The Rise And Fall Of Synanon

The definitive account of Synanon. On a fall day in 1978, Los Angeles attorney Paul Morantz reached into his mailbox to collect his mail and was nearly killed. He was bitten by the four-foot-long rattlesnake that had been put there by members of a cultlike group called Synanon. Chuck Dederich—a former Alcoholics Anonymous member who coined the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life"—established Synanon as an innovative drug rehabilitation center near the Santa Monica beach in 1958. Synanon quickly evolved into an experimental commune and religion that attracted thousands of members and was strongly committed to social justice and progressive education. Twenty years later, when Dederich was arrested for the Morantz attack, Synanon had devolved into a paranoid community that followed its egomaniacal leader in whatever direction he chose to take. Based on extensive primary sources and interviews with former members, The Rise and Fall of Synanon explores how the group arose in the context of American social, political, and economic trends. Historian Rod Janzen argues that Synanon's downfall resulted from members giving too much power to Synanon's charismatic founder. The subject of a new documentary and podcast, this community serves as a mesmerizing case study of how alternative societies can change over time and how the general public's reactions to such societies can shift from tolerance to fear and opposition.

Chuck Dederich--a former Alcoholics Anonymous member who coined the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life"--established Synanon as an innovative drug rehabilitation center near the Santa Monica beach in 1958. Synanon evolved quickly into an experimental commune and "religion" that attracted thousands of nonaddict members and was strongly committed to social justice and progressive education. Over 25,000 people were members of Synanon at various times, including jazz musicians Charlie Haden and Stan Kenton; supporters of the group included Senator Thomas Dodd, comedian Steve Allen, and psychologist Abraham Maslow. In its later years, however, the group became involved in highly publicized violent actions--including putting a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a Los Angeles-area attorney--making the group's name synonymous with paranoid cults. Based on extensive primary sources and interviews with former members, The Rise and Fall of Synanon explores how the institution evolved in the context of American social, political, and economic trends. Historian Rod Janzen argues that the group's downfall resulted from members giving too much power to Synanon's charismatic founder and a small group of top-level associates. Media attention focused on the group's cultlike activities, neglecting the community's significant successes in drug rehabilitation and social integration. Janzen's in-depth analysis of Synanon serves as a fascinating case study of how alternative societies can change over time and how the general public's reactions to such societies can shift from tolerance to stances of fear and active opposition.

“Matt Garcia's explosive new history of the United Farm Workers offers an absolutely stunning set of revelations about the internal life of that union while at the same time demonstrating the creative brilliance of those who organized the most important and successful boycott movement since the eve of the American Revolution itself.” —Nelson Lichtenstein, MacArthur Foundation Chair in History, University of California, Santa Barbara “Matt Garcia’s From The Jaws Of Victory has done a great service in not only chronicling in all its compelling detail what once promised to be an unprecedented revolution in the organization of agri-business and the status of its workers, but also in telling this story with all its shadows, flaws, and shortfalls included. Rather than give us a statue in the park with which to track and remember our history, Garcia has given us a living, breathing monument to our actual selves and to who we might have been or yet might be. From The Jaws of Victory is full of perspective, understanding, and respect, a must for anyone who wants to follow the tracks of an uprising in stature and sensibility that powered some of the poorest and hardest working Americans through their rise and fall on the national stage.” —David Harris, author of The Crisis: The President, the Prophet, and the Shah—1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam "From the Jaws of Victory is an essential contribution to the growing body of work on Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers' movement. This unabashedly objective, disciplined, and honest work adds critical new textures to the portrait of an American icon and his complex legacy." —Hector Tobar, author of Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States “Matt Garcia's Jaws of Victory is a gripping, thoroughly researched narrative about the rise and fall of the UFW. The reader will come away with an entirely new perspective on the UFW and its iconic leader, Cesar Chavez. Garcia pulls no punches, and, consequently, the reader is in for a roller-coaster ride of emotion as the author unravels the cocoon that has enshrined the image of Chavez for decades. This book is the historian's craft at its best as Garcia painstakingly takes us through a bevy of untapped primary sources to show us the complex nature of the UFW as it lead the cause for agricultural workers' rights. Garcia reminds us that the UFW should not be defined merely by its leader, but should be understood as a collective group of dedicated, although sometimes flawed, individuals, who transformed the way the American public thought about food consumption and workers' rights.” —Maria E. Montoya, author of Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict Over Land in the American West, 1840-1900 "Matt Garcia places the reader right in the center of the struggles to create, build, and grow the farm workers movement, represented by the emergence of the United Farm Workers of America. But he does more than that. He examines the story of UFW leader Cesar Chavez, not from the standpoint of either further canonizing him or from tearing him down, but from the standpoint of understanding the circumstances in which he was operating, the decisions he made, and some of the fateful mistakes that have had a lasting impact on the UFW. This book made me think of the famous words of the late freedom fighter Amilcar Cabral, who cautioned justice movements to ‘tell no lies; claim no easy victories.’” —Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice "Matt Garcia's activist scholarship and participant observer methods give voice to the volunteers that were the backbone of the farm worker movement. Garcia reveals two themes that are untouched by recent critiques: that the Teamster Union acted at the behest of Richard Nixon, and that Cesar Chavez may never have intended the UFW to be a union in the traditional sense, but instead a model for communal living." —Fernando Gapasin, co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice

