Charles Dederick founded Synanon, evolving from a 1958 "Tender Loving Care Club" into a cult by 1965. Initially integrating members like Lena Lindsay and Betty Coleman, the program utilized "the game"—ritualized verbal abuse—to enforce conformity through trauma bonding. After Dederick arrested for running an unlicensed hospital in 1962, he leveraged the publicity to attract celebrities and expand into a business empire. By the late 1960s, Synanon barred graduations, seized assets from "squares," and deployed a private police force, transforming from a therapeutic community into a dictatorial organization aiming to build a new world order. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:04:13
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you, I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In Media Res opening to a podcast.
Oh, like we were having a fun conversation that we just let you in on halfway through.
Good times.
Oh, I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards.
Easily our best opening yet.
My guest again, as is always my guest when I actually nail an introduction, Mr. Paul F. Tompkins.
Paul.
Hello, everyone.
Oh, did you enjoy that absolutely real conversation that we let the audience in on halfway through?
I haven't had a conversation like that in such a long time, and it's refreshing.
It reminds me of my humanity again.
So thank you.
Yeah, you really buried your soul there.
And yeah.
You made it easy.
I feel honored.
I feel honored.
Paul, you are.
When we had you on last time for our Rush Limbaugh episodes, somebody in the subreddit was like, I didn't initially recognize his name.
And then I looked him up and realized that he had entirely shaped my generation's ideas on comedy.
I feel accurate to you because you've been in so many, like, so many, like missed your show.
You did a bit for The Daily Show back in the day.
You did some comedy bang bang stuff.
You were on, did the Dead Authors podcast, Bojack Horseman, obviously.
Also true.
You're just an incredibly accomplished comedian.
So thank you for dining to be on our show again.
It's my point.
Paul, to start us off, I got a question for you.
Ancient Roman Intoxication00:15:13
How do you feel about drugs and alcohol?
I think that when used responsibly, that ain't nothing but a good time.
Sure.
And, you know, obviously, sometimes people have problems with drugs or alcohol.
And what would you say about the idea?
Like, obviously, very reasonable for a group of people, you know, especially if they feel like the medical system may have let them down to come together and work together as like a community to try to deal with their struggles with drugs and alcohol.
Perfectly reasonable, right?
Absolutely.
I know many people who are in such programs and it works very well for them.
Yeah.
It usually does.
Now, Paul, I have a question for you that relates directly to the subject of the article.
If a group of people were to do that, how large of a Marine Corps do you think they would need to punish their enemies?
Ooh, I haven't thought about this before.
My instinct is to say they wouldn't need one at all.
They wouldn't need one at all.
You think most addiction recovery programs get by without a Marine Corps?
That's my, I mean, look, I don't know about all of them, but to my knowledge, they seem to be doing just fine without them, as far as I know.
Yeah, I would say that's accurate.
And obviously, we're very pro people getting recovery here.
We're talking, however, today about an addiction rehab program that went as off the rails as it is possible for one of those things to be.
This is like the 20-year journey of a guy who wanted to help people get off of heroin and eventually built his own army and attempted to take over large chunks of California.
So have you ever heard of Cinnanon?
S-Y-N-A-N-O-N.
That name sounds familiar to me, but I don't know why.
It is not the first addiction recovery program, but the first, probably the first large organized narcotics recovery program, right?
And for everything kind of that happens in this episode to make sense, we're going to have to travel back in time a little bit to talk about kind of the history of human understanding of addiction and addiction recovery.
Obviously, people have been doing drugs longer than we've been doing anything else, including like even being friends with dogs.
Like we've been getting high forever.
It's just something we've, we were doing it, you know, back before we were people.
People like it and waste it.
Sure.
Yeah.
And primitive science meant that it was pretty hard back in the day to have the kind of addictions that we have now, right?
If all you have is like beer and watered down wine, alcoholism is going to be less extreme than when you have Everclear and that kind of shit, right?
151 rum means it's a lot easier to have like a serious problem.
Likewise, you know, the way indigenous tribes in North America, Central America would use tobacco, it wasn't really unhealthy.
If you're doing it occasionally as part of a religious ritual, that's not nearly the same as burning two packs of Marlboroughs a day, right?
We're talking about a wildly different kind of thing.
People obviously had drug problems 5,000, 10,000 years ago, right?
But it was a lot less noticeable and it was less noticed because, especially in civilization, everyone was buzzed a lot of the time because like water was deadly, especially if you're in a city, right?
Like you're living in ancient Rome.
You don't want to drink that fucking water coming through the aqueducts.
You're going to pour it into wine.
So the wine will kill most of what's bad.
And you're not going to be wasted all the time because it's actually, there were people that like you talk about like ancient Roman mores around intoxication.
It was considered kind of like gauche to be too drunk.
Like obviously there were times, celebrations, festivals, but most of the time everyone was just kind of a bit buzzed, right?
And the same thing with beer and other cultures in other parts of Europe.
The first documented use of distilled liquor in Europe didn't come around until the 12th century.
And that was not something you would have drank for fun.
It was part of an Italian medical school textbook.
Obviously, liquor has a lot of medicinal benefits, like just for like you can sterilize shit with it, you know.
There were, there's debate over who the first kind of successful distillation, where it was.
Some people say that it was in first or second century China.
There's evidence of that.
The earliest like recognizable still, and I think it was kind of similar to a modern reflux still, was probably developed in the 8th century AD by an Arabic alchemist named Abu Musa Yabir ibn Hayan.
Now, whoever you give credit for the first distilled liquor, it didn't become a common recreational product until the 1600s.
So pretty recent, right?
People have not been drinking liquor all that long.
And is this before history?
Beer and wine, or beer and wine were first.
Oh, beer.
We've had beer and wine forever.
Beer dates back to the very first human civilization.
There's anthropologists who will argue that we started building cities to brew beer.
People would make beer as part of these, like when people were nomadic tribes to have these like big festivals.
But beer is a complicated product.
You would need to make bread because the first bread, the first beer was made with a kind of bread called bapir as like the basis of the beer.
And it requires a lot.
There's a lot of, there's a logistical tale to making beer.
And so one of the arguments some anthropologists will make.
Yeah, that's no, no.
You're a straight wine guy, just some rotten grapes.
I don't want to make my own stuff.
Yeah.
Well, that's why people started making cities, so that it was easier to have someone else make the beer and you just have plenty of it.
That's an argument some anthropologists will make.
But yeah, it goes back a while.
Liquor, much more recent because you have to like have know how to do some science to make liquor.
You got to have like a still.
They're not, it's not, I mean, it is pretty.
I used to make liquor and I was always wasted when I was making liquor.
Caught my kitchen on fire five or six times, which is why stills are illegal.
It would just be spurting Everclear, basically, out of these like gaps in the welds because we welded it while drunk.
So yeah, 1600s, we get liquor and it takes off.
People are real big fans of liquor.
I'm sure that's a surprise to anyone who, I don't know, lives in California where you can buy liquor anywhere you can buy a scratch off ticket.
This is not like a Barcelona story where one guy did this one thing and then everybody else did it to be cool.
This was immediately, it was popular with everyone at once.
It was popular with everyone.
And it also immediately becomes a problem.
Like as soon as there's liquor, you have for a long time, people don't, there's not really a mass cultural conception of alcoholism as an issue.
Then liquor comes around.
And by the 1700s, people are talking about alcohol addiction as a serious social problem.
Like it's that quick.
The first alcoholic recovery program were sobriety circles.
That's what they were called, which were kind of alcoholic mutual aid societies.
So communities of sufferers working together to deal with and try to get over their addiction.
And they seem to have been created first by members of various Native American tribes, right?
