True Anon Truth Feed - The Game Part 1: Dopefiend
Aired: 2022-09-26
Duration: 50:19


=== Kidnapped at 14 (07:56) ===

[00:00:02]  I'm going to tell you about something that happened to me as a kid.
[00:00:05]  I was kidnapped two months after I turned 14 years old.
[00:00:09]  It happened this way.
[00:00:10]  Two big men came into my room in the middle of the night, got me up from bed.
[00:00:15]  I was confused, groggy.
[00:00:18]  Of course I was terrified.
[00:00:20]  My father stood behind them.
[00:00:22]  I remember he looked impossibly small next to the men.
[00:00:25]  He stood there apologizing, trying to calm me down.
[00:00:28]  The two men ordered me to get dressed and informed me that they had been hired to take me to Oregon.
[00:00:34]  Then, no more than five minutes after making their appearance, they took me by the arms and led me out of the house.
[00:00:40]  These two men were escorts, employees of an agency whose job it is to snatch up children at the behest of their parents and take them to places they do not want to go.
[00:00:50]  I ended up at a wilderness program in the Oregon desert.
[00:00:53]  I had a rough time.
[00:00:55]  Two months later, I was taken to the Monarch School in Montana.
[00:00:59]  I kept wondering why.
[00:01:01]  How did I get here?
[00:01:03]  The reasons I had been given were these.
[00:01:05]  I had been in some trouble around age 12, part of a group of kids who had been busted for property damage and vandalism in an abandoned building.
[00:01:14]  I was on probation.
[00:01:15]  My probation officer despised me.
[00:01:18]  My first day at the Monarch School was surreal.
[00:01:21]  I was searched, had my remaining possessions taken from me, and was assigned a bunk bed in a cabin near the edge of the property.
[00:01:28]  I felt like a sleepwalker.
[00:01:30]  I met the owner that day too.
[00:01:32]  He was a blonde giant in a white wool turtleneck and he towered over me.
[00:01:36]  I remember he had a smile that I hated etched into his face.
[00:01:40]  He shone with a light that repulsed me.
[00:01:43]  I had never encountered a creature like him before and believed I was looking at a devil.
[00:01:48]  Now that year was one of the strangest of my life.
[00:01:51]  My time was split four ways.
[00:01:53]  Farm labor, esoteric therapeutic practices, a small amount of schoolwork, and punishment duty.
[00:02:00]  I witnessed what I thought of at the time as brainwashing.
[00:02:04]  Repetition of absurd maxims, lack of sleep, arbitrary orders and punishments doled out by sneering adults, and children who were unable to realize the absurdity and injustice of their situation who were going along to get along, snitching and smiling and doing everything that was asked of them.
[00:02:22]  Communications with my parents were tightly controlled, and I found out later they had been told by the staff that everything I said to them was a manipulative lie from an unstable personality.
[00:02:32]  Two weeks into Monarch, I got caught trying to escape.
[00:02:35]  I made it about a mile down the road.
[00:02:38]  I knew then that I had to learn how to be a sneak, learn to lie to people.
[00:02:43]  I spent a year doing insane things.
[00:02:46]  I called girls sluts at the behest of adult men.
[00:02:49]  I made constant false confessions of increasingly absurd crimes.
[00:02:53]  My body was possessed with a dull hatred for the adults who ran my life.
[00:02:58]  I went in there as a frightened 14-year-old boy.
[00:03:01]  But as I went through the program with all its ananities and half-ass techniques, I hardened into something else.
[00:03:07]  And I spent every single second there thinking of two things, escape and revenge.
[00:03:13]  After about a year, my schemes came to fruition.
[00:03:16]  And I was on the run for about four months before I was caught.
[00:03:19]  And I wasn't sent back.
[00:03:21]  But I never resumed having a normal life either.
[00:03:24]  I have about two years of high school.
[00:03:26]  I've had trouble connecting with people.
[00:03:29]  Anywhere I am, I feel like I'm always on the verge of running out the door.
[00:03:33]  I can't sit still.
[00:03:35]  I live in constant fear of hurting women.
[00:03:37]  I was a heroin and methamphetamine addict for many years because I couldn't stand for even one second feeling the way that I felt.
[00:03:45]  And when I really stand up and look back at my life, so much of that stuff seems to emerge from those woods in Montana that held the monarch school.
[00:03:53]  Since then, none of this has been far from my thoughts.
[00:03:56]  And I've held on to these three questions.
[00:03:58]  Why did this happen?
[00:04:00]  Where did this come from?
[00:04:01]  and who is to blame.
[00:04:44]  How are you doing?
[00:04:45]  I'm doing fantastic.
[00:04:47]  Me too.
[00:04:48]  I'm giddy.
[00:04:49]  So I think before we start, I just want to say a couple things that I've been thinking about, which is, you know, we've known each other for a very long time now.
[00:04:59]  Yeah, we have.
[00:05:01]  Honestly, I can't even remember.
[00:05:02]  But teen years.
[00:05:04]  I said teen years.
[00:05:06]  Teen years when I, I know I met you on the train tracks outside of Gilman.
[00:05:14]  I met a lot of women out there.
[00:05:16]  I wasn't, yeah, I was a girl.
[00:05:20]  Yeah, we were going to a punk show.
[00:05:22]  Yes.
[00:05:23]  And I think there were probably beers and brown bags.
[00:05:25]  100%.
[00:05:26]  Yeah, those train tracks.
[00:05:27]  I probably drank more of those train tracks than anywhere else in my childhood.
[00:05:30]  Yeah, totally.
[00:05:32]  But it's funny, you know, yeah, we've known each other for a really long time.
[00:05:35]  And I kind of knew a little bit about, you know, how you grew up and what happened to you when you were a kid.
[00:05:43]  But it really wasn't until we started doing this podcast that I learned a lot more of those details.
