Firm That Tracks Down Teen Drug Addicts Comes Under Fire : Regulators: Once found, the runaways, at the direction of the parents, are transported to treatment facilities. The state is investigating the company for not having the proper licenses.

When their 15-year-old daughter ran away from their Simi Valley home in 1988 after a history of cocaine use, Donald and Alice Soeder were frustrated and scared.

They wanted their daughter, Jane, off the streets and in a drug abuse treatment program, but they had only a vague idea of where to find her and no clue of how to get her to help.

On the advice of a Port Hueneme drug treatment facility, the Soeders called S&L; Teen Hospital Shuttle, a Canoga Park firm that transports youths with drug problems, sometimes forcibly, to treatment programs.

Within days, using photographs of the girl and telephone records, the firm found her and drove her--with her hands and feet bound--to the Port Hueneme facility. Two years after Jane completed treatment, she and her parents have nothing but praise for S&L.; “There was no way that they by themselves could have gotten me,” Soeder said of her parents.

But the firm, the only one of its kind currently operating in the Los Angeles area, has also drawn criticism from some drug treatment officials and the attention of regulatory officials.

S&L; operates as both a transport and an investigative service, those who have used the firm said. Sometimes the company simply drives stubborn youths with drug problems from their homes to treatment centers. In other cases, such as Jane Soeder’s, it tracks down addicted teens who have run away from home, then restrains them during the drive to rehabilitation facilities.

State officials last month began investigating the company, which is recommended to parents of addicted teens by a handful of Los Angeles drug treatment facilities.

S&L; is authorized by the state to operate as a transport service. It is registered with the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency that licenses businesses such as limousines, buses and airport shuttles.

The firm is listed in the telephone book as an ambulance service, but is not licensed as such by the city, county, or state, officials said.

Neither is S&L; licensed to conduct private investigative work. Last month, the California Department of Consumer Affairs’ Bureau of Collection and Investigative Services began to investigate S&L;, said Gretchen Werry, the bureau’s program coordinator.

Leslie Miller, who with Steven Sawhill owns and operates S&L; out of the couple’s Canoga Park house, referred questions about the firm and the state investigation to their lawyer, Larry Mandell.

“They just transport kids that have drug problems because the parents can’t do it for themselves,” Mandell said. “They have their referrals, and things are working out good, and they’d just like to keep it at that.”

Mandell declined to discuss S&L; or the state’s investigation in more detail.

The Department of Consumer Affairs last week sent S&L; a “cease and desist” letter ordering the firm either to shut down permanently or to stop the investigative part of its work until it applies for and receives the proper state license, said Denise Grayson, the department investigator assigned to the S&L; case.

Miller and Sawhill will have one month from the day they receive the letter to respond, Werry said. If they ignore the letter or cannot show that they have proper licensing, she said, the department ultimately could recommend prosecution.

Operating as a private investigator without a state license is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and a jail term of up to one year, Werry said.

To obtain a private investigator’s license, an applicant must perform 6,000 hours--approximately three years--of investigative work with either a law enforcement agency or a private detective firm and must pass a written test, Grayson said.

The “cease and desist” letter sent by the Consumer Affairs Department this week was the second such notice mailed to S&L; in a year. On Aug. 3, 1989, days after they learned of S&L; in a magazine article that mentioned the firm, officials from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation sent the firm a letter ordering it either to obtain a transport service license or shut down, said Donald Mansion, a DOT investigator.

It was nine days later--on Aug. 12, 1989--that Sawhill and Miller applied for state authorization to operate as a transport service.

In their permit application, the couple identified themselves as an equal partnership under the name “SLTHS.” They claimed five years of experience in the transport field, and described their business only as “shuttling teen-agers and adults to requested destination.”

Drug treatment workers who have referred parents to S&L; said the firm charges a fee based on driving distance and time involved in locating and transporting each teen-ager. One treatment worker said the fee averages $600 per case.

Brent Lamb, administrator of Anacapa Adventist Hospital, a 48-bed juvenile psychiatric hospital in Port Hueneme that uses S&L; “a couple times a month,” said S&L;’s fee is not covered by patients’ medical insurance. He said Anacapa, the facility to which S&L; took Jane Soeder, pays the transport fees for the teen-agers it receives from S&L;, and does not pass those fees on to the youths’ parents.

There is no law prohibiting private citizens from helping parents find and retrieve a runaway child, even if the effort requires them to use “reasonable force,” said Dallas Binger, a consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department’s juvenile narcotics unit. But anyone who does so as a business must be licensed for the task, Binger said.

Past S&L; customers said the firm’s workers do not carry weapons, and that when they suspect they may confront violence in retrieving a teen-ager they contact police for backup help. But neither Binger nor the police departments reported by customers to have helped S&L; in individual cases said they had heard of the shuttle company.

Customers and treatment centers who have used the firm said they knew of no instance in which S&L; injured a teen-ager under its care. Many praised the company as acting professionally and compassionately in an obscure and poorly regulated field where the potential for abuse is great.

“You’ve got to know what you’re doing,” said Dan Leon, program coordinator for the Avalon adolescent drug treatment program at Coldwater Canyon Hospital in North Hollywood, a 30-bed facility that receives approximately 25% of its patients from S&L.; “You’ve got to know how to deal with the kid. That’s why we use them. We know they’re not going to rough the kid up unnecessarily.”

But several people who work in the adolescent drug treatment field, including some who said they have referred parents to S&L;, said they objected to the company’s tactics.

“It sounds like somebody else trying to exploit the drug problem,” said Scott Lewis, a spokesman for the California Department of Health Services, who said he had not heard of S&L.; “You know what it reminds me of? The old deprogramming days,” he said, referring to firms hired by parents to retrieve teen-agers who ran away from home to join cults.

Some drug treatment experts took issue with the concept of forcing teen-agers to enter drug treatment centers against their will.

“When kids come to programs like this, the more you strong-arm them into the program the less they’ll work in the program,” said Chris Layton, clinical supervisor of Renew Life, a 23-bed, nonprofit facility for teens with drug or behavioral problems located at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank.

“Often these shuttle services are hired to force a person into a situation they don’t want to be in,” said Layton, who said he referred parents to S&L; in the past. “In that case, you end up spending the first few weeks just working on that issue.”

Others who work with adolescent drug abusers, however, argued that forced entry into a treatment program is sometimes necessary.

“It’s not as simple as, ‘They have to want the help to get it,’ ” said Jay Cavanaugh, president of the board of directors of Interagency Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Programs, a nonprofit group that runs four non-residential adolescent drug treatment centers in the Los Angeles area and that has used S&L; in the past. “There are a lot of times when the kids are very ill.”

“It is definitely the last of the last resorts,” said Cindy Hobbs, intake coordinator for the Life Plus Treatment Center in Panorama City, a private adolescent program that uses S&L; about twice a month, usually to retrieve runaway teens. But, Hobbs stressed, “I would rather see a kid in a hospital safe than out on the streets and using. If that’s what needs to be done to get the child in, then that’s what needs to happen.”