Alcoholism becomes a serious problem.
It's introduced by Europeans, becomes a big problem with indigenous tribes.
And so the first organized attempts at addiction recovery were indigenous in nature.
And they would often use traditional indigenous healing practices, both like natural medicine, both like indigenous medicine, but also like rituals to kind of treat alcoholism.
Now, in 1784, the first kind of European white, I don't know, whatever you call it, physician, Western physician to acknowledge alcoholism was Benjamin Rush.
Not the first to acknowledge it, but the first to call it a disease, right?
Which is basically our modern understanding, as opposed to like a moral failing.
This is an illness that a person has.
His work helped to create the modern temperance movement, which by the early 1900s had evolved into the prohibition movement.
Now, throughout the 1800s and the early 1900s, society gradually gained an understanding that drug abuse of all kinds could be problematic, right?
That it wasn't just alcohol.
You could be addicted to a bunch of shit.
And virtually every like Western attempt to treat drug and alcohol addiction was horrible.
Up until the modern day, those indigenous sobriety circles were probably like still the most reasonable program ever created.
One common treatment for addicts was to throw them into facilities patterned off of insane asylums.
Basically, they were like, okay, drug addiction is the same as being insane.
So we'll just lock you in a prison.
That'll solve it.
What?
For like forever?
Or was it like until you dried out?
You went through all the horrible detoxing on your own and then you were fine to leave?
I think it would depend.
Some people certainly didn't get out.
And also, we're talking the 1800s.
So a lot of people just died there of diseases due to the horrific conditions, you know?
True, true.
Because a prison is basically a Petri dish.
I mean, still is.
The New York State Inebriate Asylum opened in 1864.
And that was like the first.
Yeah, I know, right?
Not great.
Other doctors treated addiction with a variety of snake oil medications, like Dr. Keely is double chloride of gold, kimf, and drunkenness.
Take some gold, that'll stop you from drinking.
They did not know about Goldschlager.
I'm sorry, that does not work.
So in the 1880s, Sigmund Freud turned his genius mind to the problem of alcoholism and morphine addiction.
And he eventually came up with a genius solution for treating both of these addictions.
You want to guess what it was?
Oh, locking people away.
I don't know.
What would Freud's approach be?
He gave them huge doses of cocaine.
Oh, that's right.
I forgot it was a cocaine.
Exactly.
Drug that has no addictive potential.
Cocaine.
The least addictive drug ever.
A miracle drug.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Cocaine, the drug with no problems.
So by the 1890s, the worm had fully turned.
And like Benjamin Rush, you know, in the 1700s, is being like, this isn't, this is an illness.
By the 1890s, they're like, no, this isn't a fucking illness.
This is a criminal behavior and it needs to be punished as such.
Inebriate homes and asylums closed and alcoholics were sent to drunk tanks or foul wards of hospitals.
Foul wards.
I know, right?
Everything was so, everything was titled so mean back then.
They were real dicks back in the day.
They really were.
You don't have to say, you don't have to call it the foul ward.
No.
No, it is the 1800s.
We're going to be shitty about everything.
God damn.
Now, of course, these kind of treatments, the insane asylums, the prisons, the foul wards, these were where you sent poor addicts.
If you had money and an addiction, you would go to the first celebrity rehab facilities.
And the very first celebrity rehab facility was the Charles B. Towns Hospital, which opened in 1901.
It treated alcoholics with Belladonna, which is a poison.
Like, what was the dose?
What was the they must have known it was a poison back then.
Like, what?
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
I maybe there, maybe it just, they were trying to make you sick enough that you drank it with the alcohol.
It.
I didn't do enough research into Belladonna therapy, but I don't recommend taking Belladonna.
And it was, again, this was for really rich people.
It costs $350 a day in 1901, which is about $5,600 a day in modern currency.
This is like Betty Ford clinic type shit, right?
Like, I don't know if it worked or not, but you're not going there if you're not rich.
Now, one of Charles's most frequent patients was a fellow named Bill Wilson, who would go on to found an organization called Alcoholics Anonymous, which you can draw a direct line.
And, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous, there's a lot of really valid criticisms of the organization.
I know a lot of people who say it saved their life too.
I'm not going to make a determination one way or the other on it, but you can draw a real direct line between the basic idea of AA and those indigenous sobriety circles, which I do find interesting.
This basic idea that a community, a communal environment, is the best way to deal with addiction.
And support probably is.
Exactly.
And support, yes.
Empathy, someone knowing.
Just you knowing that someone else understands what you're going through and that they've been there themselves.
Yeah.
Not institutionalization, not criminalization, but a community support.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And maybe not poison.
And maybe not Belladonna.
Maybe that's not going to help.
Now, by the time AA was created, and it wasn't just Bill Wilson, I think there were four or five guys who started it.
It was created in 1935.
And at that point, the criminalization of addiction was at a very advanced stage.
In the 1910s, U.S. states had started passing laws that legislated the mandatory sterilization of alcoholics and addicts.
Yeah.
One of the fun things, this is, you're going to get a hoot out of this, Paul.
This is fun, some fun history.
Real, real good yucks in this bit of history.
After World War II, when they found out about all of the horrific crimes of the Nazi concentration camps and they were starting to try to punish people, one group of people they didn't punish were the Nazi doctors who had sterilized the mentally ill and drug addicts because that was being done in the U.S. too.
So they were like, we can't punish these guys.
We're doing the same thing.
A lot of Nazi doctors got off scot-free.
Don't love it.
Because, yeah, it's history.
It's always been a lesson is, well, we're not going to stop doing that.
We're looking at monsters and seeing what they do.
We also do one of those things.
So we're just going to look the other way rather than stop.
So we're just going to, we're fine with that part.
I mean, it is, it is kind of like the fact that when they were liberating the concentration camps, in a lot of cases, they didn't free the homosexuals because that was still a crime in the societies that were freeing the concentration camps.
Anyway, I mean, anytime, you should never be looking at the Nazis and saying even a broken clock.
Yeah, exactly.
If you're thinking, well, maybe they had a point about that.
That I agree with.
Yeah.
So 1910s, you know, states are sterilizing alcoholics and addicts.
And doctors at asylums and prisons were actually, the way this was phrased is that doctors had the authority to asexualize individuals with drug and alcohol abuse problems.
That's what they called it, asexualization.
Now, Alcoholics Anonymous was in many ways, as I said, a throwback to these sobriety circles.
But where those were kind of very based in Native American religion and medicine, AA was based around the Emmanuel movement, which was a psychologically based approach to religious healing that started in 1906.
Sterilizing Alcoholics00:04:11
The primary thrust of Emmanuel Movement treatments and thus AA were individual and group therapy.
AA in particular came to reject the clinical and institutional treatment for addicts in favor of a bottom-up structure that the founder Bill Wilson described as, quote, benign anarchy.
The thrust of this was that the individual branches of AA were all self-governing.
They didn't have to report back to a home office.
They didn't have to follow identical treatment methods.
And they didn't have to have leaders.
Usually, when, especially when you have guys in this poem refer to something as anarchy, they're kind of getting it wrong.
In this case, he's not, because he is saying we're trying to dissolve power relationships.
We don't think that the right way to treat an addict is a situation where a bunch of people are in power over them and they're incarcerated or they're kind of under the thumb of the state.
We also don't think that there should be leaders of this.
Everyone should be working together.
You know, it's a community effort.
So, really, he's not wrong when he says that this is when he uses that term.
And his stated reason for this bottom-up approach was to prevent the formation of cults of personality, which were very common in alternative medicine at the time and also now.
Unfortunately, in practice, this did not work.
Today, one of the main valid complaints against AA is that it can act as an incubator for strongmen and gurus who often engage in profound mental, physical, and sexual abuse of their group members.