[00:05:50]  And I think for our listeners, you know, obviously, it wasn't until they heard the episode that we did, whenever it was a year or two ago, Brat Camp, where you really opened up and talked a little bit about your experience.
[00:06:05]  And something that I think I've learned in doing this show over the past three years is that putting together the reasons why these traumatic events happen to us is really a lifelong project.
[00:06:25]  Yeah.
[00:06:26]  Because these are the things that shape and continually reshape our character and who we are throughout our lives.
[00:06:37]  And I think that part of what we're trying to do in this series is piece together some of the investigative work that you've done and trying to figure out why this happened to you when you were a kid.
[00:06:53]  Yeah, not just me.
[00:06:54]  I think I came out, I mean, I was lucky compared to a lot of other people, but it's me, it's thousands, if not, I mean, at this point, probably millions of other people who are deeply affected by what we'll be talking about in these episodes.
[00:07:08]  So with all that being said, I think it's appropriate that we began in the middle, in your middle, Brace, in the middle of the night, in the middle of your childhood, when you were kidnapped from your home, thrown in a van, and taken deep into the middle of nowhere.
[00:07:29]  So over the course of the next some odd hours, we are going to draw lines between the middle of that night and the middle of the 1950s, when a man by the name of Charles Diedrich dropped acid and decided to make himself a god.
[00:07:43]  From the Oregon High Desert to the cells of Abu Ghraib, from the junkie ward at Lexington to the acid tests at UCLA.
[00:07:54]  So I'm Liz.
[00:07:55]  I'm Brace.
[00:07:56]  And of course, we're joined by producer Young Chomsky.

=== Charles Diedrich's Acid Experiment (07:15) ===

[00:07:59]  And this is The Game, the story of Synanon.
[00:08:31]  So to really tell the story of Synanon, we also have to tell the story of Synanon's founder, Chuck Diedrich.
[00:08:37]  Chuck was born in 1913 in Toledo, Ohio.
[00:08:41]  His father was a drunk.
[00:08:42]  His mother was an opera singer.
[00:08:44]  His family was pretty well off, but nothing really special.
[00:08:47]  So Chuck's father died, according to lawyer Paul Morantz, drunk behind the wheel of his car in 1917.
[00:08:53]  Morantz also says that he was with another woman who was not his wife.
[00:08:58]  But then Chuck's brother died too, and his mother remarried to a man Chuck despised so much that his hatred was mentioned in Chuck's own obituary.
[00:09:06]  So by this time, it's high prohibition and Chuck, like basically everyone else in America, is drinking heavily.
[00:09:15]  He discovered that he was what is now called a functional alcoholic, which is, you know, he could give off the appearance of being stone cold sober, but was drunk off his ass basically all the time.
[00:09:26]  He smoked reefer and got loaded as the stock market crashed in 1929.
[00:09:31]  As he saw the decay around him, he grew frustrated.
[00:09:35]  Racism, crime, class conflict, all of it seemed so out of control, so insipid and evil and stupid.
[00:09:43]  But he was too drunk and paralyzed to do anything about it, and politics made him supremely uncomfortable.
[00:09:48]  So by 1931, he was on his way to Notre Dame, but he would flunk out of that and out of another college in quick succession.
[00:09:56]  Like everybody else in the 1930s, Chuck somehow got a pretty decent job at Gulf Oil.
[00:10:01]  He stayed loaded, married a secretary, pumped out a few kids, and spent his time traveling around, drinking, making enemies, making mistakes, and generally fucking up his life behind the scenes.
[00:10:13]  So World War II hits, and at the same time, Chuck is diagnosed with meningitis.
[00:10:19]  By the time he's in the clear from this, one whole side of his face drooped.
[00:10:23]  He took on the appearance of a sort of garrulous quasimodo and carried with him an aura of intensity and mania.
[00:10:30]  He was hideous, uglier every day, and the more fucked up he looked, the more fucked up on alcohol he got.
[00:10:37]  So he leaves his wife and kids, leaves his job, and he moves, just like so many others, out west to California.
[00:10:46]  Chuck hits Santa Monica, figuring he can live on the beach in a van and stare at all the little ladies walking by in their bathing costumes while he takes sips of liquor and grows a belly.
[00:10:57]  But beach life is boring and he needs money.
[00:11:01]  So Chuck gets a job at Douglas Aircraft and begins the process of making a new life again.
[00:11:06]  He meets a woman, Ruth.
[00:11:08]  They move in together, have a kid, but his drinking gets worse.
[00:11:13]  In 1952, his mother dies, putting him deeper into a hole of depression.
[00:11:19]  Now, not only was he drinking out on the town at all hours, but his drinking deepened, became worse in every way, and basically started ruining his life.
[00:11:28]  His wife tries to introduce him to Alcoholics Anonymous, commonly known as AA, then an organization in ever-growing esteem among the American public.
[00:11:39]  But he wouldn't have it.
[00:11:40]  He would drink because he wanted to get drunk.
[00:11:45]  So this goes on for years.
[00:11:47]  Of course, he loses his job.
[00:11:49]  His family suffers immensely.
[00:11:50]  And in 1956, his wife finds him delirious, thrashing around on the floor, speaking in tongues, and she takes him to these doctors, basically saying, go with these guys, I'm going to leave you.
[00:12:01]  Five days after sobering up, after his DTs and withdrawals had subsided, Chuck lopes his way to his first AA meeting, the Beverly Hills Men's Stag Meeting, on May 4th, 1956.
[00:12:14]  Chuck is enthralled by AA.
[00:12:17]  He finds that when he gets up there and talks, people listen.
[00:12:20]  And when people listen to him, he gets excited.
[00:12:22]  And the more excited he gets, the more people listen to this unsightly maniac's gesticulations and exhortations.
[00:12:30]  Now, I think we should pause for a second.
