Word: synanon
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...addicts. Dederich established a nononsense, self-help program that included the "game," a rugged encounter session in which participants acted out their inmost hostilities. Learning the truth about themselves supposedly helped them stay off drugs or booze. But in recent years, Dederich has had more grandiose ambitions and transformed Synanon into a religious cult with himself as high priest and prophet. It now attracts fewer addicts and more middle-class eccentrics in search of new adventures in living...
Since its shoestring beginning in an Ocean Park, Calif., garage, Synanon has done very well by itself. The taxexempt, nonprofit organization has 883 adults and 300 children living in luxury on two ranches in the Sierra foothills, beach-front property in Santa Monica and Tomales Bay and in a converted San Francisco paint factory. Most members pay a minimum $400 a month for room, board and uplift, but some contribute much more. One woman has donated more than $1 million. Synanon's assets, including ten aircraft and 400 cars, trucks and motorcycles, total almost $30 million. Its advertising...
Indeed, the people at Synanon are treated much as if they were interchangeable automobile parts, and Dederich is certainly in the driver's seat. He makes the rules as he goes along, and the members never know what is coming next. "Chuck is marvelous," says Terri Haberman, 30, who has lived at Synanon for nine years. "He has this amazing quality of being able to articulate what we want to do before we even know what it is we want...
...Dederich decided that because he was giving up smoking, everybody else would too. In 1975 the women at Synanon began shaving their heads. Any that refused were ostracized. When Dederich's wife Betty went on a diet in 1976, all the other members had to cut down on the vittles. That same year Dederich concluded that Synanon had too many kids. So all the men were pressured into having vasectomies, except Dederich. "I am not bound by the rules," he says. "I make them...
...course, for everybody. While Synanon has moved in new, provocative directions, its membership has dropped from a peak of 1,800 in 1972 to 1,183 today. Among those to leave was Dederich's brother William, who did not want to break up his marriage of 37 years. Those who stay at Synanon seem to be as hooked on the place as any junkie on his drugs. "They want somebody to tell them what to do," says Sydney Fischer, who left the commune in 1976 after living there for four years. "It's like having a big daddy...