This is a problem that has been noted on a number of different occasions in different AA groups.
And today, the focus of our episode is going to be on one of those gurus, a man named Charles Dederick.
Now, Charles Edwin Dederick was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 22nd, 1913.
He was named for his father and was called Chuck by his family.
His namesake dad was a horrible alcoholic who died in a drunk driving accident when Chuck was four years old.
When he was eight, his younger brother died of influenza.
Charles felt guilty and responsible for his brother's death.
I think it was a survival guilt thing.
And it was noted that he was never able to bond with children again, even his own kids, which is rough upbringing here.
Not an easy set of cards to draw.
So when he was 12, his mother, Agnes Kuntz, married a man that he despised.
Now, Agnes was Agnes was a prominent singer, and I don't think the family had huge financial issues as a kid.
Like they seem to have gotten along okay.
But he's really unhappy with this guy she marries, and he's also stifled by his upbringing because she is a devout Roman Catholic and she raises him that way.
He later recalled, I believed literally that I would go to hell if I didn't go to church on Sundays.
So when he was 14, Charles comes across a copy of H.G. Wells's The Outline of History that had been owned by his stepfather.
Are you familiar at all with this book?
No, I've never heard of it.
It's an interesting, it's an interesting book.
It was an attempt by H.G. Wells to chronicle the entire history of the world from the Neolithic period up to World War I.
Now, in the book, Wells claimed, The history of mankind is a history of more or less blind endeavors to conceive a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily and to create and develop a common stock of knowledge which may serve and illuminate that purpose.
And it's so it was kind of a it was an optimistic but also atheistic look at human history, right?
Like he's not looking at this through a religious lens.
And he's, I think it still was a Eurocentric lens, but I don't think he was trying to look at it that way.
And one major theme of the book was the development of free intelligence, which he credited originally to bards, common to all the quote Aryan-speaking peoples who extended the power of the human mind by traveling and thus expanding the development of language.
This book has a huge influence on Dederick, who later claimed that after reading it, he quote became a militant atheist almost overnight.
So he reads this book and it just pills him to use the parlance of the time.
And the downside of this is he starts drinking almost immediately after he reads this book, right?
He kind of goes whole hog against his upbringing, right?
Yeah, I'm an atheist.
Enjoy This Moment00:04:56
Time to get fucked.
That was sort of how I went too, I think.
Yeah, but I think about it now.
It was a little slow.
It was a little more gradual, but definitely that was the line.
No, I mean, within about six months of realizing I was an atheist, I was taking hallucinogens every weekend.
So I can relate.
Yes, it's not.
Yeah, exactly.
At this point, he's a thoroughly sympathetic character.
Right.
Now, yeah.
Let's remember this.
This is the show that it is, Paul.
Yeah.
Let's just stop a moment and really enjoy this time with this guy before we continue.
Yeah.
And you know, Paul, let's stop a moment while we're enjoying this time before the horrible shit happens.
And also think about products and services.
Because, Paul, you know what else is the result of human beings engaging in more or less blind endeavors to conceive a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily?
Robert, I wish you would tell me.
The products and services that support this podcast.
That's what they all do.
Here we go.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mona.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Replacing Addictions00:15:34
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we are back.
And Paul, before we get back into this story, there's a matter of serious importance that I have to discuss with you.
Okay.
Have you looked at your Wikipedia page recently?
Uh-oh.
No, I have not.
There's a photo of you from 2012 on it, and you look a lot like Burt Reynolds.
And I mean that as the highest possible compliment I can possibly give someone.
Is it the turtleneck picture?
Yeah, yeah, turtleneck.
And yeah, God, one of the best pictures ever taken of me, and God bless whoever decided that should be my picture.
It should be your Wikipedia picture.
It's a really good picture.
We should all be so lucky to be immortalized looking like Burt Reynolds.
All right.
So we're talking about the upbringing of Charles Dederick, Dead Rich, whatever.
I never do quite as much research as I should do on how to pronounce things, but what are you going to do?
Listen to another podcast like that exists.
Not me, boy.
Yeah.
So Charles, one of the men who has most thoroughly chronicled Charles Dederick, credits the fact that he started drinking and the fact that he became an atheist less to this H.G. Wells book and more to his mother's second marriage, right?
So he says, I read this book and it led me to both, you know, to be an atheist.
And I kind of started drinking not long after.
Other people who have Chronicled Disciples say, well, he was really angry at his mom for marrying this guy.
His mom was super religious, so he rejected her religion.
And, you know, drinking is a pretty normal part of teenage rebellions.
He's an unhappy teen.
Either way, it's probably a mix of things, you know?
Why not both?giff.
Yeah, why not both, right?
Yeah.
Whatever the case, he very quickly developed a serious drinking problem.
He's one, again, you know, it's a disease.
He's one of those people who it's not just heavy drinking.
It's immediately like life destruction kind of drinking.
He was extremely bright.
And in fact, in high school, he earned admittance to Notre Dame.
But once he graduated and started college, he flunked out very quickly because he just couldn't keep his shit together.
You know, he had a problem.
He next got a job with the Mellon family of Carnegie Mellon fame, but he lost it and several other good jobs again due to his horrible, horrible alcoholism.
He got married, but his abusive drunken behavior destroyed that relationship too.
In the early 1940s, at age 29, he caught meningitis, which nearly killed him and left his face partly paralyzed.
He would spend the rest of his life with a droopy eye and a facial tick.
So by the time this guy's 40, he's had a rough life.
You know, not doing great.
And he kind of decides that since his life in Ohio was a disaster, he should probably fuck off to California and become a beach bum, which is a reasonable decision.
Absolutely.
Perfect career for an alcoholic.
Yeah.
We've, we've all made versions of this decision.
Yeah.
Kind of everyone who moves out west is like, well, shit's not working here.
Maybe it'll be better where there's an ocean.
And it is.
I love the West Coast.
But so he moves to Santa Monica because back in those days, you could afford to move to Santa Monica if your life was a complete shit show, as opposed to needing to be a rich person whose life is a complete shit show to afford the rent now.
He got a job at a hardware store, which again, you could afford to live in Santa Monica working at a hardware store in the 50s.
Wow.
Yeah.
And he remarried, but he kept drinking and his second marriage fell apart too.
At one point, a friend found him passed out on the kitchen floor and told him, Fatso, if you don't go to Alcoholics Anonymous, you will die.
I don't know if the Fatso is necessary.
Doesn't not really necessary.
I mean, when you play it back in your head later, like, yeah, he said I was going to die.
Oh, he also called me Fatso.
He also called me fat.
That did not need to be in there.
Yeah.
How about, hey, my friends, what do you do?
If you don't stop drinking, you're going to die.
Hey, buddy.
That's the person I care about.
Human, anything.
Well, it was the 50s, so they hadn't invented the concept of male friendships yet.
It was still just as yeah.
Fine.
Hey, buddy old pal.
What's wrong with that?
So that's what he did.
He goes to AA.
And I'm going to quote from LA magazine here.
Quote, he floundered for three years in the ocean breeze before walking into his first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Partway through, Dederick marched to the podium and shared with the group.
People listened.
They laughed.
They applauded.
Dederick was hooked.
I went from one AA meeting to another every night, he told psychiatrist Daniel Carseal, one of a number of social scientists to write books on Sin and On Sin and On in the 1960s.
That's all I did.
I was the first one to speak, and I'd speak all night unless they stopped me.
So what you're seeing here is a couple of things.
Number one, this guy's mom is a is a very successful performer.
He clearly is a good performer, right?
He's an engaging, he's able to like talk for hours at these meetings.
