1 Treating America's Opioid Addiction Part Two: Synanon and the Tunnel Back to the Human Ra
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Treating America’s Opioid Addiction Part Two: Synanon and the Tunnel Back to the Human Race John Stallone: I mean, I had no intentions of stopping. Mariel: I’m Mariel Carr, and that was John Stallone, telling me how he felt about quitting Heroin when he was 18 years old. And this was after he arrested and sent to a federal prison hospital called the Narcotic Farm, in Lexington Kentucky. When it opened in 1935 it promised to find a cure for heroin addiction, but two decades in, it still hadn’t. John spent about five months there in 1958. John Stallone: I got kicked out just before Christmas. On the train back to New York, of course there were a couple other guys that had gotten released. One of the guys, this guy, Bunny, was from uptown. We shot up at his house. Then we all went back to our own neighborhoods, and that was the end of that. I didn't even wait to get back to my neighborhood to use. We used right there in Manhattan. Mariel: John kept using heroin for years after that. But eventually he really did want to get clean. John Stallone. You know it’s kind of a boring life. Hustling every day. I would work and try to stay clean for a while, but it never lasted. One time I came out of my house, and the stoop right next to my house, this guy says, "Hey, how you doing?" It was this guy Chancy, and I was clean, and he said, "You want to get off?" I said, "Yeah, of course." I jumped over the little fence there and went up to his house, and I started using again. There were no programs. Mariel: John finally found out about a program at a particularly low point in his life. Stallone: Well, me and my partner, we used to stick up drug stores for dope. We were coming back from robbing a drug store out in Long Island, and I started getting real sick. I said, "Man, I'm sick." Mariel: They pulled off the Long Island Expressway and stopped at an old friend’s house. Unannounced and with a bag of drugs. Stallone: He sent his wife to bed, and we sat up and shot dope all night. While we were doing that we said, "Where were you, man? We haven't seen you in about a year." He said, "Oh, I was out in this great place out in California. It's a place, [00:23:30] a bunch of dope fiends got a place on the beach. That’s how I ended up going to Synanon. Stallone: Everything I read, everything I heard was once a junkie always a junkie, once a dope fiend, always a dope fiend. You can't cure a dope fiend. Then I heard about this little ragtag outfit out in California that was a bunch of junkies keeping themselves clean. That made sense to me. That was interesting. Alexis: Hello and welcome to Distillations. I’m Alexis Pedrick. Lisa: And I’m Lisa Berry Drago. Alexis: And this is the second installment of our three-part series on the history of opioid addiction treatment in the United States. 1 Lisa: Part one was called The Narcotic Farm and the Promise of Salvation, and we told you about the first wave of opioid addiction treatment in the U.S., which began after the Civil War. It was a response to an epidemic that started with physicians’ prescriptions—just like our epidemic today. Alexis: We also talked about the Narcotic Farm in Lexington Kentucky, which was one of two federal prison-hospitals that tried to treat inmates with opioid addictions. They also studied drug addiction more extensively than had ever been done before throughout the world. Lisa: When the Narcotic Farm opened its doors, doctors were optimistic that science would deliver a cure for drug addiction. But it was all ultimately an experiment—with people like John Stallone as its subjects. And that experiment eventually failed. By the 1960s a sense of futility had set in, and a void was created. Alexis: This void was filled by an unconventional treatment community, run by an eccentric leader. And this, my friends, is where our senior producer Mariel Carr is going to take over. Lisa: Chapter Two: Synanon’s Beginnings. Mariel: Today’s opioid addiction treatment landscape basically boils down to two very different models: One is medically-assisted maintenance treatment—which is taking a daily dose of methadone or buprenorphine to stave off cravings and prevent withdrawal symptoms. The second option is what’s known as the therapeutic community or TC model. The term therapeutic community actually comes 19th century England, and not from addiction treatment but mental health. The idea focused on two things: an environment that supported recovery, outside of someone’s everyday life, and the idea of mutual aid—where someone with a condition helps someone else with the same condition. In their purest form, people in TCs for drug addiction participate in peer therapy, live together, and completely abstain from drugs. Today some programs combine both models. But that therapeutic community, or TC model has contributed to nearly every residential drug treatment program in the U.S. today. It probably doesn’t sound new to you. But nothing like it existed for opioid addiction until 1958, when a group called Synanon opened its doors just down the coast from Santa Monica, California. An instant guide to Synanon… What exactly is the foundations purpose? Synanons first order of business is to reeducate drug addicts and alcoholics delinquents and others who are unable to function responsibly in society. Mariel: Synanon began almost by accident, but it quickly filled a very big void. This is Claire Clark, a behavioral scientist and historian of medicine. She’s also the author The Recovery Revolution: The Battle over Addiction Treatment in the United States. Claire Clark: I think there just were so few other alternatives, and there are certainly fewer alternatives that were sort of governed by, they called themselves ex-addicts for ex-addicts. There's a saying in AA that the program is the kind of like last house on the street. [00:17:30] That the only alternative to 12-step for people is, "It's prisons, institutions, or death." Synanon claimed to offer a novel alternative to those options when there were very few available. Who started synanon? 2 The synanon foundation was started in 1958 by ex-alcoholic Charles E. Dederich. And today Chuck is chairman of the board of directors. Mariel: Before he started Synanon Charles Dederich, or Chuck, as he was called, stayed sober by going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day. He loved it. He loved talking at the meetings, and he often took them over. He once said he’d talk all night unless they stopped him. One thing bothered him though: he thought AA members were too easy on each another. Here’s John Stallone. John Stallone: If there was somebody that got up and said, "Hi, my name is so and so, and I'm an alcoholic, and I've been clean for two years now," he couldn't get up and say, "You're full of [expletive]. I saw you in a bar last week." There is no feedback in AA. You can't do that. He wanted a much more honest communication. He started inviting guys up to his room, he had a room, not an apartment, a room. They would sit around his bedroom and he'd have these two rules, no physical violence, no threats of physical violence, and nobody loaded, and you could say anything you want. Guys loved it. Mariel: The gatherings got too big for Chuck’s bedroom, so he used a thirty-three dollar unemployment check to rent a storefront in Ocean Park, right between Santa Monica and Venice Beach. The meetings were loud and confrontational, and they kept growing. One day a man showed up who wasn’t an alcoholic—he was addicted to heroin. But he was intrigued, and he came back with friends. John Stallone: Then the alcoholics got pissed off, and they told Chuck, "Hey, we don't want these dope fiends in our group. Throw them out." Chuck said, "I'm not throwing anybody out." Eventually, the alcoholics said, "Well, if you don't, we'll leave." He said, "Hey, I can't tell you what to do." They all left and here he is, he's stuck with all these dope fiends. He didn't know [expletive] about dope fiends, he was a rich kid from Toldedo, Ohio. Mariel: Pretty soon these so-called “dope fiends” were living in the storefront, and Dederich—who was not a heroin addict—started assigning them jobs. He saw something in them. The seeds of communal life had been sown. John Stallone: He said, "Okay, does anybody know how to cook?" Some guy says, "Yeah, I know how to cook." He said, "Okay, you're the cook." He says, "You got a good mouth, you talk good. You go out to all these little grocery stores and you ask them if they've got anything they can donate. Tell them your story and how you're staying clean." That's how it started. Mariel: They formalized their group as a non-profit and settled on the name Synanon. Claire Clark: The name has a bunch of different origin stories, but the most plausible to me was always that it was short for sin anonymous.