Synanon

Chuck Dederich: Good evening. Synanon is a corporation. It's a corporation whose business it is to cure dope addicts. Dope addicts--everybody talked about them, nobody did anything about them. Well, we did something about it. We did something. And the answer is this building and even more. 140 people who couldn't live without dope are living here, and they're living here without any crutches. We drink coffee and we smoke cigarettes. We drink a helluva lot of coffee and we smoke a helluva lot of cigarettes. But we don't shoot dope! Besides the coffee and the cigarettes, there's one other thing that keeps us going: talk. We live on talk. The only time anybody gets worried around here is when someone shuts up. Because at Synanon, we talk out every big, small, dumb, smart, asinine thing that occurs to us. And our talking has paid off. Psychologists, criminologists, psychiatrists, every kind of "gist" you can name, they've all come down here to have a look at us and they've all gone away with one conclusion: we cure dope addicts.