And I assume some people are bugged, but a lot of people just like listening to him.
He's got that thing, you know, that performers and cult leaders have.
There's not as not as there's a thin line between being a good stand-up comedian and having what it takes to be a cult leader.
I mean, not every entertainer is a cult leader, but every cult leader is an entertainer.
And every entertainer has to do at least elements of cult things, which are not inherently bad, right?
There's good aspects to it.
Yeah.
A good party is a cult that ends at midnight or so, you know, or two or three in the morning.
So yeah, he becomes an AAA.
And what Charles does, this is a thing you also see with some people, including some people who credit AA with saving their lives.
He gets addicted to the program, right?
Which is sometimes necessary.
Sometimes you have to replace one addiction with another before you can, you know.
And even though like AA is really what saves him, he's still open to other treatments for his disease and he's still experimenting with other things.
And in 1958, UCLA offers him another path to recovery, LSD.
See, the late 50s were this wonderful era.
There's all this gleeful experimentation with acid.
They're trying it for everything.
And it just so happens that LSD has been shown to have a serious documented efficacy at treating alcoholism.
One analysis of studies conducted in the UK in the 1960s suggested that 59% of patients who took LSD showed reduced levels of alcohol misuse.
And it was very durable, like lasting six months or longer.
There's a lot of theories that multiple, like just doing LSD once or twice a year could be like an effective long-term solution.
Which, again, I'm a big advocate of the medical use of psychedelics.
There's some incredible stuff there.
Doing LSD once or twice a year sounds very pleasant and reasonable.
Yeah, it's a very healthy way to live, I think.
Yeah, especially when you compare it to crippling alcoholism, you know, tripping twice a year and fucking, I don't know, putting on some King Crimson.
Much better.
So in 1962, Charles called taking LSD, quote, the most important single experience of my life.
Now, interestingly, though, he didn't credit it with curing his alcoholism because I think AA had really is what he credited with that.
And he doesn't, I mentioned how effective it is because I don't want to be making it like LSD is a very promising treatment for alcoholism.
That's not what it does for Charles.
He doesn't, it doesn't cure him.
He credits it with unlocking a new person, basically fundamentally changing him.
He says that it helps him like unlock new confidence in himself.
Quote, I became a different person, really and truly.
Everything that has happened to me since, synonym, everything, dates from that point.
And interestingly, Charles did not suggest or allow his later followers to take LSD.
He considered his reaction to the drug to be unique as a result of the fact that he was better than people, like ordinary people, right?
He had a special LSD experience that other people couldn't have because he was special.
In 1961, one of his followers, somebody who talked to him about his experiences on acid, wrote this, quote, 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 merely appeared 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, which is, I hate to tell you, Chuck, a very normal acid experience.
Like I said, I used to do that a couple of times a week, buddy.
You're not special.
But he's convinced that his reaction to LSD is unique.
And he's, it also, you know, it can change your personality.
I have had trips that I walked away from a fundamentally different person.
Not every, not most trips, like I've had one or two in the hundreds of times that I can credit to fundamentally altering some aspect of myself.
But this happens with Chuck.
And in this case, it's not a good thing.
So the combination of Alcoholics Anonymous and Chuck's newfound acid-given confidence had a profound impact.
As LA magazine writes, quote, after the acid experiment in 1957, he was one year sober at the time.
I also hear 58.
I don't know, one of those years.
Dederick became a voracious reader of philosophy and psychology.
Looming especially large were the nonconformity espoused by Emerson and self-reliance and the utopian notions put forth by Thoreau and Skinner.
Dederick was living on $33 a week unemployment checks and he began to taper off from AA.
When other recovering alcoholics checked up on him, Dederick would engage them in impromptu meetings, Equal Parts grad school symposiums and combative group therapy sessions.
Those get-togethers became thrice weekly affairs.
Then one day, a young heroin addict named Whitey Walker, fresh out of prison, joined the group.
As he began inviting other dope fiends to the mix, the language grew coarser, the crosstalk more aggressive.
Dederick loved it.
The sessions became known as Synanons, a portmanteau of symposium or perhaps seminar and anonymous.
Dederick, who provided couches for people to crash on as they kicked heroin, would come to believe that addicts weren't full-fledged adults and shouldn't be treated as adults.
The younger adults took to calling him dad.
So what happens here is very interesting to me.
You have AA starts as, okay, this institutional approach where you just have a couple of doctors or wardens just completely controlling the lives of addicts and treating them like criminals.
That's a horrible way to get people clean.
What you need is this bottom-up leaderless approach.
And Dederick comes out of that, takes the language and some of the methods, and then turns it to a situation where he is in charge and the addicts are children.
Like it's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know what this leaderless approach needs?
A leader.
A leader.
Yeah.
It's almost perfect.
The leaderless approach is almost perfect.
It's perfect.
It's just missing a single guy in charge of everybody.
Yeah.
They called dad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's amazing how often this happens in history.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, this is basically 1917, but on a smaller scale.
So now, when it comes to like where the name Synanon came from, and obviously LA magazine says it's a mix of symposium and seminar.
I've heard different theories.
I don't know which is true.
Paul Morantz, who's probably the number one expert on the cult, claims the cult changed the name was chosen because an addict slurred the words symposium and seminar together.
So not a conscious portmanteau, a guy who was fucked up and like screwed up while talking.
I've also heard that it was supposed to mean Sinanon, like Sin's Anonymous, and that that's how it was more often referred to.
I don't know which is the case.
I've heard all of these stories and shit that I've read about this.
Even if this is true, it's worth noting that Synanon was not initially affiliated with Chuck's addiction recovery program.
Its original name was the Tender Loving Care Club.
The Tinder Loving Care Club?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
The club.
Oh, my God.
That's like the Saturday morning cartoon roundup.
It's 9 a.m.
It's time for the Tender Loving Care Club.
There's a block of programming that's all very positive.
And you will be treated like a child by the Tender Loving Cares Club TV block, too.
Yeah.
A lot of Transformers getting sold during that.
So Charles Dederick rented a rundown storefront in Venice, which at that point was like a shady, crime-riddled neighborhood, and you could like buy shit there very cheap because people didn't want to live in Venice.
Again, Los Angeles was a really different city at this point in time.
When you're talking about Venice as like the shit part of town, that's ridiculous to me.
So they get this like crappy little storefront in Venice and they're all broke as hell.
Like when he starts this, he basically buys this storefront and they start living there kind of illegally, like he and a bunch of addicts that he's trying to like help get clean.
They were all broke and they survived by begging for stale food from catering trucks and taking donations from local prostitutes.
Like a lot of how they stay alive is local sex workers give them money, which is awesome, right?
There's like a really cool story in here of like a community of people on the outskirts of society taking care of each other.
At this point, it's still a pretty good story, but we are starting to see some troubling aspects of Charles, too.
Their shower was a hose that ran through the window.
I'm pretty sure they were stealing water, you know?
It's very punk rock, actually.
Absolutely.
On the wall of the building was a lifesaver.
Like, you know, the things on a boat that you throw out, um, that they called the USS Hang Tough.
While life was difficult and they endured many privations, Charles urged everyone to pull together and stay, promising that a great future would emerge for the group.
And the system he developed seems to have helped a lot of addicts.
The accountability, the constant surveillance of a community, the fact that they were all always together is kind of for people with really serious addictions, one of the only ways to stop someone from relapsing, right?
You need that 24-7 accountability because if you go away for a minute, you're going to start using again.
Trauma Bonds Groups00:14:07
But what Dederick saw as the most powerful tool of the group and his most brilliant innovation was what he called the game.
And I'm going to describe what the game is to you from a write-up in Cabinet magazine.
I'm sure it's not sinister in any way.
