LSD gave birth to synanon... http://www.manasjournal.org/pdf_library ... XIV-06.pdf
Here's that lead article copied out (pp 1-6 out of 13):
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Manas Journal -
LEAD ARTICLEVolume XIV, No. 6
February 8, 1961
SYNANON REVISITEDIN late August of last year, an editor of MANAS, having heard that a group of ex-drug addicts, housed by Synanon, Inc., were having some trouble with the authorities, suggested that we visit their home and headquarters at 1351 Ocean Front, in Santa Monica. That visit was one of the most exciting evenings either of us had experienced, and before noon the next day, I had finished writing the article, "ExAddicts, Incorporated," that appeared in MANAS for Sept. 14, 1960. Synanon House had exuded an aura of successful living that overpowered my skepticism about addicts staying "clean" under any but the most extraordinary auspices.
I was puzzled and intrigued; I had to see more of Synanon. There was no trouble about that; Charles E. (Chuck) Dederich, and his board of directors, not only invited me to visit whenever I chose, but insisted that I move in and stay as long as I wished.
Move in, I did—first for a week; then, a month and a half ago, for a period which will continue until I complete a book about Synanon and its people. Living with fifty or more dope fiends—their own designation for themselves—might seem an adventure to some, or a novel way of gathering morbid material, but to me it has been an experience in a new dynamic of family life that each day brings some fresh reward.
At one time, I counselled drug addicts in a clinic within a penal institution, and was continually depressed by the hopelessness they felt and which I couldn't break through. My civil service title was "Mental Health Therapist," but to the addicts I was only an odd sort of warden who had been hired so that the public could compensate for at least a little of the guilt felt for punishing sick men. Here, in Synanon, people sometimes seek my counsel, and since I am no longer an apologist for a sick society I can give freely of the little I know and have it taken seriously by the free man who comes to me. And I'm far from depressed and hopeless about the addicts I live with.
The essence of Synanon is the open door that swings both ways. The sick, outlawed, and harried addict who is under an irresistible compulsion to commit at least $50 worth of crime every day in order to pay for his habit, can enter Synanon and find a haven. There he will have to kick his habit the hard way, just as he would have to in jail, or in a State Hospital where derision would be the rule, and sympathy a novelty. In Synanon, however, sympathy and empathy are the rule in the period between indoctrination and the day that drug-free health returns. If at any point the addict decides that the going is too tough, he can walk out, although Synanon members will try to discourage him from doing so. Thus, when he does kick the habit "cold turkey," without the aid of drugs, he has a feeling of accomplishment that he wouldn't have had under any other circumstances. He has made a moral investment in Synanon, and is part of it.
"No addict ever comes to Synanon for a cure," Chuck Dederich states flatly. Interviews with members prove him right in this statement. Most come because the law is breathing down their neck, or because they need a respite from the everincreasing amount of crime their habit demands. If they kick and get built up physically, they can then go back to drugs with a habit that will be less demanding, for a while, at least. A man I interviewed recently, an addict of 20 years standing who can make money easier than most, told me he came in to cut down on his habit, and when he was clean—completely off drugs—he stayed on, just to see if a couple of other old-timers would make it. For several months, a sort of malicious curiosity kept him clean, and then he began to notice that he felt better than he had ever before in his life. As a child, he had been taught that the only wrong was being caught, and that right was doing well for yourself in a material way, preferably by crime. Up until eight months after entering Synanon, he had adhered strictly to the criminal code. Now, after eighteen months in the group, he admits—with some embarrassment—that his new ethic and morality may have ruined him as a hustler and dope fiend. Actually, you'd have to search for an addict less likely to stay off drugs. "By enabling man to go right, disabling him to go wrong" is a slogan Synanon has taken from Lao-Tze. The man I have just described is a living example of that slogan in action.
Although Synanon now has enough experienced "old-timers" to expand and open new houses, Chuck Dederich, the founder, continues as something more than a leader. In the past, there were times when he was incapable of even leading himself, but you have to take his word for that, since it's impossible to know him now, and think of him as less than a leader in any situation. He has the carriage of a gladiator, and his features are square and aggressive. Even when he's relaxing, which is a lot of the time, he exudes an aura of power. He might be thought to be rigid, stubborn and impervious to ideas from the outside, but behind this façade is a man whose intuitions and intellectual curiosity leaven the rigidity and stubbornness. He has the toughness that he knows is needed to control dope fiends, but when this is used to keep men and women from destroying themselves, no one can doubt the tenderness hidden behind it. He has learned the hard way that the kind of "tender loving care" that allows a dope fiend a few pills or an occasional fix doesn't work, and that a permissiveness which lets them go out on their own too soon is destructive.