[00:12:31]  And Bruce, can you talk a little bit about AA?
[00:12:34]  I would love nothing more, Liz.
[00:12:36]  So AA started in 1935 in Akron, Ohio by Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, otherwise known as Dr. Bob.
[00:12:43]  AA's entire program is basically, well, there's these 12 steps that are supposed to get you to kind of tackle the root causes of why you drank or used drugs.
[00:12:51]  And then also you attend AA meetings, which is generally defined as a group of more than two drunks getting together and talking to each other.
[00:12:59]  So the groups catch on shortly after they start them.
[00:13:01]  And the publication of their book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which is colloquially known as the big book, and a big Saturday evening post spread in 1941, sees the group's reach grow even further.
[00:13:12]  AA and its myriad sister programs are now wildly popular.
[00:13:16]  It's programs to help addicts and alcoholics and people suffering from other, maybe non-chemical addictions, to overcome them.
[00:13:23]  But a crucial part of AA is the second A, anonymity.
[00:13:28]  AA functions in a way that there's no real leadership of the program, that groups function autonomously, and that money or fame cannot be part of the program.
[00:13:36]  As such, there's no president of AA.
[00:13:39]  Now, a big part of the founding myth of Alcoholics Anonymous was Bill Wilson's hospital room spiritual experience, which almost certainly was the result of a quack doctor's Belladonna treatment, which caused him to hallucinate.
[00:13:52]  This, alongside the group's roots in Christian self-help organizations, make an almost psychedelic God consciousness a crucial part of AA's teachings.
[00:14:00]  Chuck saw that AA, at least for some people, worked.
[00:14:04]  I mean, it even worked for him.
[00:14:06]  He took to it, going to meeting after meeting, bloviating at the podium, and holding court afterwards.
[00:14:12]  But even sober, Chuck couldn't keep it together.
[00:14:15]  He was fired from the next job he got.
[00:14:17]  He lost his car, his home, and he ended up sleeping at various AA clubs and on other members' floors.
[00:14:24]  He was eventually lent some money by a fellow AA, rented a place, and started letting newly sober alcoholics crash on his floor.
[00:14:34]  Now, in 1957, two scientists, Keith Dippman and Sidney Cohen, show up at an AA meeting with a proposal for alcoholics there.
[00:14:46]  Participate in our National Institute of Mental Health, aka the NIMH, backed study for testing LSD on alcoholics.
[00:14:57]  Chuck's hand, shut up.
[00:14:59]  God, I wish that were me.
[00:15:01]  So wait, Liz.
[00:15:02]  In the 1950s, doctors would just go to AA meetings and offer to give people acid?
[00:15:07]  Yeah.
[00:15:08]  Damn, that's fucking crazy.
[00:15:12]  It does sound fucking crazy, but it's true.

=== Dosing Alcoholics with LSD (15:00) ===

[00:15:14]  By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA, alongside the U.S. military, was doing all sorts of bizarre and robustly funded psychological research into pretty much everything and anything you can imagine.
[00:15:29]  And that included dosing alcoholics with LSD.
[00:15:33]  In fact, between 1945 and the mid-1960s, the U.S. military was, by far, the largest institutional sponsor of psychological research in the United States.
[00:15:45]  During the Korean War, DOD spent more on social and behavioral science than all other federal agencies combined.
[00:15:53]  Now, the NSF, aka the National Science Foundation, and the NIMH were technically separate as non-military entities, but basically institutionally intertwined with DOD.
[00:16:05]  There's a lot of revolving doors across all of these various institutions.
[00:16:10]  Now, why was DOD spending so much?
[00:16:14]  Well, a couple reasons.
[00:16:16]  One is you have to remember that in 1957, a little rocket that could named Sputnik was launched and everyone in America collectively freaked out for being total losers that couldn't compete with the Soviets.
[00:16:30]  Naturally, the response was to ramp up the machine and suddenly DOD was drenched in cash.
[00:16:36]  But the other reason is a little more nuanced.
[00:16:39]  In the rubble of World War II, social science disciplines were in crisis.
[00:16:45]  Everyone was searching for how and why the Holocaust happened, how their studies failed to account for the possibility of such a horrific event, and how any society, ostensibly full of rational social beings, could be capable of such monstrosities.
[00:17:01]  Now, this is where infamous projects like the Frankfurt School's Authoritarian Personality come from, where Hannah Arendt's studies saw Nazis and their bureaucrats emerge.
[00:17:11]  The social sciences were disciplines looking for answers so as to prevent fascism from ever taking hold again.
[00:17:17]  And psychology as a field was no different.
[00:17:21]  At Yale in 1954, the humanist personality theorist Gordon Alport said, Up to now, the behavioral sciences have not provided us with a picture of a man capable of creating or living in democracy.
[00:17:38]  What psychology can do is to discover whether the democratic ideal is possible.
[00:17:53]  In the wake of World War II then, psychology became a discipline, a term pregnant with political content.
[00:18:01]  Freed from the shackles of the dusty European analyst's couch, psychology was no longer concerned with interpreting the dark and twisty mirrors of the individual unconscious.
[00:18:12]  Psychology had to become American.
[00:18:15]  In order to meet the demands of this emerging intellectual market, psychology needed to map out new territories to conquer, to expand beyond the Freudian meditations on the expert clinician, and articulate a grander vision for a new democratic subject and society.
[00:18:34]  In short, psychology needed to become a political project.
[00:18:39]  And so by the early 1960s, DOD was spending almost its entire social science research budget on psychology.
[00:18:48]  Now it's really during the Korean War that a lot of the DOD social science research comes to fruition.
[00:18:53]  Psychological warfare, intelligence classification, clinical treatment, human engineering, even human relations research.
[00:19:01]  All of this is funded and realized through military projects.
[00:19:06]  The biggest client of all of this funded research is our old friend, the CIA.