No, of course not.
Of course not.
It's just ominously called the game.
The game.
It sounds like a cult that murders people.
Absolutely not.
The game consisted of a dozen or so addicts sitting in a circle.
One player would start talking about the appearance or behavior of another, picking out their defects and criticizing their character.
But as soon as the subject of the attack tried to defend him or herself, other players would join the barrage, unleashing a no-holds-barred verbal onslaught.
Vulgarity was encouraged.
Talk dirty and live clean, said Dederick.
And so the other members would accuse the defendant of real and imagined crimes, of being selfish, unthinking, of being a no-good, ugly, diseased cocksucker who was too weak to go straight and was too much of an asshole, junkie, crybaby motherfucker to admit it.
Faced with this unrelenting group assault, the recipient would eventually have little choice but to admit their wrongdoing and promise to mend their ways.
Then the group would turn to the next person and begin all over again.
The first time it hits you, it absolutely destroys you, remembered a former game player.
No matter how loud you scream, they can scream louder, recalled another.
And no matter how long you talk, when you run out of breath, they're there to start raving at you and laughing.
Emotional catharsis was the aim.
There were only two rules: no drugs and no physical violence.
It was vicious, but it actually seemed to work.
One cannot get up, remarked Dederick, until he's knocked down.
You know, I know that a lot of people subscribe to the theory that you must break someone down in order to build them up, but I feel like there has to be a better way.
Also, in terms of games, don't really get the game aspect.
Yeah, not really a game.
Yeah, it's just a Parker Brothers board that says, Call your friends cocksuckers.
Scream at each other for hours.
There are better games out there.
There are better games out there.
At least make it a charade where you have to guess what the person is saying.
This is the horrible thing that they're saying about you.
Yeah.
I mean, it is like there's a, and again, you can see like the elements of like, I have dealt with addiction at various points in my past, and I've had moments where friends were like, you're doing what you're doing is stupid and you're hurting yourself and you need to fucking stop.
And like, yeah, sometimes you do need that kind of straight talk.
There's a difference between straight talk and saying you're a no-good cocksucking piece of shit, right?
Like that's not straight talk.
That's just abuse.
But also, I blame it on the fatso guy.
That's the fatso guy.
He started this path.
I think there's a line to be drawn by why this works.
And what this works at doing, I think what's actually happening here, why this contributes to keeping people sober, is not that the game encourages sobriety.
The game encourages cult-like group behavior.
And that discourages drug abuse.
It keeps the group because trauma bonds people.
Even trauma that you're inflicting on each other can bond groups of people together.
It's a codependent relationship kind of thing.
And they've also been instructed to do this by dad.
Yes.
Yeah, by dad.
Would Chuck participate in the game?
Oh, yes.
He would lead.
And you did not insult Chuck.
That's what I wanted to know.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
Chuck is not getting insulted alongside everyone else.
Chuck was just there to say it.
Now you go.
Now you go.
And to yell at people.
He was very good at screaming at people.
And it's, I also think there's a line to be drawn here between what they're doing and kind of how the military basic training, at least, used to work.
I don't know now, but like, I know friends who have described particularly Marine Corps basic training as a game.
It's a game.
And when you understand the rules, you understand how to do it and like what you need to do in order to like get through what kind of, and it bonds, one of the things that bonds the unit together is how shitty the experience is.
And that's, I think, what's keeping people off of drugs.
I don't think it's any magic about the game.
It's just you put a bunch of people together, you traumatize them, and they kind of can't exist outside of the group.
But if the group is committed to sobriety, they'll stay sober, you know?
That's what I'm reading from this.
Yeah, I mean, speaking as a person who has been insulted in my life, it has not helped me.
Yeah.
It does not.
No, it has not helped me.
No.
Dederick had invented the game by mixing AA's teachings with shit he vaguely remembered about psychiatry from articles he'd read.
So you know it's good.
And also a bunch of parts of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay, Self-Reliance.
Now, the core of his philosophy was to fix people with tough love, to make them comfortable by first making them very uncomfortable.
Over time, he developed a catchphrase, which he used to greet addicts on their first morning in the house.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
He's the one who invented that.
Wow.
Yeah.
How weird.
Right?
And it's, you can, you can see there's both a very optimistic recovery angle to that.
Like your life starts again now.
You don't, you're not bound to your past.
You're not bound to make the same mistakes.
But also, that can be very culty.
It can go either way.
As in, now you have a new life with us as part of this group.
And you'll never, yeah.
Yeah.
So it can mean both things.
In 1958, Dederick incorporated his facility as a non-profit.
Over the next two years, a standard routine evolved.
New members were asked to quit drugs cold turkey.
And as they got over being dope sick, they were gradually welcomed into the communal life of the club.
There was hard labor, but there was also constant mutual support and group therapy.
The game was played three times per week.
Members were forbidden from any drugs save coffee and cigarettes, which were available in unlimited quantities at all times.
I think has been for most of the history of addiction recovery pretty common.
People smoke and drink coffee fucking constantly.
You know, whatever you got to do.
Oddly enough, peanut butter sandwiches were also always available.
And I think it's just because Charles Dederick liked them.
So obviously they must be good for addicts.
This will be the beginning of a pattern.
Fairly quickly, Chuck proved to have a peculiar genius for marketing.
The term synonym had been used internally for a while, and he decided to adopt it as the name of the group.
To its early members, Synanon was a very real lifesaver.
In the late 1950s, drug addiction had become a matter of national concern, similar to how the prohibition movement had taken over the country at the turn of the century.
Newspapers and radio broadcasters warned constantly about the dope monster ravaging the United States.
The governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, claimed that 50% of crimes in his state could be linked to drugs.
Whether this was true or not mattered less than the fact that people believed it.
State lawmakers followed the public outcry with a raft of narcotics bills aimed at criminalizing drug users.
Most recommended mandatory minimum sentences to try and discourage drug addiction.
This did not work, but it kept being done.
In the mid-1950s, California's Department of Corrections started building facilities for narcotics violators.
For people who wanted to get clean, there were basically no community resources.
Your only option was one of two kinds of incarceration.
You could get convicted and sent to prison, or you could get sent to an asylum.
So obviously, alcoholism has started to get an understanding.
Now there's AA.
Nothing like that existed for narcotics, and that's becoming a problem.
So Cinnanon kind of blows up because it's really the first organized attempt someone has to dealing with the problem of narcotics addiction.
One early member of Cinanon was Lena Lindsay.
She was a dope addict, and before she found Cinanon, she spent time in jail and also spent time in Camarillo State Hospital, one of the first facilities to open an asylum for addicts.
You couldn't just check yourself into Camarillo, though.
You had to go to court, admit you were an addict, and be sentenced or admitted to the hospital, which is not ideal, making drug addicts go to court before they can give treatment.
But Lena did.
She had enough of a problem that she was like, fuck it, I'll go before a judge.
And she got sent there for 90 days.
And it was not a great program.
Quote, I didn't think it was a rehab place.
I just thought it was a place for me to get clean.
That's where my mind was.
I just wanted to get clean.
Camarillo was fine.
I think I stayed loaded more than anything else.
So she continued to get high.
They kept me in the admitting ward.
I helped with new people who would come in.
To me, that was a nuthouse.
I had no expectations.
I'll put it that way.
There was no program.
I helped them with other patients.
Remember, I was on the admitting ward and I helped them with other patients.
I helped them give shock treatment, and I stayed loaded while I was there.
My boyfriend would come to visit.
After 30 days, you could have visits, and my boyfriend would come.
Me and another girl, we were on the ward together.
Our boyfriends would sneak us drugs.
I don't think the staff knew what we were doing.
