UC San Diego

This dissertation argues that Synanon offered an alternative to the experiences of institutional confinement that dominated the lives of heroin users and addicts in post-World War II Los Angeles, and that its philosophy of getting clean forwarded alternative ways of living and structuring society. It focuses on Synanon’s origins and formative years, from 1958 to 1965, and the perspectives of Synanon people themselves in order to explore their creation of a recovery counterculture. Moving away from prevailing attitudes about sobriety as a path to middle-class respectability, Synanon saw sobriety as a springboard to social experimentation and self-realization. They also rejected the dominant postwar policy of mandatory addiction treatment, and instead demanded autonomy from government and professional medical authority. The story of Synanon, often reduced to a simplistic narrative of “drug rehab turned cult,” actually has far-reaching implications for the fields of addiction and recovery, nonconformity and dissent, and utopian communities and social movements in the twentieth-century United States.