[00:19:12]  Alan Dulles, giving a rare public statement during this time, warned that the Soviets had special psychological technology aimed at the perversion of minds of selected individuals who are subjected to such treatment that they are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts.
[00:19:30]  Parrot-like, the individuals so conditioned can merely repeat thoughts which have been implanted in their minds.
[00:19:37]  As you might be aware, developing this technology became pretty much the focus of the CIA.
[00:19:43]  And by 1963, you have the Inspector General saying, The CIA case officer is first and foremost, perhaps, a practitioner of the art of assessing and exploiting human personality and motivation for ulterior purposes by bringing the methods and disciplines of psychology to bear.
[00:20:00]  The prime objectives are control, exploitation, and naturalization.
[00:20:06]  These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeutic in their intent.
[00:20:11]  Psychology, now a robust discipline thanks to more than a decade of unprecedented funding, was ready to be instrumentalized in service of the American project.
[00:20:24]  All right, but to bring this back around to old drunk Chucky out there in Santa Monica, part of some of the experimental projects the DOD funded included research into LSD.
[00:20:36]  Okay, so LSD25, aka lysergic acid diethylamide, was a drug only available to physicians explicitly for research purposes.
[00:20:49]  Synthesized in Basel, Switzerland, it was only discovered to have mind-altering properties when the chemist who created it accidentally ingested a teeny dose and went a little cuckoo.
[00:21:00]  Now, psychologists had been searching for a chemical cause of insanity, and so part of the focus of LSD research was to induce psychosis in subjects, basically attempting to replicate mental illness through chemical torture.
[00:21:14]  In America, the CIA's interest in LSD was as a potential truth serum, and the agency began to secretly fund these projects beginning in the early 1950s.
[00:21:23]  The little that we do know about the agency tests was revealed in the 1970s as part of the congressional investigation into the CIA's covert MKUltra program, but almost everything else remains unpublished.
[00:21:37]  For the subjects of these tests, their experiences varied, but typically it went a little something like this.
[00:21:43]  They exhibited a range of emotional reactions from intense giggling to unyielding weeping, totalizing dissociation, spirals of anxiety and loops of nervous breakdowns, profound, deepening paranoia, the warping of past, present, and future, ego death, and a seductive, tantalizing sense of incompleteness.
[00:22:04]  Researchers concluded that these subjects had experienced a temporary psychosis, easily comparable to schizophrenia.
[00:22:12]  Dr. Sidney Cohen, the man who plucked Chuck out of AA for his acid test, was an assistant professor at the newly established UCLA School of Medicine, flush with government cash.
[00:22:22]  Cohen himself took acid in 1955 and wrote, I was taken by surprise.
[00:22:28]  This was no confused, disoriented delirium, but something quite different.
[00:22:33]  The problems and strivings, the worries and frustrations of everyday life vanished.
[00:22:38]  In their place was a majestic, sunlit, heavenly inner quietude.
[00:22:42]  I seem to have finally arrived at the contemplation of eternal truth.
[00:22:47]  Here, Sidney's acid tests take a turn.
[00:22:50]  Rather than attempting to model psychosis, Dr. Cohen wanted to test whether LSD could treat subjects, have a positive effect, help them work through their deficiencies, and achieve a higher consciousness, similar to the experience that he had.
[00:23:08]  Dr. Cohen started focusing on alcoholics, seeing if administering LSD could alter their behavior in such a way that their addictions were cured.
[00:23:18]  The idea here was twofold, that the traumatic experience of LSD would resemble the DTs, and if that didn't work, then two, it could potentially expand one's consciousness so much that one would be ready to embrace a higher power.
[00:23:34]  Now, Bill Wilson himself got stoked on this second idea in particular and took LSD for the first time in 1956 alongside Dr. Cohen.
[00:23:44]  His foray into acid trips went on for years.
[00:23:48]  Bill even started a private LSD group in New York with acids supplied directly from Dr. Cohen and his research partner, Dr. Keith Dipman.
[00:23:56]  Now Dipman was the head of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute's Alcoholism Research Clinic, which administered the tests on alcoholics.
[00:24:07]  It's here, in 1957, that Chuck Diedrich took part in two separate LSD trips as a part of a group of people recruited from AA.
[00:24:17]  When Dipman published his research at the end of the 1950s, LSD was seen as a miracle cure for alcoholism, but news of Bill Wilson's involvement rocked AA.
[00:24:28]  As for Diedrich, he said this of LSD.
[00:24:32]  The experience doesn't end when you come out from under the immediate intoxicating influence of the drug.
[00:24:38]  It stays with you and you go through all sorts of changes and insights.
[00:24:42]  I had all of those.
[00:24:45]  Chuck credited his two LSD trips with changing the way he viewed the world and laying the foundation for Synanon.
[00:24:52]  In the years to come, he would seek to replicate the epiphanies he had under the influence by conducting his own psychological experiments on the residents at his program.
[00:25:10]  So just a couple of years into his sobriety, Chuck began to experience something many newly clean people eventually feel.
[00:25:17]  The quiet joys of brotherhood started to get a little bit boring.
[00:25:21]  By the time 1957 rolled around, he was feeling restless, irritable, and discontent.
[00:25:27]  Now, Chuck was a voracious reader, especially Thoreau, but also whatever sociology books he came across.
[00:25:33]  He was beginning to feel a little bit big for his britches in the rooms of AA.
[00:25:37]  He would talk too much at the meetings, totally dominating them, snapping at people, gesticulating wildly and taking up all of the time.
[00:25:45]  He divided AA members.
[00:25:47]  Some thought he was enthralling, and others recognized his massive ego and authoritarian personality.
[00:25:52]  Chuck stopped attending AA regularly, instead hosting members at his apartment for his own groups.
[00:25:58]  So Chuck's at-home meetings were peculiar.