It was different than being in jail, that's for sure.
There was no place.
In my time, there was just no place for drug addicts.
None at all.
So, not a great drug addiction program if you can, you know, get heroin there.
And I mean, I guess because at this time, narcotics are definitely seen as a moral failing across the board.
Yes.
There's nobody that's saying people are somewhat more understanding of alcoholism than they are of.
It started to be.
Yes.
Yeah.
So Lena first heard about Cinnanon through the television via a local news broadcast.
She described her first impression of it as, quote, this place on the beach that was supposed to be helping dope fiends.
And by the way, that's what they called each other in Cinnanon.
They called each other dope fiends.
Over the months, as she struggled with her addiction and went into and out of treatment, other addicts she knew started talking about Cinnanon, saying stuff like, they give you cigarettes, they feed you.
When Lena first showed up, Chuck took her around and then told her to leave.
His attitude was addicts should get a tour, see what the place had to offer, and then be sent back to their disastrous lives so they would hit rock bottom again and realize how important it was to get straightened out, right?
That was the standard procedure.
But she convinced Chuck to let her join straight away, and Lena became the first black member of Cinanon.
The organization quickly grew to be significantly more integrated than mainstream American society at the time.
This is one thing I haven't heard any allegations he was racist.
They were actually really ahead of their time in terms of it was a fully integrated program and eventually kind of a fully integrated version of society.
And as fucked up as the game sounds, Lena found it useful.
And she explained to an interviewer, quote, it was in the game that I started learning how to tell the truth.
Because us drug addicts, we believed our own bullshit.
In order to do what we did and live the lifestyle, I guess we had to believe the mess that we told ourselves.
It was after one of the games, big heavy games, I went to my room, I went to bed, and I started thinking about what they talked to me about in the game and how I defended it.
And I was lying.
And that's when I started learning how to tell the truth to myself.
To thy own self, be truthful.
That was one of my favorite concepts the old man, Dederick, gave me, to thy own self, be truthful.
When I was in my bed by myself, I copped to myself what a liar I was.
And in my next game, I copped out on myself.
That started me to telling the truth.
I didn't tell the truth all the time.
It had to get to be a habit, you know.
This type of thing, I mean, people can, I guess, the relationships that you form within AA, let's say, people can, they're allowed to call you out, maybe not in a meeting in front of everybody, but you know, if you have a sponsor, can call you out if you're spinning some bullshit and without it being like a complete breaking down of you, just somebody keeping you in check.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's that's hugely important.
And I don't think Lena, you know, I think there's very abusive aspects to the game, obviously, but for people who had never had anyone to call them out, because maybe all of their friends are also addicted.
Everyone's an enabler, I can see why that would be a value, even though there's also clearly toxic aspects of it.
I mean, because part of being an addict, a big part of being an addict is lying.
You have to constantly be lying to other people, to yourself.
You have to be justifying what you're doing at all times.
Yeah.
And you have to be able to lie to yourself before you can convincingly lie to other people.
That's like the most important aspect of doing that.
Yes.
You have to make it so that the lying to other people is that, well, they don't understand, they'll never understand.
So I have to just gloss over this because I just can't make them see why this is necessary for me.
Exactly.
And I, you know, it's one of those things, again, we've talked about like how kind of abusive aspects of the game is.
It's also probably fair to say this is the best narcotics addiction treatment available to people in Southern California or anywhere in the country, really, at this period of time.
Like there's not really a lot of options.
So folks, you know, do what they can.
And yeah, you know who else does what they can, Paul?
I bet it's goods and services.
Exactly.
The goods and services that support this podcast are, you know, obviously now we have a solution to all kinds of addiction, and it's capitalism.
Look, we all need the dopamine fix that a needle of heroin gives us, but why not buy a mattress instead?
That's all I'm saying, you know?
All right.
Here's some products.
Buy a Mattress Instead00:03:33
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Hierarchy of Addicts00:15:09
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
We're just thinking about products, services, the intersection of those two.
Thank you, products and services.
Thank you.
Thank you, products and services.
Thank you.
In 1962, Chuck Dederick moved Cinnanon from the CD storefront in Venice to an empty National Guard armory in Santa Monica.
He had about 65 members at this time.
They were immediately unpopular among the NIMBY types who lived near the facility.
Yeah, right?
You know, it is Southern California.
It hasn't all changed.
10 days after moving in, he was arrested for operating a hospital without a license, which I agree.
That should be a crime.
Yeah.
But also, they were, I think it was kind of bullshit.
Like, he wasn't operating a hospital.
He was doing something no one else was really doing.
Anyway, he was convicted.
The court offered him probation if he would agree to move out of the armory.
And as an act of protest, he declined and he went to jail for 25 days instead.
Now, the news picks up on this, and Synanon had started to generate a significant amount of buzz over the last couple of years.
And his decision to go to jail for his beliefs rather than moved was the best buzz marketing he could have done.
He becomes a hero all across California, a brave trailblazer fighting the scourge of dope addiction and an out-of-touch court system.
Governor Edmund Brown signed a bill into law that gave Cinanon specifically a special exemption from health licensing laws.
So this becomes a big enough thing that the governor signs a bill into law to allow this specific program to exist.
Now, under the bill, the medical board of the state of California was supposed to establish special rules for Cinanon to follow.
They never got around to doing that.
They were supposed to, though.
Sure.
Yeah.
Now, Chuck's time in prison had made him a martyr, and the fawning media attention had made him into a national hero of the dope epidemic.
Donations started to flow in.
Wealthy celebrities began dropping by, some for treatment, and others just to explore the new sober society that Chuck Dederick was building in his facility.
Leonard Nimoy made a habit of stopping by to play the game with ex-addicts.
So you can imagine Leonard Nimoy just like screaming cocksucker at a bunch of dope fiends and wow, Santa Monica.
Well, it makes me sad to think that somebody would be yelling mean things at Leonard Nimoy.
I don't think anyone yelled at Leonard Nimoy.
I have trouble believing that.
He took a sort of more of a chuck role in the game when he played.
Yeah, I'm guessing he was more of a chuck in this.
I just can't imagine anyone yelling at Leonard Nimoy aside from Bill Shatner.
Let me ask you this.
So, so at this point, at this point, no one leaves Chuck once they get into the program, right?
They are.
They are.
It's kind of up.
He claims an 80 to 100% success rate.
There are people who will say that never more than 70 or 80 people graduated, but some people are graduating, but a lot of them don't want to graduate.
A lot of them want to stay in this community.
And we'll talk about that in a little bit here.
So a number of very prominent jazz musicians also became members because obviously jazz musicians do a lot of drugs.
When they wanted to become queen, they would go to Cinnanon and they would start playing music there.
And they actually formed a Cinnanon jazz band and cut an album called The Sounds of Cinnanon.
Their band played on the Steve Allen show.
So like, yeah, they're like, this is like a big cultural thing at the time.
Now, one reason for Cinnanon's popularity was that, you know, the civil rights movement is starting to become popular with the Hollywood set in the early 60s, and Synanon is fully integrated.
And I haven't found evidence that he was, he was certainly for his time very progressive on race.
In 1959, a black sex worker and dope addict named Betty Coleman came to Cinnanon for help.
Betty later told an interviewer, I think I stayed those first two or three days just out of total fascination.
She said of her first encounter with Cinnanon in 1959, I was sick as a dog.
I was going through the usual withdrawal symptoms and everything, but I was just fascinated.
I had never been around addicts and such a motley lot of, you know, people.
It was a weird scene.
I got caught up in it.
So Betty leaves and relapses a couple of times, but she keeps coming back.
And eventually in the early 60s, she stays for good and she and Chuck get married.
And she becomes like the co-leader of Cinnanon with him.