In February of 1977, during a weekend visit to her uncle's home in Riverside Valley, California, Celena was taken in the night. Two radicalized women planned the kidnapping. Both were members of the Synanon cult's Kidsnatchers group in Marin. One of the women, Celena would learn, was her mother, whom she had not seen for two and half years. Leaving Los Angeles, she came to enter a strange, secluded world where childhood was an experiment, and no relationship was sacred. Immersed in the strange and deviant society of Synanon, Celena would spend the next five years subject to the unpredictable whims of Charles Dederich, the cult's shadowy leader. In a series of scenes, Synanon Kid chronicles cult living from a young girl's perspective and her search for identity and belonging in a world of physical and familial displacement. From the African American communities of South Central Los Angeles to the racially integrated, yet rural and isolated world of Synanon, Celena tries to make sense of and navigate the dichotomy of the mainstream blue-collar life into which she was born and the counterculture lifestyle she inherited. A haunting tale of estrangement, Synanon Kid, is a coming-of-age story of hope, survival, and determination. It is also a story of the unconditional love between a mother and daughter and how that love helped a young girl to grow and flourish against the odds of her distorted childhood.

In the 1960s, as illegal drug use grew from a fringe issue to a pervasive public concern, a new industry arose to treat the addiction epidemic. Over the next five decades, the industry's leaders promised to rehabilitate the casualties of the drug culture even as incarceration rates for drug-related offenses climbed. In this history of addiction treatment, Claire D. Clark traces the political shift from the radical communitarianism of the 1960s to the conservatism of the Reagan era, uncovering the forgotten origins of today's recovery movement. Based on extensive interviews with drug-rehabilitation professionals and archival research, The Recovery Revolution locates the history of treatment activists' influence on the development of American drug policy. Synanon, a controversial drug-treatment program launched in California in 1958, emphasized a community-based approach to rehabilitation. Its associates helped develop the therapeutic community (TC) model, which encouraged peer confrontation as a path to recovery. As TC treatment pioneers made mutual aid profitable, the model attracted powerful supporters and spread rapidly throughout the country. The TC approach was supported as part of the Nixon administration's "law-and-order" policies, favored in the Reagan administration's antidrug campaigns, and remained relevant amid the turbulent drug policies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While many contemporary critics characterize American drug policy as simply the expression of moralizing conservatism or a mask for racial oppression, Clark recounts the complicated legacy of the "ex-addict" activists who turned drug treatment into both a product and a political symbol that promoted the impossible dream of a drug-free America.

An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine. A rich, sweeping history that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and sociology, The Urge illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold. The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.