[00:26:01]  In some ways, they were similar to AA, with attendees often sitting in a circle.
[00:26:06]  But unlike AA, where crosstalk and comments about others is forbidden, those things were the only focus of these meetings.
[00:26:13]  Attendees would speak, but if Chuck thought they were lying, he'd tear into them.
[00:26:18]  The participants would rage at each other, break down, sob, scream, and all of them found it terrifically cathartic.
[00:26:25]  Chuck, always in control, always the moderator, began to feel at home for the first time in his life.
[00:26:33]  Though they didn't know it yet, this was the seed of what would become Cinanon's foundation, the game.
[00:26:39]  Though the game, Synanon's form of attack therapy, would transform over the years, with sub-games and secondary games and situational games appearing as necessary, the game served as a through line from the beginning to the end.
[00:26:53]  Now at these meetings, they didn't just confine themselves to the personal.
[00:26:57]  They spent all night sometimes engaged in talking about sociology, psychology, history, anything they could think about, taking turns lecturing each other and debating.
[00:27:06]  For most of the attendees, this was the first time they'd ever been in an environment like this.
[00:27:12]  Chuck even began going down to AA meetings with a little cadre of followers and haranguing the speakers, arguing with them while flanked by his crew.
[00:27:20]  According to Paul Morantz, Chuck said, AA was born out of love.
[00:27:26]  We were born out of hate.
[00:27:52]  As Chuck's house meetings became more frequent, the ragtag group of drunks became more tight knit.
[00:27:58]  One day, a member of the club brought along a former dope addict to the house.
[00:28:03]  Now you have to understand, in that era, AA looked down mightily upon drug addicts.
[00:28:09]  They were seen as little more than rats, criminals, of low morals and character.
[00:28:14]  Out of this enmity, eventually Narcotics Anonymous would start, though it wouldn't take off for a couple decades.
[00:28:20]  Chuck didn't look down on the dope addict, at least not in the way AA did.
[00:28:24]  He saw a blank canvas on which he could paint his vision.
[00:28:29]  One dope fiend at Diedrich's meeting beget another.
[00:28:33]  And soon, much like Rets, Diedrich really did have an infestation of dopers.
[00:28:39]  There was finally some place other than the hospitals or jail where an addict could go and try and get clean.
[00:28:45]  Soon, junkies from all over LA were moving into Diedrich's tiny apartment.
[00:28:49]  So many, in fact, that he had to move.
[00:28:52]  The group used one member's money to move into a small storefront in Ocean Park, California.
[00:28:58]  Now when you got a thing, you got a thing.
[00:29:01]  But eventually, you gotta give that thing a name.
[00:29:05]  In their infinite wisdom, they decided to call this little storefront the Tender Loving Care Club.
[00:29:13]  It was a place for addicts to get off dope, get on their feet, and feel a little bit of the heat from the hellfire and brimstone that Chuck would bring down on them in the game.
[00:29:22]  In a loving way, with their best interests at heart, of course.
[00:29:26]  There were no professionals involved.
[00:29:28]  This was by drunks for dopers.
[00:29:32]  It was, as best as anyone can figure, one of the first modern treatment centers, and certainly the most prominent.
[00:29:41]  Now, Bruce, you spent a lot of time in rehab.
[00:29:43]  Listen, a lot of time is subjective.
[00:29:46]  Have I spent months?
[00:29:49]  I mean, listen, who can calculate how long time is?
[00:29:53]  But yes, I've spent a significant portion of my life in rehabilitation facilities for those who might have fallen victim to that great scourge, heroin.
[00:30:03]  And so I'm pretty familiar with how modern rehabs work.
[00:30:06]  I've been to all kinds of different ones.
[00:30:08]  I don't.
[00:30:08]  I'm not very familiar.
[00:30:10]  Well, not yet, honey, but you know what?
[00:30:12]  Maybe one day I'll just convince everyone you're insane and send you there.

=== Addicts Helping Addicts (13:37) ===

[00:30:15]  I sure will.
[00:30:17]  But anyways, to those of you listening at home, you might not have been to rehab yet.
[00:30:22]  But, you know, to you, like this idea of like addicts helping or former addicts helping people who are trying to get sober, that's not unfamiliar to you, right?
[00:30:31]  Yeah, totally.
[00:30:32]  I've heard of that.
[00:30:32]  That seems like how it works, right?
[00:30:35]  Well, it didn't always work that way.
[00:30:37]  So many of the rehab centers I've been to and ones that I've worked at were staffed by addicts basically from top to bottom.
[00:30:44]  Sometimes not all the way to the top, but most of the way there.
[00:30:47]  Now this is sensible in theory and much of the time sensible in practice.
[00:30:51]  Recovering addicts are perfectly capable of getting the same certification and training that people who don't have a problem with drugs or alcohol are.
[00:30:59]  And more than that, many of them know how addicts think.
[00:31:01]  The mind of an addict is mostly filled with, all right, let me see if I can get myself back in time.
[00:31:07]  How to lie and steal in order to get the next fix, self-pity, bitterness at perceived slights from society or friends or family, how to stop the pain without enduring any more of it, how to, you know, find people from your past in order to extort or lie to them in order to get money from them, and who you owe money to.
[00:31:27]  Former addicts know this well, most of them having been through the same process.
[00:31:32]  So prior to the 20th century, much of the time drunks were either left out on the street to rot, remanded to asylums, or put in work gangs or prison cells.
[00:31:42]  Much of the talk around alcoholism was on how to prevent it.
[00:31:46]  There were small programs here and there, sanitariums or in private dwellings.
[00:31:52]  There were attempts by Native Americans to put forth programs, but none went far.
[00:31:57]  And in the late 1800s, America saw the rise of anti-saloon leagues, the beginning of the movement towards prohibition, the ones leading the fight against alcohol.