So there's a very progressive, like, and again, another one of these things is that like Cinnanon, I don't care if you were a sex worker.
I don't care like what you did.
There's no judgment here other than the judgment that you're a dope addict and not an adult.
You know, like it's, it is this like we will continually judge you on that.
Yeah, for the rest of your life, but also less than society outside, Will, which you do have to keep in mind at this point, you know?
Right.
And the fact that everyone except for Chuck is getting judged equally harshly, I think there's a kind of radical egalitarianism to that.
That was, again, to people on the margins of society, very compelling.
So Cinnanon starts holding massive weekly parties with a jazz band and lots of cigarettes, but no drugs or alcohol.
And again, celebrities would drop by all the time.
James Mason, Jane Fonda, Milton Burrell, and Natalie Wood were all guests of Cinnanon at multiple points.
Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling gave lectures on site.
So this is like a big deal.
Like, those are some fucking names.
The only one that's weird to me, honestly, is Milton Burrell.
Milton Burrell, right?
Milton Burle is.
You know what?
I got to explore other belief systems.
This is my one time.
Let's see what's going on.
It's weird that he was there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That Milton Burrell and Leonard Nimoy might have wound up screaming cocksucker at a bunch of junkies is a weird thing that could have happened.
By 1965, Cinnanon was a bona fide phenomenon.
It reached its apex of relevance in tried and true Hollywood fashion with a major motion picture.
Columbia Pictures debuted.
Yeah, baby.
And the trailer for this is fucking great.
Columbia Pictures debuted Cinnanon in 1965.
Edmund O'Brien played Chuck Dederick and Eartha Kit played Betty.
Wow.
Yeah, Eartha Kit.
I kind of want to see the movie.
I've seen the trailer.
Yes.
And I love Eartha Kit, right?
Like, she's fucking rad.
Yeah.
The movie tagline was: Dope fiends scream the truth about the house where they live together, love together, while they fight their way back.
And it was from the trailer, I think it was a very horny movie.
Like as horny as you could be in 1965.
Cinnanon also earned praise in the halls of power.
U.S. Senator Thomas J. Dodd declared in Congress that the program could, quote, lead the way in the future to an effective treatment for not only drug addicts, but also criminals and juvenile delinquents.
He called Cinnanon the miracle on the beach.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow also praised Cinnanon's no-crap therapy.
Courts started sending addicts to Cinnanon as a condition of their parole.
Wow.
So, yeah, this is all gonna.
So, by the mid-60s, at the height of its popularity, Cinnanon had turned the art of keeping junkies clean into what it considered to be a science.
Their first rule was that new addicts had to detox without any kind of medication.
We're talking pure cold turkey here.
They'd generally be left on a couch or a bed to suffer through the shakes until they were well enough to partake in communal life.
Because the real trick of Cynanon, it wasn't the treatment, it wasn't even the game.
It was the fact that Chuck Dederick was offering his members an entirely new vision of life.
He had created a miniature society with its own social mores and its own ways of policing behavior.
From Cabinet Magazine, quote: As long as people worked, washing dishes, waxing floors, ironing laundry, painting walls, picking up food donations, they never had to leave.
Cinnanon was also self-policed.
You were expected to report those breaking the rules.
Those who slacked off or who failed to tell someone else were taken to task in the game.
Those who smuggled in contraband were given a haircut, a private dressing gown from a senior member.
Repeated infractions led to banishment.
Put a pin in that haircut thing.
So far, not bad, right?
You do bad shit, you get a private, perfectly healthy.
But they're running on the honor system.
Well, there's some other things that are wrong there.
But perhaps Synanon's greatest innovation was realizing that addicts knew more about addiction than medical specialists.
The dope fiend, as Dederick insisted they be known, was painfully familiar with the tactics of denial and evasion that their colleagues used.
What's more, they shared the same language.
There was no we they in Cinanon.
If you spoke about caps and bennies, terp and horse, everyone knew what you were talking about.
As for Dederick, he was never coy about his role.
I am considered a megalomaniacal nut, he declared.
Of course this is true, but I'm not so crazy.
He freely admitted to populating Cinnanon's board of directors with recovering addicts whom he could control.
But no one doubted that this was wise and canny thinking.
After all, those were dope fiends, and Dederic was entering uncharted territory.
Dederick predicted that within three to five years at Cinnanon, a dope fiend would be ready to graduate back to the outside world.
No one doubted Dederick's sincerity.
No one worried about the ambiguous undertones to his most famous maxim, the one he told to those to each new arrival at Synanon: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Now, what's interesting to me is that he's very open.
He calls himself megalomaniacal.
He basically says, I am the dictator of dope fiends.
But hey, American society in the 60s, you know, these people are mental children.
They have to have a dictator.
And that's me.
And this is good for society.
And everyone says, yeah, that scans.
I wonder how much of this is because he was like in the hierarchy of addicts that maybe an alcoholic outranks a dope fiend.
Yeah, he's looking at these.
I mean, because he's not, he's because this is, is it, is it exclusively narcotics that people are coming to seek the knowledge?
No, he it's it's drunk.
But it's mostly narcotics.
Yeah.
Because most drunks, you know, there's other things for them.
It's mostly narcotics addicts, people primarily, I think, heroin more than anything else.
And yeah, I suspect that is maybe an aspect of it: he thinks these people are easier to control.
You know, a dope addict is easier, is easy for someone like him to manipulate.
I think that's probably his attitude.
And it's certainly the attitude, like out again, nobody thinks this is weird or abusive, what he's doing.
Right.
Well, yeah.
Of course, of course, the only thing for addicts is fascism.
So from the beginning, graduation was very rare.
While Cinnanon claimed like an 80 to 100% success rate, Chuck was increasingly reluctant to declare anyone cured.
And again, AA today, it's really hard to get good information on who actually, how long people stay sober.
It's the same thing for all rehab, right?
Rehab programs in general, super sketchy about giving you solid numbers about relapses and whatnot.
And it makes sense that Chuck wouldn't want to declare anyone cured because a cured person can relapse.
And that might throw the wisdom of your methods into question, right?
For another thing, if people get better, really better, then they'll leave Synanon.
And in Chuck's head, Synanon was already an improvement on and a replacement for mainstream society.
So he doesn't want people to get out.
And so when it seemed like his members were on the path to recovery, Chuck would warn them that they were still addicts.
Now, this isn't necessarily unreasonable, right?
There's certainly an attitude you'll see.
I don't think it's universal.
It's if you're like, well, you're always an alcoholic.
You're always an addict.
And that's not necessarily, that's not to like talk down to somebody.
It's to keep in mind that like you always have to have an eye on this part of yourself, right?
I don't think that's an unreasonable thing necessarily.
But Chuck was prone to more unsettling outbursts.
He would tell members that as long as they still loved their mothers, they would never get over their drug problems.
He would urge them to avoid family and was adamant that members must.
Yes, he's an interesting angle.
Well, here's your yeah.
This is innovative.
Yeah.
He would urge them to avoid family, and he was adamant that members must follow his instructions to a T and stay in the group to have the best odds of staying sober.
He frequently said that, quote, giving freedom to think to a dope addict is like giving a gun to a baby.
Jesus Christ.
So we've hit the point where it becomes problematic, right?
It's a mixed bag, maybe even more bad than good.
And by the late 60s, the worm has started to turn a bit.
By 1968, 10 years after its founding, Cinanon had at least 1,100 members.
And again, 1,100 people who live there, thousands more have done some aspect of the programs, right?
Right.
And it was receiving about $2.5 million a year in donations.
This is the modern equivalent of about $19 million.
