Synanon connection,,, I am glad that someone posted the diagram of how all these abusive treatment centers are connected. It is the same diagram that Wes Fager had during his talk at the first conference about abusive treatment centers hosted by Dr. Arnold Trebach, wayback in 2001, in Maryland.
It was a very imfromative and healing conference. It was an awaking to learn that elan was not even an original idea of ricci's but a stolen concept based on the daddy of all cults.
It is apperent that elan was simply a tool to make money for ricci and his henchmen. Whether or not people suceeded upon leaving elan did not matter to these men. If you were not damaged by elan you were lucky. Many people were not so lucky ,,,some ended up in prison,,, some ended up being emotional cripples,,,and some ended up dead for simply having come in contact with elan.
During my time there in the early 70's there were many junkies in there . Mixing hardcore drug addicts with children , not a good thing. I will not forget what Jerry G. said after marty kruglik's graphic one man act play about all things related to shooting dope,,, from scoring ,locating a place to shoot,cooking, tying off, registaring and booting, and what the effect was like . Personally as a young kid I had no idea why this intense glamourization of heroin was a positive thing for the addicts cause it made them scworm and very uneasy and of course what Jerry said was just nuts. A drug so powerful.
Simply put elan was an unoriginal idea that was incoporated (literaly) to make money off of families in crises. Whether or not it (elan) actually helped was the last thing on the owners and operators of this corporation. It was how many can we get (residents) and how much can we make. It suckered the states who sent their charges there. All for the love of money. And the Damage that it did ,,, just screams from these forums. elan was a very dangerous place . ricci found a way to incorporate a cult and not a very good one at that. Synanon the mother of them all ,,,no pun intended.