Four or five years ago, Chuck realized that he was an alcoholic and had lost control of his life. His drinking was so progressive and uninterrupted that when he went to Alcoholics Anonymous and sobered up, he decided that he had had his first and last hangover. In keeping with his obsessive personality, he threw himself completely into the work of that organization, giving up his job, his home, and living "catch as catch can." During this period, he was undoubtedly storing away a lot of knowledge of the addictive personality without any idea of how he would make use of it. Then, one day, he heard that a psychiatrist from UCLA was giving LSD (a form of lysergic acid) to alcoholics in an attempt to bring their problems to the surface. He decided to give this theory a test.
What happened can only be handled sketchily here. Chuck was an atypical patient in that he experienced no regression, no sensory enhancement or hallucinations. During the active period of LSD intoxication, his normal traits appeared merely in a sort of caricature. One phrase that came into his mind impressed him: "It doesn't matter, but, at the same time it matters exquisitely." He would go to his room and give way to tears for an hour or more every day. Even with the seeming grief, there was euphoria.
When the grief-bearing memories and the euphoria left, the strange feeling of omnipotence and omniscience that had been with him from the beginning continued. He felt that he could resolve all paradoxes and, indeed, he did seem to confound many of the people he met and argued with. This lasted for nearly six months, but after that it remained certain that he had undergone a personality change. As the psychiatrist who had given him the LSD put it, "You were poised and were mustering your forces toward a goal that wasn't clear to you, and the LSD experience triggered those forces." Another LSD treatment simply made Chuck a little tipsy for a few hours. The omnipotence and omniscience of the earlier period had vanished, but he felt more sure of himself than he ever had before.
Anyone who knows Chuck knows that he is a realist who has very little belief in magic, chemical or otherwise, and yet he believes, with what seems good reason, that LSD was responsible for the personal clarity and drive from which Synanon emerged. He now thinks that LSD is not safe for alcoholics and addicts. The three alcoholics who took the drug with him have all gone to pot. Every member of Synanon who has taken LSD has returned to drugs, or become impossible to deal with. In his case, however, LSD does seem to have released a man to meet his destiny.
He rented an apartment in Ocean Park, and soon it became a haven for alcoholics who wanted to discuss their own and the world's problems. Soon he was sleeping on the davenport, and ex-drunks with no place to go were sleeping on his bed and on the floor. Although Chuck's education was Jesuit, the stress on religion in A.A. bothered him, and the psychological and philosophical approach, as well as the sociological, seemed to him to be neglected. Soon he had attracted a small group, and they were holding what he calls "Anonymous Anonymous Meetings," a sort of self-help group without a professional leader. A moderator was chosen from the group. Chuck was almost always the moderator, and as word of the group spread, there were several meetings each week. What set this work apart was that Chuck had a knack of getting people to take the wraps off and really have at it. The landlord was soon complaining of the noise.
At about this time, the only dope fiend Chuck had ever knowingly met showed up, and soon he attracted several others. To the surprise of everyone, some of them actually began staying off drugs. Without Chuck particularly willing it, a colony began to form around him, those with money chipping in to pay for the food and rent of those without. What is now known as Synanon had begun to take shape; more drug addicts were coming to meetings, and caste-conscious alcoholics were dropping out. Chuck didn't know much about drug addicts at that stage, but of one thing he was sure—they would do better under one roof where he could keep an eye on them.
An old store building was rented, furniture and bedding hustled, and what was known as the T.L.C. Club (tender loving care) was open for "business," with almost forty customers and no money in the cash register. The Beatnik joints up the street were not as colorful by design as T.L.C. was by necessity. Each meal meant that a few dollars had to be raised somewhere. "It will emerge" and "It doesn't matter" became slogans. Candles were used at night and after group therapy, addict musicians would form a combo and release their hostility, or feeling of victory, as the case might be. But out of the chaos, where the moans of agony of those kicking the drug habit mixed in with the exuberance of those who were clean and those who were using drugs on the sly, order was emerging. Chuck was getting tougher at the group sessions, and he was learning about drug addicts from those he counselled personally. The wild, authority-hating complex of misfits he had collected looked up to him and made strong and positive transferences, and respectfully called him "Dad."
Then came "the night of the big cop out." Synanon picked up the center of its unifying dynamic overnight. Some of the members had been smoking marijuana and taking fixes of heroin on the sly. They'd been letting Chuck down, but, more important, they had been letting themselves down. By almost unanimous consent they agreed to tell the truth to Chuck and the members who had stayed clean. One after the other, nearly twenty members got up and contritely admitted their guilt. Chuck may have been touched by this, but it didn't make him any less tough. When he asked them where they got the drugs and they refused to tell, reverting to the code of the streets, he told them that so long as they used that code, they were "slobs and puking little punks" who deserved the end they'd meet in some alley or jail. The sources of supply were then revealed and forwarded to narcotic officers, who apparently didn't take the information seriously. After that, trusted and forceful members of the club policed the neighborhood. What was important was that the new code of honesty was born that night, and a new sense of responsibility.