The program expanded massively, buying up an additional $7 million in real estate in Santa Monica, West LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Tamales Bay, Reno, New York City, Detroit, and Puerto Rico.
So this becomes like an empire.
Yeah.
He owns a lot of Southern California.
Now, since addicts come from every strata of society, Synanon members included gifted entrepreneurs.
There's a lot of people who are like homeless, who were, you know, sex workers.
There's a lot of people who were wealthy businessmen, lawyers.
And he sets these folks to work buying up and using their money to buy up for Cinanon a string of gas stations.
This eventually leads to him in the late 60s opening the door up to professionals, even those without drug addictions, who were interested in this new version of society that he was crafting.
All they had to do to join, if you weren't an addict, was transfer your assets to the organization.
And a number of people do this.
Building a Cult00:05:52
This might be where it's become a cult.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, Jesus, just like that's that's, I mean, that's one of those situations where I'm out.
Like if they, yeah, I mean, you say that, Paul, I'm starting my cult.
And if you are a wealthy businessman, you can live on the property that I buy with your money if you give your money to me.
That's that's the behind the bastards guarantee.
Now, will that property get raided by the FDA?
Will our compound be burned down by an FBI, FDA assault?
Of course.
Of course.
But that doesn't mean you can't help me own a string of gas stations.
This is what I love about cult people is that it's always the point where it goes a little, they get a little too greedy, where it's like, guess what?
If you just had the string of gas stations, that's not bad.
People need that.
That's not bad.
You know, that's an income for you.
Yeah.
Where do you want to go buy gas?
Oh, let's buy gas from the addiction recovery program that for some reason owns a bunch of gas stations.
Yeah, why not?
But no, things go wildly off the rails very quickly at this point.
So by early 1964, Cynanon had started advertising itself not as an addiction recovery program, but as an alternative society.
Dederick would draw in people by emphasizing that Cynanon could help them live a, quote, self-examined life.
He started using some of the millions they'd accumulated to build their first city in Marin County.
The end of the 1960s, and by the way, if you're building a city for your cult, you could do, I mean, Marin County is a wonderful location for adults.
Absolutely.
I do way better than Waco.
I mean, pricier than Waco, but less flammable.
So the end of the 1960s and the summer of love brought about a mass fascination with the idea of communes and of communal living.
And this is all tied into when, you know, Cinanon makes this turn.
So this era gave us, I don't know, the city of Eugene, Oregon, but it also was a huge boost for Cinnanon.
People who weren't addicted to anything started being allowed to join now, not just professionals, anybody who like wanted to join Synanon, basically, as long as you were willing to like hand them a bunch of money.
Non-addicts who joined were called squares.
Now, briefly, Chuck toyed with the idea of, so you've got squares and dope fiends.
That's what they call themselves in Synonym.
Chuck briefly toyed with the idea of letting his addict members leave Synanon facilities and live independently as long as they worked jobs and sent their money back to the organization.
But he wound up dropping this idea because it's hard to control people who don't live inside the cult, you know?
So by the end of the 1960s, Synanon had fully crossed the bridge from New Age Addiction Treatment Program to Cult.
From Cabinet Magazine, quote, When members stepped out of line now, the haircuts they received were literal ones, with men having their heads shaved for bad behavior and women being forced to wear stocking caps.
Whereas sex was rampant in Cinanon's early days, now members had to ask a Synanon elder for permission to date and were forced to follow a strict and celibate courting ritual.
Glut raids were routinely run on residents' rooms to confiscate excessive personal possessions.
And Dederick and his elders would instigate arbitrary new rules such as the 24-hour day in which half of Synanon would go to work at night while the other half worked during the day.
A Synanon police force patrolled the nearby streets looking for members who might be breaking the rules.
You know your cult's doing well when you got your own cops.
That's the wild, wild country shit, right?
It's exciting to know that glut raids prefigured Marie Kondo.
Yeah, it is.
It is nice, right?
Yeah, he's it's amazing like what a mix of Marie Kondo Scientology and like Maoist China this cult becomes.
So Charles Alverson was a journalist, a novelist, and a square who spent six months living at a Cinanon center.
In an interview with the Fix, he said that during his time there in the late 60s, he saw Synonym as mostly positive, a way to help addicts get control over their lives again.
But he also saw evidence that it was starting to head in a very dark direction.
Quote, I recall being rooted out of bed about midnight to witness a long-term member sitting in a garbage can with his head shaved because he had been caught using.
This was quite common and an indication that some of the cured weren't quite so cured.
Despite the egalitarian veneer of Cinanon, Dederick was always the father figure, big kahuna, boss of bosses.
At mass meetings, new synonym triumphs were announced and new enemies were denounced.
Such techniques kept the wagons circled.
The game evolved from being primarily a therapeutic tool to being an instrument of social control.
Members were increasingly forced to confess to misdeeds during sessions.
Secrets were not allowed, and the information members gave up about themselves provided the organization with blackmail material they could use if they later tried to leave.
Scientology does the same thing.
It's really like very similar to like the auditing sessions and stuff.
Except for it's you're in a huge group too, which is an interesting wrinkle.
In 1967, Charles Dederick decided to end the concept of graduation entirely.
His justification was that most ex-adics would revert to using once they left.
Now, this is still a problem today.
Relapse rates for addiction within the first year of people who go to modern rehab facilities are between 40 and 60 percent.
Chuck considered this unacceptable, and the best way to ensure no one relapsed was to ensure that no one ever left rehab.
He told one follower, we're getting out of the dope fiend business.
Now, now the goal of Synanon was not to reform addicts, to get them clean, to help them take control of their lives.
If you entered the program, you were expected to never leave.
The goal was no longer sobriety.
New Utopian World Order00:02:22
The goal was to build, with the guidance of Chuck Dederick, a new utopian world order destined to take the world by storm.
Now fully a cult leader, Chuck began to insist to his followers, this is the kind of revolution that moved the world from Judaism to Catholicism to Protestantism to Synonism.
This is a total revolution game.
Remember, he reared in his attics trying to get off dope.
He's really going for it.
He's really going for it.
I have to say, if you're going to do something, do it right.
He's really going all the way.
Yeah, this is the first cult leader since L. Ron Hubbard, who at least is like, yeah, you know what?
You committed, motherfucker.
No one can take that away from you.
Absolutely.
You went all in on this shit.
Yeah.
Oh, Paul.
You got any pluggables to plug?
Well, sure.
I always like to plug things.
Oh, one of life's simple joys.
I have a handful of podcasts happening right now.
I have the Stay F Homkins that I do with my wife, Janie Haddad Tompkins.
I have Freedom, which I do with Scott Ackerman and Lauren Lapkus.
I have Star Trek the Pod Directive, which is the official Star Trek podcast that I host with Tawny Newsome.
Those are all free wherever you get your podcast.
And then if you have a little extra money at the end of the month, The Neighborhood Listen will be coming back.
That'll be on Stitcher Premium before it becomes free at some point in the indeterminate future.
Well, I am glad since you do a Star Trek podcast that I was able to give you this fun fact about Leonard Nimoy, which I had not known.
I cannot wait to tell Tawny.
This is trillion.
Well, this has been Behind the Bastards.
You can find us various places online, but what you should really do is check out my new podcast, the audiobook of my novel, After the Revolution, wherever podcasts are sold.
You can also find the e-book, which is being announced, you know, coming out three chapters a week on atrbook.com.
That's atrbook.com.
It's free.
Check it out.
Check out Paul's podcasts.
And I don't know, start an addiction recovery center that buys up most of Southern California and creates its own police force.
Listen to Rorschach00:02:41
Or don't.
Maybe you'll do it nice this time.
Maybe you'll be the one who figures it out.
That's part one.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Echo Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.