From a Pioneering Rehab Program to a Church, and Its Unraveling

Synanon began in California in 1958 as a pioneering drug rehabilitation community founded by Charles Dederich, and in its early years it earned genuine respect for its residential model of recovery, built around an intense group-encounter practice known as "the Game," in which members confronted one another with unsparing honesty. Its influence on the wider therapeutic-community and addiction-treatment movements was real and lasting.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, however, Synanon evolved from a rehabilitation program into a communal movement and then, in 1974, declared itself a religion, a change many observers linked to legal and tax considerations as much as to belief, and became increasingly authoritarian and insular under Dederich's control, adopting practices such as mandatory changes of relationship and, for men, vasectomies. Its later years were marked by serious wrongdoing established in the courts: most notoriously, in 1978 members placed a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had litigated against the group, and Dederich and others were prosecuted in connection with that attack. The organization declined through the 1980s and dissolved. Synanon is studied as a cautionary case of how an innovative and initially beneficial therapeutic community can, under unchecked charismatic leadership, turn coercive and violent.