Word: synanon
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...Synanon, where success with adult addicts who stay within the supportive framework of the house is high but sadly lower with those who leave completely, Synanon Official Bill Ullman contends: "There is no cure for heroin." Dr. Densen-Gerber believes that teen-agers will be easier to help than adult addicts, if only because they are more resilient physically and emotionally and highly responsive to peer group influence inside a treatment center. But she is at a loss to deal with the Ralphies, the pre-teen junkies who are unable to comprehend that the alternatives to treatment are jail...
...look at it as an infectious disease." Epidemic, of course, is a relative term, but as a Chicago psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Schwarz, says: "Now we're seeing it clinically, whereas before we weren't. The kids on heroin all have long histories of drug use." At the California-based Synanon self-help centers for addicts, the teen-age population has risen from zero five years ago to 400 today. In San Francisco, Dr. Barry Ramer, director of the Study for Special Problems, calls heroin now "the most readily available drug on the streets." He adds: "In my wildest nightmares...
...drug. And it is moving so fast that it is different this year from last year." The traditional barriers between much of society and the users of such hard drugs as heroin, cocaine and morphine are collapsing. "Heroin has become respectable," says Mrs. Harriet Benjamin, a worker at Synanon in Santa Monica, Calif. "The image of the dirty old man in the schoolyard is dead." Ten years ago, middle-class high school kids looked down on heroin users; now it has shed the fear and the lower-class taint. Heroin users are no longer an exclusive club. Heroin is part...
...most accepted means of dealing with the drug addict is through a small, controlled therapeutic community. These residential communities first detoxify, then attempt to rehabilitate the drug user by restructuring his eqo and life pattern. Some, like California's famed Synanon, are run largely by former addicts. They accept only those who have proved their determination to kick the heroin habit, and seek to increase the addict's understanding of himself and his problems through often brutal group-encounter sessions. Others, like New York's city-run Phoenix and Horizon Houses, utilize both ex-addicts and professionals...
...next picture starts before the retinal image of the last has disappeared; a good idea, considering some of the films. Fortunately though there are enough good works to redeem the collection as a whole? an extraordinarily complex abstract film called 7362; a good documentary, Children of Synanon: and Burton Gershfield's Note That the Buffalo's Gone...