[00:32:07]  And you know what, Liz?
[00:32:08]  They were correct in diagnosing the lead cause of destruction in America, the defiler of youth, the foe of peace, the deceiver of nations, the vagabond of poverty, the enlisting officer of sin, the serpent Liz of Eden.
[00:32:26]  All right, well, around the turn of the century, a hospital opened up in New York called the Charles B. Towns Hospital.
[00:32:34]  Named after a consummate freak named Charles B. Towns, a life insurance agent who moved to New York from Georgia.
[00:32:42]  At some point, old Charles had hooked up with Alexander Lambert, who was serving as Teddy Roosevelt's personal doctor.
[00:32:50]  Now, Townes tells Lambert he has a cure for morphinism, an alcoholism that was told to him by a mysterious and unnamed country doctor.
[00:33:00]  Towns has zero experience with this stuff, but basically his idea was to give addicts a bunch of delirians, belladonna, henbane, a bunch of other herbs.
[00:33:11]  These two opened up the Towns Hospital, which is where Bill Wilson from AA ended up several times when he was trying to get sober.
[00:33:19]  Towns eventually fell out of favor with doctors and his cure came to be seen as total quackery, but not before he helped craft our nation's drug policy and loan Bill Wilson a bunch of money.
[00:33:32]  This goes to show though, experimental technology, social or medical or whatever, can be tested on addicts with no repercussions.
[00:33:43]  You can, in fact, make a killing.
[00:33:49]  So the 1930s saw the advent of narcotics farms, the first major one being the most famous, situated out in Lexington, Kentucky.
[00:33:58]  This is by far the most famous treatment facility of the mid-20th century and features prominently in William Burroughs' autofiction novelette, Junkie.
[00:34:08]  If you're a doper in the 1940s, this is what you do.
[00:34:11]  Get the bus down to Narco, get clean, maybe get high off of nutmeg or something else in the kitchen, get your tolerance down, get out, and then back on morphine.
[00:34:21]  There were occasional AA and later NA meetings there, but very little recovery as we would know it today.
[00:34:27]  The thing is, doctors also set up labs there while funding rained down from the government and sociologists studied the drunks and junkies lying around the place.
[00:34:36]  Of course, with so many drug addicts in one place and so many particularly black addicts in one place, the CIA found pig bellies ripe for the slicing.
[00:34:45]  In conjunction with the NIMH, Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA experimented on mostly black patients by dosing them with LSD, sometimes every day for months at a time, before rewarding them with their drug of choice, usually heroin.
[00:35:01]  Narcotic and pharmaceutical testing on patients at Lexington continued for years and partially contributed to its closure in 1975.
[00:35:13]  Other than Lexington, most junkies had to dry out in jail or in hospitals such as New York's Bellevue.
[00:35:19]  Now, I myself have withdrawn from drugs quite a number of times, and I think it would help if I actually did describe this process in a little bit, the slightest bit of detail.
[00:35:31]  I can describe it like this.
[00:35:33]  Every cell in your body is run amok.
[00:35:35]  Your heart is beating so fast you think you've gone berserk.
[00:35:38]  You can't move, but you must move.
[00:35:40]  You want to die.
[00:35:41]  And in your stomach, you know that there are untold horrors which you will vomit up, but with each vomit, you become weaker and more able to be eaten by the devil.
[00:35:49]  Also, you have diarrhea.
[00:35:51]  Also, the devil hates you, and he lives in you too.
[00:35:53]  He has an apartment in you, and he's trying to kill you, even though you're already in hell, and also you're his landlord, and you piss yourself.
[00:36:00]  Also, you come really easily, even with a limp penis.
[00:36:03]  This is for guys only, as described in the New Orleans section of Burroughs' Junkie in great inaccurate detail.
[00:36:10]  It is the worst feeling by far that I have ever felt in my life.
[00:36:15]  So before Cinanon, there was nothing really resembling it.
[00:36:18]  Cinnanon, of course, had no medical staff.
[00:36:20]  Its workers had no accreditation.
[00:36:22]  But to junkies who had been in and out of hospitals, institutions, and jails with no results, it was practically a miracle.
[00:36:39]  All right, but back to 1958.
[00:36:43]  Those 25 dopers hanging around the tender, loving care club with Chuck were living on knife's edge.
[00:36:51]  Money was thin, and many didn't know what would happen to them if they all went their separate ways.
[00:36:57]  The group survived by stealing, sometimes hooking, subsisting on whatever they could hustle.
[00:37:02]  Many of them had only known the lives of the street junkie or the career criminal.
[00:37:07]  They're gonna pay rent, have a place to eat, and a cot to sleep on.
[00:37:10]  They needed to make money, and very few had had straight jobs before.
[00:37:15]  This cohesion, this group struggle, this communal effort, was part of what animated the group and brought them together.
[00:37:25]  Yeah, I mean, the worst thing for an addict is to be alone.
[00:37:28]  He shuts off.
[00:37:29]  He withers like those old people who die because they don't know any other old people.
[00:37:34]  The junkie trying to get clean needs to be around other people.
[00:37:37]  And it's finally at this point in the story that Synanon earns its name.
[00:37:42]  There's been a lot of speculation on the precise origins of the name.
[00:37:46]  It certainly sounds sinister enough, but the generally accepted one is that it's a product of a wet-brained ex-drunk who excitedly mixed up symposium and anonymous.
[00:37:57]  But the name is nonsense, of course.
[00:38:00]  While the group sessions were a bit like symposiums with lectures on Thoreau's self-reliance from Diedrich often mixed in, there was absolutely nothing anonymous about the program, and the group would soon seek as much publicity as possible.
[00:38:26]  Synanon was a hit.
[00:38:27]  Pretty much immediately, it made the local news, which sparked wider interest in the group.
[00:38:33]  But Cinnanon's neighbors in Ocean Park didn't like this.
