Which Came First: Addiction or Wilderness Camp? What Do You Do If You Suspect Your Child Is Using Drugs—Would You Send Them to Wilderness Camp?

Francis Bacon once warned that a cure can become more dangerous than the illness it intends to treat. The line is old enough to feel ornamental, the kind of aphorism you encounter engraved on a courthouse wall or buried in a commencement speech. And yet it hovers uncomfortably close to modern parenting decisions—particularly the decision to send a child away, into the wilderness, in the name of saving them.

What Do You Do If You Suspect Your Child Is Using Drugs—Would You Send Them to Wilderness Camp?

The contemporary wilderness program is often marketed as a last resort, a corrective for teenagers who refuse to be corrected. It promises structure where there is chaos, discipline where there is defiance, and—most alluringly—transformation. Parents are told that stripping away distractions will reveal character, that discomfort breeds insight, and that the natural world has a moral authority no therapist can match.

But stories have a way of leaking through brochures.

In 2014, Cracked published an investigation by Robert Evans and Victoria Jane into what has come to be known as the “troubled teen industry.” One account, written in the flat, stunned tone of someone still processing what happened to them, describes waking in the middle of the night to strangers standing over the bed. They introduced themselves as “escorts.” There was no packing. No phone call. No explanation that felt real. The teenager was driven away to a place called “wilderness,” a word that in other contexts suggests freedom, but here meant something closer to disappearance.

The writer compared the experience to being kidnapped—except that the kidnapping, they later learned, had been arranged by their parents. The betrayal, not the fear, was what lingered.

In clinical work, these stories surface with striking regularity. Clients describe sleeping outside for months, being denied basic comforts, forced to hike while ill or injured, punished for emotional responses that were interpreted as manipulation. Some speak of learning endurance, yes—but also of learning something else entirely: that distress will be met not with curiosity, but with escalation.

The Cracked article distilled its findings into six observations. Parents can hire strangers to remove their children from their homes. Those children are handed over to private companies, many of which operate with little to no oversight. Kids have died while enrolled in these programs. Regulation is sparse to nonexistent. The treatment methods—deprivation, confrontation, coercion—often lack empirical support. And perhaps most troubling, the psychological residue does not fade when the program ends.

Trauma, after all, is not erased by survival.

Hannah Gadsby once remarked that people who are harmed by those they trust often assume the blame themselves. It is a neat, devastating insight. When harm is reframed as help, resistance begins to look like pathology. Pain becomes evidence of progress. And the child learns that safety is conditional.

The question, then, is not simply whether wilderness programs work. It is whether the experiences designed to interrupt addiction or behavioral distress sometimes deepen the very wounds that later demand treatment. Whether the story begins with substance use—or with a night when the door opened and strangers walked in.

And whether, in our urgency to fix what frightens us, we sometimes mistake severity for care. The question remains, "What Do You Do If You Suspect Your Child Is Using Drugs—Would You Send Them to Wilderness Camp?"