Called Business Lure : D.A. to Probe Teen Drug Abuse Project

The San Diego County district attorney’s office will investigate charges that the controversial, nonprofit teen-age drug rehabilitation program Freeway was little more than a front to channel paying clients into the $5,000-a-month SLIC (Sober Live-In Center) Ranch rehabilitation program, spokesman Steve Casey said Tuesday.

Casey said a district attorney’s investigator will conduct a “preliminary inquiry” into the charges contained in a letter that was delivered to the grand jury Tuesday by Paul Britton, a former executive director of Freeway, before deciding whether the matter warrants a full-fledged investigation.

In his letter to the grand jury, Britton alleged that Bob Meehan established Freeway as a free, community-based program to attract parents who to send their children to his privately run SLIC Ranch near Escondido to break them of their addiction to drugs or alcohol.

Freeway was disbanded Friday by its board of directors in the wake of criticism from former staff members and teen-age participants. Critics said that while the organization was successful in helping teen-agers stay off drugs and alcohol, it made the teen-agers psychologically dependent on Meehan, who founded Freeway and SLIC Ranch in 1981.

Britton and others have charged that Meehan-trained Freeway counselors encouraged teen-agers to rely so heavily on peer support from other Freeway followers to maintain their sobriety that they abandoned their old friends, schools and, in some cases, their families in favor of being with one another.

Meehan denied Britton’s allegations.

“There’s not one piece of truth to any of them,” he said. “This is like a divorce, where something of love turns into hate and there are crazy accusations and half-truths.”

He likened the charges to “McCarthyism.”