[00:38:36]  They thought that all junkies were criminals, thieves, rapists, murderers.
[00:38:41]  They wanted this corpulent, lopsided freak and his merry band of misfits out of there.
[00:38:47]  Neighbors called city inspectors on Cinanon, and as the group was living in a storefront, they quickly lost the case.
[00:38:54]  This was the first of many, many problems with neighbors that Cinnanon would undergo in its early years.
[00:39:01]  Problems which only made the group more insular and distrusting of the wider world.
[00:39:07]  So by the time they were evicted, Diedrich was starting to make friends with money.
[00:39:11]  12 members of the Friars Club got together some money and gave it to Chuck to pay first and last at the Santa Monica Armory, the most storied of Cinnanon's many locations.
[00:39:22]  The facility was huge, and Chuck was finally able to house anyone who came sincerely seeking help.
[00:39:28]  He started giving talks to local organizations, netting big donations, and making a name for himself.
[00:39:33]  The group was starting to come together too.
[00:39:37]  Around this time, something transformational happens in Cinanon's internal history: the night of the big cop-out.
[00:39:45]  What began as a big game of accusations and recrimination led to dozens of members admitting to everything from the occasional smoking of pot to taking fixes of heroin in secret behind the armory.
[00:39:57]  Chuck demanded to know who was using, where the drugs were coming from, in short, everything about everyone.
[00:40:03]  But no one would budge.
[00:40:05]  It was a tense scene.
[00:40:06]  The code of the streets ruled.
[00:40:09]  But Chuck harangued, yelled, pointed, screamed at them until they broke one by one.
[00:40:15]  And they were broken, but they felt free.
[00:40:18]  They'd copped out.
[00:40:19]  And at Cinanon, to cop out became the rule.
[00:40:23]  But by that August, Diedrich and one of his associates were in jail.
[00:40:27]  They were accused by the city of Santa Monica of operating a hospital without a license.
[00:40:34]  Now, Chuck lost the case, but he showcased his willingness to go to jail for the organization.
[00:40:38]  And with that came vigorous defense from allies, a shit ton of positive press, and a boatload of addicts from all across the country.
[00:40:46]  It also showed Diedrich that strength mattered.
[00:40:49]  Now, I think it's useful for us to talk a little bit about what life at Cinanon was really like.
[00:40:54]  Okay, so you're a junkie who stumbles in.
[00:40:56]  Maybe you took a train all the way from the Midwest or East Coast or somewhere.
[00:41:00]  You're shaken.
[00:41:01]  You took your last shot the night before.
[00:41:03]  You're looked over by a couple of members.
[00:41:05]  You answer some questions.
[00:41:07]  You're sick.
[00:41:07]  You're put on the couch of the common area to shake off your jones.
[00:41:11]  You shiver and you move around on the couch for a few days or a week or two.
[00:41:15]  Meanwhile, you're getting kind of razzed lightly, but taken care of by the members.
[00:41:20]  The minute you're better, then you got intake, real intake, where the laws of the land are laid down for you.
[00:41:26]  You're integrated into the group.
[00:41:28]  Integration was real big at Cinanon.
[00:41:30]  You get cleaned up, introduced to the group, given a job, always at the bottom, but it was one that would keep you honest.
[00:41:36]  And then it's time for you to get to the real work.
[00:41:40]  So you join in on the game, on the hustling, on the strange pop psychology sessions from Chuck, where you might be told that you're in an Oedipus complex, that you're a homosexual, or maybe both.
[00:41:50]  A certain level of behavior is expected from you.
[00:41:53]  Total honesty, a good attitude, willingness to take it on the chin.
[00:41:57]  Remember, no drugs or alcohol and no violence.
[00:42:00]  But sometimes, though, things were tough.
[00:42:03]  Yeah, punishment meant either getting tossed out on your ear or the haircut, meaning Chuck would stand there and verbally dress you down.
[00:42:11]  Maybe he'd make you sit at a high chair, like a baby, or maybe you'd even have to wear a sign around your neck saying how much of a dummy you were.
[00:42:18]  But there were rewards too.
[00:42:20]  Many at Cinanon had finally found a family.
[00:42:23]  People who cared about them, were honest with them, and only harsh with them because they loved them and wanted them to get better.
[00:42:30]  And there were cigarettes, lots and lots of cigarettes, all for free.
[00:42:34]  And coffee, and community.
[00:42:37]  Many of these people had experienced nothing at all like this in their entire lives.
[00:42:42]  There was a certain defiance to the Cinanon members.
[00:42:45]  All their lives, they had been told they were junkies, bums, that they couldn't make it.
[00:42:51]  They were sick in the head.
[00:42:53]  Even AA had rejected them, and in AA, everyone was sort of glum and self-accusing.
[00:42:58]  But here, at Synanon, they could really hold their heads up high.
[00:43:40]  Hello, Liz.
[00:43:42]  Hello.
[00:43:43]  I am overjoyed right now.
[00:43:45]  Why?
[00:43:46]  I told you, it's a nice airport.
[00:43:49]  Yeah, I haven't been here in like six years.
[00:43:51]  Well, it was under construction.

=== Direct Link to Savannah (05:35) ===

[00:43:53]  Well, I have.
[00:43:54]  It's good it was under construction because I'll tell you this, it was a real bus stop.
[00:43:58]  That's why you said it.
[00:43:58]  You said it's like being in a bus terminal.
[00:44:00]  It was when I was here before.
[00:44:02]  Yeah.
[00:44:02]  I went to Savannah.
[00:44:03]  That was a long time ago.
[00:44:05]  Also, the one thing I will say, though, with JFK, you can take the train straight there.
[00:44:10]  No train straight to LaGuardia.
[00:44:12]  I'll walk by Nana here.
[00:44:15]  Well, we did get here early, and we have a little bit of time before a flight.