"Dope fiends take dope," Chuck says bluntly. "As long as they are dope fiends, they are no damned good; they are slobs and thieves with the temperaments of nasty little children. When they stop using dope, they're something else again. They need self-respect and then general respect more than they do sympathy. Pity will send them running for a fix; too much laxness with them in the early stages makes them take their problems in adjustment too lightly. I may seem rough on them at times, but I have to be their guts, until they develop guts for themselves. The most severe punishment I can offer is banishment and for guys who have spent most of their time wanting to get out of jail, that really startles them. They really get the idea of the open door then, and what responsibility means."
Chuck admits that, in the early days, dozens of addicts who might make good in the Synanon of today were lost because of a lack of know-how. He compares the process of improvement to a collander in which the holes of escape are becoming smaller every year. "Even though some of our most successful members have records as tough as you could find," Chuck says, "it may be that they were ready to get well if given a half chance. So far as making a record is concerned, it is possible that they are giving us a break in our early days by making such fantastic recoveries. We can handle more resistive addicts now. Who knows what we will be able to do in five years?"
In the little store-front building, Synanon was chartered as a California corporation. Then, after leasing the old Armory—a former beach club, really—the problem of raising funds became acute, and without any formal books, and nothing but sheer drive and faith, Chuck succeeded in getting the Synanon Foundation accepted by the Federal Government as a non-profit organization, with a tax exemption for donors. All this was done in two years, and mainly by one man who had to be the equivalent of a father to nearly seventy emotionally immature adults that society had despaired of, and wanted to keep in prison.
Now, a little over two years from an uncertain beginning, Synanon House is a home in which gracious living is provided for fifty or some people. At least 75 per cent of the cash expenses are met by the wholly voluntary contributions of Synanon members who hold jobs outside. As an example, one of the men who contributes most of his pay check plans to make Synanon his home for life. At 35, with twelve years of prison behind him, he is holding down the first job he has ever had. His employers, who have hired two other Synanon members, know all about him. This week, he took on the added assignment of carrying the firm's funds to the bank—thousands of dollars each day. This is a man who was once convicted of armed robbery to get money for dope. In all his years in prisons, State and Federal, no attempt was made to rehabilitate him. Once he saw a psychiatrist for a half hour.
The key to the success of Synanon is the synanons, as the self-help therapy meetings are called. These are held three times a week, and the members rotate so that no group is ever the same. Chuck Dederich insists that people release their "gut level" feelings—the ones with strong emotional content. The group discussions, or "war parties," as they should sometimes be called, may deal with an individual's problem as he feels it, or as another senses it. If it is felt that a person is withholding material about himself, he may undergo a virtual inquisition. Anything anyone does that might lead him back to drugs is attacked incisively. Sometimes, it will sound as if a fight is going to break out, but it never does. Physical violence is a number one cause for banishment from Synanon. Hearing the violence of the arguments at the synanons, and then seeing happy and relaxed people gather afterwards for refreshments, is a shock, until you understand that each has reached some sort of catharsis, or release.
Reid Kimball, who has been off drugs for 20 months after twenty years of addiction, gave me an example of his experience of part of the maturing process that developed through synanons. He has always been a short-tempered, impetuous, easily riled man who could be very tough on such occasions. In short, he was the type of person who could truthfully say, "I've never taken anything off anyone." He'd made an arrangement for another man to sweep under his bed and hadn't noticed that this chore had been neglected. There was an inspection of his section of the dormitory, and when the inspector saw the dirt, he turned Reid's bed over, and bawled him out. Reid saw red. In swift succession he shifted the blame to the inspector, the guy who had neglected to sweep, some members who were laughing, and finally to the whole of Synanon. In his past, the answer to this situation would have been to commit mayhem on as many people as he could lay hands on, and then go out and take a big shot of dope. As he sat on his up-turned bed to muster his forces, the anger suddenly became ridiculous. The whole ludicrous process of his thinking came into focus. He saw that it didn't even matter that he protest his genuine innocence about the dirt. For the first time in his life, he was able to shrug off an assault on his ego, and put his vanity and pride in their rightful places. He had a feeling of security without knowing why. A little incident, but a moment that dramatized a major change in a man's life. He really "dug" Synanon from that moment on and is now a member of the Board of Directors.
Chuck seems to have known intuitively that a man's subjective world is only as deep as his objective world is wide. The noon seminars at Synanon House, dealing as they do with concepts taken from science and the humanities, give the members an ever-widening scope and encourage reading. As their world and interests expand, the members are better able to find words with which to express their feelings; they gain self-confidence, and their reasoning ability improves. Professional people who observe the seminars are tremendously impressed with the range and seriousness of the discussions.
