A political committee tied to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that is actively fighting Florida’s pot legalization ballot initiative received one of its largest contributions to date this month from a nonprofit created by the late GOP mega-donor and dedicated drug war hawk Betty Sembler.
Sembler, who died at age 90 in 2022, was a co-founding member of the controversial teen drug rehab program Straight Inc., along with her late husband Mel Sembler, a former U.S. ambassador under President George Bush.
Straight Inc., founded half a century ago in Florida, has been described by at least one former patient as “torture,” as one of several prominent programs that blossomed within the widely criticized “troubled-teen” industry, before Straight was forced out of existence.
Campaign finance records more recently show the Semblers' Florida-based group Save Our Society From Drugs contributed $1 million this month to Keep Florida Clean, a committee chaired by DeSantis' chief of staff, James Uthmeier. The Keep Florida Clean committee, launched in July, was created as an opposition campaign to Florida's Amendment 3, which would legalize recreational marijuana use for adults aged 21 and older, if approved by Florida voters this November.
The late Semblers, based in St. Petersburg prior to their deaths, tossed sizable campaign contributions toward GOP politicians during their time (including DeSantis), and had an extensive history of funding state-level campaigns against efforts to legalize medical marijuana.
According to The Nation, Save Our Society From Drugs for instance also helped bankroll an unsuccessful campaign against Colorado’s historic marijuana legalization ballot initiative in 2012. The group was reportedly the opposition campaign's biggest funder. The Semblers' affiliated nonprofit, the Drug Free America Foundation, similarly threw money into a campaign against a medical marijuana legalization measure in Florida in 2014 (which received majority support from voters, but fell short of the 60 percent threshold needed to pass) and a successful initiative to legalize medical marijuana use in 2016, state campaign finance records show.
The St. Petersburg power couple, in the business of retail real estate development, were reportedly close to the Bush family and eventually (if warily) fundraised for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, after the campaigns of fellow presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, to their chagrin, flopped.
Decades earlier, however, the Semblers became well-known figures in the war on drugs. In 1976, the Semblers co-founded teen residential rehab program Straight Inc., which reportedly attracted the attention and praise of first lady Nancy Reagan, prior to her own rollout of the infamous “Just Say No” to drugs campaign.
Straight Inc., later hit with multiple lawsuits over its treatment of children, was forced to shutter its facilities in the early 1990s (including one in Orlando) after a series of scandals emerged, involving allegations of mental, psychological and physical abuse.
“It robbed me of my innocence,” one 40-year-old survivor told the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times) in 2002, after being forced into a Straight Inc. program in Florida at 16 years old.
Richard Bradbury, another patient from the Tampa Bay area who even graduated from and became a staffer at a Straight program before “campaigning to destroy the organization,” later described the program to the Times as “pure child abuse” and “torture.”
Investigators in California found that teen patients at a Straight Inc. facility there had similarly been subjected to “unusual punishment, infliction of pain, humiliation, intimidation, ridicule, coercion, threats, mental abuse … and interference with daily living functions such as eating, sleeping and toileting” prior to its eventual closure.
Yet the couple nonetheless persevered in their anti-drug advocacy. After the downfall of Straight, the Semblers reportedly changed its name to the Drug Free America Foundation, gutting the treatment component of their advocacy, and created the affiliated Save Our Society From Drugs. The nonprofit is still active and based in St. Pete, along with their son Brent Sembler, who also openly moonlights these days as a political fundraiser for the GOP in addition to serving as vice chairman of his late father's development company.
State campaign finance records show that the Save Our Society From Drugs’ contribution to Keep Florida Clean is the third-largest contribution it has received so far since its launch, behind a $1.1 million donation from Secure Florida’s Future Inc., a nonprofit based in Tallahassee, and a $12 million donation from billionaire hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin.
The anti-pot political committee has raised nearly $14.5 million since it was first launched in July, complementing the separate DeSantis-linked Florida Freedom Fund PAC, which is similarly raising funds to oppose both Amendment 3 and Florida's abortion rights measure, Amendment 4. Meanwhile, Smart & Safe Florida, the cannabis industry-backed committee leading efforts to pass Amendment 3, has raised over $100 million since its launch in 2022, with most of its money coming in from cannabis dispensaries like Trulieve.
Despite DeSantis' voiced opposition to Amendment 3 (due in part to his concern that it will make the state smell bad), the ballot measure has garnered cross-partisan support in the business-friendly Sunshine State, earning endorsements from former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, the Florida Young Republicans, the Libertarian Party of Florida, the Florida Democratic Party and former GOP chairman and state Sen. Joe Gruters. The Florida Chamber of Commerce (confusingly) announced its own opposition to the initiative on April Fools Day in a news released emailed to press at exactly 4:20 p.m.
If Amendment 3 is approved by voters, Florida would join roughly half of the rest of the country that has similarly legalized recreational marijuana use, which advocates say could help boost the state and local economies, and reduce dangers associated with unregulated pot. Amendment 3 needs a "yes" vote from at least 60 percent of voters in order to pass.
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