated as before, some left in isolation and the others put together into Rat Park. The results were the same as the previous experiment. The isolated rats dosed themselves to death. The pre-addicted rats in the social setting, after showing a few physical signs of drug withdrawal, preferred the unlaced water.

Today, it is widely recognized that social setting plays a central role in drug addiction, which vindicates the underlying premise of the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club—that the epidemic of deaths of despair devastating white males is the predictable result of a lifetime of being targeted by the popular culture for racial denigration and marginalization. The recognition that social setting plays a central role in drug addiction also vindicates my decision to expand our target population to include those in distress but not necessarily using opioids, since an adverse social setting could manifest itself in ways other than drug addiction. And it vindicates the structure of the program I devised—intensely social within a small group of similarly afflicted men who would, together, experience everything—including the extremes of boxing and poetry, not to mention the hyper-bonding experience of singing—singing!—together as a chorus. Can Mr. Geis imagine singing at his methadone clinic? Ha! Not on your life! He is a serious scientist using MAT for the EBT of OUD. No songs!

I had to laugh when, in the course of my research, I came across this abstract of a 2016 article in Nature:

Research on the neural substrates of drug reward, withdrawal and relapse has yet to be translated into significant advances in the treatment of addiction. One potential reason is that this research has not captured a common feature of human addiction: progressive social exclusion and marginalization. We propose that research aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms that link these processes to drug seeking and drug taking would help to make addiction neuroscience research more clinically relevant.⁶

Studying the actual physical activity in the brain to learn how to treat drug addiction is like studying anatomy to learn how to dance. But even as the authors lament the inability of their science to “capture” the phenomenon of social exclusion, they call for more research (and funding) to study the “link” between marginalization and drug addiction. Talk about myopic. And then what? Come up with a pill to treat social exclusion?

I hadn't fully considered Psychology's efforts to “treat” drug addiction like Pharmacology treats kidney stones (but without the success) until being forced to look into it by the SPLC's hiring of Mr. Geis. But I'm glad to have learned about it. Now I know the science backs up my view that there is no scientific treatment for drug addiction, and never will be, because, as a physical ailment, it's neither. The RJBC approach to drug addiction, with our emphasis on social setting and our de-emphasis on the drugs themselves (what you do with your drugs is your own business), is far more cutting edge than the scold method employed by Mr. Geis's useless and expensive methadone maintenance programs. For many of our fellow Americans—actual suffering humans—the RJBC program holds much more promise than more of the same from Mr. Geis and fifty years of failure.

There are several definitions of the word “treatment”. One is “the process of providing medical care”, which is the meaning when Mr. Geis says he runs a “drug treatment program”. But another definition of treatment is “the way in which a subject is dealt with, especially in art or literature”, as in “the book’s treatment of village life is very realistic.”⁷ This is the meaning of treatment when I say the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club is a life treatment program. The RJBC treatment of the life of a man in distress was designed specifically to help the man see that his life is worth living, a treatment of life desperately needed right now among white males in particular—including those addicted to heroin—a treatment science cannot provide.

Craig Nelsen
September 2, 2020

Odysseus Unsheathed

Rebuttal to SPLC's Expert Witness

The Science and Practice Consensus of Drug Addiction Treatment: Principles of Effective Substance Abuse Treatment for Heroin and Other Opioids

Theories of Change: The Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club Program vs. the Principles of Evidence-Based Addiction Treatment

Conclusion