Synanon owes much, of course, to the family life that it has created at Synanon House. Each one contributes according to his or her ability; some cook, sew, or iron and keep house; others hustle for and pick up the food contributed by friendly local merchants. All this makes for a busy family. Everyone is expected to express himself fully—within the realm of good taste—at synanons, and even good taste can be dropped if need be. Without spying, a concern is shown that enables the coordinators to know if anything is wrong with anyone.
Laughter can be heard in the house during most of the waking hours, and almost always there are groups in serious discussion. Usually there are visitors about, some of whom enjoy using Synanon House as a hang-out. Following the injunction, "Display before you are investigated," Synanon lets officials and professional people stroll where they will, and talk to whomever they wish. With the exception of three people who had warrants out for them before they entered Synanon, there has never been an arrest made at the House. In fact, they have had to call the police about their neighbors. Fifty abstaining drug fiends live a life that could be envied by their neighbors. Twenty of them go out to work in the morning and return in the evening, just as other people do. Eighteen Negroes are members of the family, as well as three or four from other minority groups, and there is no friction. Here is a small, intense culture that should exist at peace within the larger culture, and perhaps teach it something.
A young minister of one of the leading churches in Santa Monica decided that the Synanon method would be helpful to a group of young married couples. They came to Synanon House to learn the technique and are now meeting in their own homes with Synanon members—ex-addicts and exconvicts—attending. Here is an exchange where normal citizens and formerly anti-social people learn the truth about each other. Synanon members have also gone out and spoken at over fifty service clubs and churches, and are in constant demand. In this way, a positive contribution is being made to the city of Santa Monica. In addition the seventy members who are staying off the drugs through Synanon represent $3,500 worth of crime that is being prevented each day, for that is what dope would cost them if they were using. They could get it only by crime. In prison, they would collectively cost the tax-payer around $500 per day for room, board and wardens. Synanon seems to point to a humanistic solution to a large part of our dope problem—something our society should welcome, when dope is in the headlines every other day.
In a time when there are supposed to be professionally structured programs for every human situation, even though they exist for token groups only, and when there isn't enough professional help available to meet the realistic needs of society, nonprofessional groups are suspect, and often outlawed, unless they at least profess to rely on God to an extraordinary degree. Synanon, of course, falls into the category of suspect organizations. As Chuck Dederich says, "We follow the policy of no policy—none of the other methods of getting dope fiends off drugs have worked, so why should we imitate them? We have the largest number of abstaining dope fiends in the world—people who are living behind open doors, and even moving out into their own apartments. We aren't doing as well as we will in the future, but we are doing something that all who wish to investigate can see. . . ."
In the days of his LSD euphoria, Chuck thought he could resolve every paradox, but some that have arisen lately have made him doubt his powers as well as his reason. Here are a few:
State parole officers have called on Synanon members for help in their group-therapy meetings with parolees, yet both parolees and parole officers are forbidden to enter Synanon House, even for a visit.
The state hospital inspector says that Synanon isn't operating a hospital, and refuses to inspect it. Yet, Synanon was convicted in the lower courts of operating a hospital illegally, then given a stay of execution so that it could continue to break the law! (The conviction has been appealed to the United States Supreme Court.)
Businessmen of Santa Monica contribute $5,000 each month in goods and services to Synanon and Dr. B. Casselman risks his practice to act as the family doctor, yet the officials who represent this community have condemned and prosecuted Synanon without even conducting a thorough investigation of what it is doing.
The list of paradoxes could be expanded on and on. For example, the California Adult Authority ordered seven parolees out of Synanon when they were doing well and passing their weekly Nalline test (a medical method of determining whether a person is using heroin). Without the support of Synanon, five of the seven have since returned to jail. Not long before this happened, Dr. Donald R. Cressy, Dean of Anthropology and Sociology at UCLA, and a noted criminologist, told a meeting of parole officers that Synanon "is the most significant experiment into the narcotic problem that is being made today." But Santa Monica's leading paper, the
Outlook, boasts that it won't be content until it has run Synanon out of town.
The fear that seventy former addicts who are no longer taking drugs has created among officialdom, and in a sizeable segment of society, is awesome. When confronted, none of Synanon's enemies can give a clear explanation for their fear. Significantly, none of them bother to investigate the object of their hatred. In a sense, the situation is frightening, since it seems to partake of the free-floating anxiety that some neurotic people try to release by converting it into frenzy and aiming it at any object toward which they can whip up hatred. Possibly, a part of our society is so sick that it can't stand seeing people organize
to get well, especially when they do it their own way.
WALKER WINSLOW
Santa Monica, Calif.
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