[00:44:20]  And, you know, we're about to take this trip.
[00:44:23]  And we're taking this trip for the podcast, but I think we're also taking this trip for you, you know, a little bit.
[00:44:29]  And I just wanted to maybe talk to you a little bit before.
[00:44:35]  Like, we've spoken about, you know, like when you were kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken from your home and you were dropped in the middle of Montana and then, you know, how insane of an experience that was.
[00:44:48]  But we haven't really talked about like the specifics of the school or like what the program was like.
[00:44:55]  I mean, what was it like?
[00:44:57]  Well, I quickly found out that the entirety of the Monarch program was based really around two things.
[00:45:04]  Something called Insights, which I'll tell you all about later.
[00:45:08]  And a thing called Group, which is a pretty innocuous name for something that we did really often.
[00:45:13]  I mean, we had two or three times a week for about several hours, but at least two and a half, three hours, we would sit in a circle, maybe about 30 kids and some adults, and you were supposed to confront people in it.
[00:45:31]  You know, if somebody did something wrong in the dorm, you know, you were able to sort of get into their ass there.
[00:45:36]  You were supposed to snitch on people.
[00:45:37]  You were supposed to weep, and you were supposed to talk about things that you've done that were bad in your past and the present.
[00:45:44]  They were, I cannot stress this enough, the things that I dreaded the most every single week.
[00:45:50]  The only time I ever felt comfortable at Monarch was in like the five minutes walking out of one of these fucking things.
[00:45:56]  Because they were really like, I mean, this is when kids were like trying to show off for the fucking staff.
[00:46:01]  This is when really you would get stabbed in the back.
[00:46:03]  This is when you were expected to fucking fall on your own sword.
[00:46:05]  I mean, they were really, really, really intense.
[00:46:08]  Like dozens of kids weeping, crying, thrashing around, insane.
[00:46:15]  And you were also supposed to, you know, if you had an attraction to a girl in it, in the program, or a girl had an attraction to a guy or whatever, you were supposed to make that known in the group and you're supposed to sort of tell on yourself there.
[00:46:30]  I don't know why you were supposed to do that, but you were.
[00:46:32]  And so, you know, if I had an attraction to, you know, Catherine, I would get across from her and look her straight in the eyes and say, Catherine, I have an attraction to you.
[00:46:43]  And then you wouldn't be able to talk to Catherine for several months until you were able to report back that you no longer did.
[00:46:48]  I, of course, being a typical 14-year-old boy, I never did that.
[00:46:54]  Not willingly.
[00:46:55]  But I did have a crush on a girl whose name I can't remember.
[00:47:00]  I actually can't remember anything about her, but I'm sure she was beautiful, considering my taste.
[00:47:05]  And I had written in, this is the most embarrassing story I had literally ever, I did not tell anybody this story until a few years ago.
[00:47:14]  So I'm going to try to tell it with as much verb as possible, but I had an attraction to this girl and I wrote in this kind of journal, whatever thing that I would like to kiss her.
[00:47:26]  I think that's about as explicit as it got, but I sort of wrote out this fantasy that I had.
[00:47:31]  I didn't really know about how all the other stuff went, so I don't think I could have gotten that far with it.
[00:47:37]  And you weren't allowed to kind of have these personal possessions that was really, especially anything hidden.
[00:47:41]  And so during this check, they discovered this, and they, of course, read it.
[00:47:46]  And then I was to bring it, actually, into a group and get up and look this girl in the eyes and tell her exactly what I had said about her, exactly why I had said it about her, and exactly what attracted me to her.
[00:48:00]  And then I had to apologize to every single person in there.
[00:48:03]  And I did that multiple times.
[00:48:05]  I only had to tell her once, but I had to apologize to everyone once.
[00:48:07]  It's probably the most mortifying moment of my life to this day.
[00:48:10]  And I have a life chock full of humiliating moments.
[00:48:16]  And after that, I was put on bans from girls and I think female staff members for about two months.
[00:48:23]  I wasn't allowed to talk to anybody or any girls.
[00:48:26]  And they weren't allowed to sit at the table with me.
[00:48:28]  They weren't allowed to work next to me.
[00:48:30]  They weren't allowed to like, you know, if I needed a fork, they couldn't hand me a fork.
[00:48:33]  It would have to go through somebody else.
[00:48:36]  And then I had to constantly sort of like check in on a public level about this.
[00:48:41]  And then I had to burn and then bury the ashes of my diary.
[00:48:46]  And it was difficult to really understand why that happened.
[00:48:52]  And so after I got out, after I ran away, later in my life, I encountered therapy in sort of more normal environments.
[00:49:01]  Still not a big therapy guy, but I saw how it's usually done.
[00:49:04]  And I realized that had absolutely nothing to do with what I had been doing as a kid.
[00:49:08]  And the more I thought about it, the more how fucking twisted and insane it sounded to me.
[00:49:14]  And it wasn't until years later that I started sort of doing research and trying to figure out why this happened to me and where this stuff came from.
[00:49:23]  And, you know, obviously also with these thoughts of kind of revenge in my head of figuring these guys out.

=== Direct Link Between Synanon and Monarch (00:50) ===

[00:49:28]  And I realized and I saw that there was a direct link, a direct link between Synanon and Monarch.
[00:49:36]  and that what I was doing in what they called the group was the exact same thing that Chuck Dedrick had invented in the game.
[00:49:52]  On the next episode of The Game, the story of Synanon, boom time in the people business, the DOD's human potential, and the ecstasy of a shaved head.
[00:50:04]  This series is produced by Truanon.
[00:50:06]  Exclusive episodes available at patreon.com slash truan pod.
[00:50:12]  Your hosts are Brace Belden and Liz Franczak.
[00:50:16]  The music was written and recorded by me, Young Chomsky.