Posted by Wesley (216.164.133.254) on April 01, 2000 at 10:28:16:
I found a web page that posters here should be interested in. But first a few words of why it should interest us.
In 1958 a recovering alcoholic from Ohio named Charles Dederick started a program to get heroine addicts to quit cold turkey. It was another 'anon' program like Alcoholics Anonymous, Naranon and Narcanon. He called his anon program Synanon. (There's an early newspaper article which claims the name came from Sins Anonyous). Synanon was founded in Ocean Park Califonia (the cheap side of Santa Monica). In the 1960s a noted New York psychiatrist named Dan Casriel visited Synanon in conjunction with his work to find the final solution to the heroine addiction problem in New York City. He was so impressed with Synanon that he wrote the book So Fair A House which, combined with UCLA sociologist Lewis Yablonsky's book, The Tunnel Back, put Synanon on the map. (Professor Yablonsky, who married a Synanite woman, later joined its board of directors.) The technology that Dederick developed is based on the communist doctrine that peer pressure can control one's thoughts. He developed this no-holds verbal attack therapy where addicts assisted in their own recovery by shouting indictments at one another in a 12-man circle called The Game (or synanon, small case.) [In a Straight synanon, 100 - 700 kids shout down indictments at the defenseless indictee. Parents participate in milder "Games" or synanons like parent-to-parent concerns where one's fellows take turns standing him up to indict him for one charge after another, like you left vanilla flavor out, and it has alcohol in it, and my daughter is a drug addict, and your irresponsibility could have caused her to relapse, "but I love you". Of course we parents were subjected to more intensive synanons too, like Parent Weekend, which was an implementation of Synanon's The Trip, a specially designed 72 hour Game where Dederick says he tried to replicate an LSD trip without the use of drugs (Chuck says he used LSD as a volunterer in a govenrnment research project.) In the early 1970s The National Institute on Mental Health tried to emulate its own Synanon program at the federal lockup hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. The US government stab was called MATRIX. MATRIX was a dismal failure. Evidence pointed that Synanon's success depended on having a charasmitic leader like Charles Dederick. Many people tried to emulate Synanon. Places like Daytop Lodge and Phoenix House in NYC. The most successful for kids-only Synanon follow-on was The Seed founded in June 1970 in Fort Lauderdale by the charismatic Art Barker. (Art had come from NYC). The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was so impressed with The Seed that it gave Barker a $1 million grant. Drug Czar Robert DuPont led NIDA while Barker was being funded his grant money. Barker had visions of making Seeds all over the state of Florida and then all over the country. But in 1974 the US Senate published a study which accused The Seed of using methods which it likened to Communist brainwashing techniques. Besides this unwanted bad-press, The Seed was having other difficulties. The Senate was cracking down on NIDA in its consideration of a request from Barker for another cool million to expand his services throughout Florida. The Senate had told NIDA that Barker was doing human experimentations and that NIDA's own regulations required the people being experimented upon to sign statements of consent. And then there was the new host home regulations. The state of Florida's HRS had adopted a set of standards of how to regulate the host home element of The Seed and Barker said he had problems with those new regulations. Under the weight of all these problems Art Barker gave up on his expansion plans, but today continues to operate in Fort Lauderdale--for 18 years and above.
On April 22, 1976 Mel and Betty Sembler, and some other former Seed parents from the Saint Petersburg Seed created their own Synanon-based program they called Straight, Inc. Melvin Sembler was a successful businessman involved in shopping center develoment and operation. In 1972 an attorney named Ronald Goldfarb had written a book on prison reform in which he recommended that synanons be employed as the primary drug treatment modality for prisoners who had a drug use problem. The reviewer of his book on his chapter on drug treatment was none other than Robert DuPont. Ten years later when Fred Collins was awarded $220,000 by a federal jury for being falsely imprisoned (there would have been a greater award but the jury did not feel that Fred had proven his case that he had been abused at Straight). Straight's attorney at that celebrated trial was Ronald Goldfarb. Straight's primary medical expert witness was Robert DuPont.
After leaving NIDA, one of the things that Robert DuPont did was to become a paid consultant for Straight. He has testified that it was his idea to get Straight to go national. He has testified that it was he who got Nancy Regean interested in Straight. Straight gained national prominence through Nancy Regean's indorsements and visits to various Straight camps. So it took the team of a prominent political psychiatrist, a wealthy, politically-connected businessman, and the charasmatic Reverend Doctor V. Miller Newton to do what Chuck Dederick and Art Barker had tried so hard to do, but failed. (Besides several compounds in California, Chuck operated facilities in Puerto Rico, Germany, New York, Connecticutt, Detroit, and other places. Barker's only forage outside of Florida was in Ohio, not far from Chuck Dederick's birth place. It only lasted a matter of weeks.) Straight became the national-level synanon. Rober DuPont has made of lot of money going around the country as an expert witness for Straight in its many civil suits. His name is bandied around whenever law enforcement officials look at Straight's criminal activities. By 1993 Straight's reputation for violence, violation of civil rights and human dignities had become so well known that Straight closed down. But then many former Straight officials opened up their own Straight-like programs--often out of the same facilites that Straight had operated from.
Rober DuPont has testified in court that Straight is a therapeutic community and it is descended, like most all modern day therapeutuc communities, from Synanon which he says became a cult because you never left. He has trestified that two things that Synanon was not involved in was 1. sex, 2. violence.
The following web page is from a courageous woman from North Carolina who grew up in Synanon. Her accounting, which agrees with my intensive research on this bizarre church, is that while Synanon may have stated goals of no sex and violence, that the ever changing Synanon was anything but. Enjoy.
http://www.gfonline.org/Synanon/jj-01.html
Wes Fager