Welcome To The Sunshine Place

Once called “the miracle on the beach,” Synanon began in the 1960s as an experimental rehab facility in Santa Monica, California with a radical claim: It could cure heroin addiction. Before long, it would make an even bolder claim: It could cure any of your problems. All you had to do was move in. What started in a house on the beach, soon spread to compounds across the country. The man who made the miracle happen, Charles E. Dederich, aka “Chuck,” would be the one to destroy it all, along with the lives of many of his followers and millions of dollars in assets. The Sunshine Place tells the mind-blowing, true-story of Synanon - one of America’s most cutting edge social experiments, turned into one of its most dangerous and violent cults - as it’s never been told before: by the people who lived it. Executive Produced by Robert Downey Jr., Susan Downey, and Emily Barclay Ford for Team Downey and C13Originals, together with Josh McLaughlin for Wink Pictures and written, produced, and directed by Peabody-nominated C13Originals, a Cadence13 Studio.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
You learn to use the needle to actually increase the
high because you can pull it back and push it in,
and pull it back and push it and every time
you do that, you get this warm rush through your body,
heating it up, making sure it's clean, putting the strap
around your arm, finding a vein. I mean, that's all

(00:27):
part of like a ritual. I was addicted to heroin,
but I went into Synanon on October first, nineteen seventy two,
and that was the last day I've ever used drugs.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
You're probably wondering what exactly is Synanon, and I guess
it really all depends on who you ask. Some people
would tell you that it's the reason they're still alive.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
They took me down to As soon as they put
me in a cell, I took off my blue jeans
and I hung myself. Synanay saved my life.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
To people like my mom, it was a cutting edge
social experiment. I thought it was utopia. To many people,
it was a religion. To others, it was a revolution.
But almost everyone will tell you that what it became
was a violent cult.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
They had the shotgun out the window, and I grabbed
the shotgun and I said to the guy, I'm gonna
take your own shotgun and shoot your fucking head off.
Don't mess with synonym people.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
The truth is that at various times it was all
of those things. But before it was any of those things,
it was only one person, the founder of Synanon, a
man named Charles E. Didrich, who most people called Chuck.

Speaker 4 (02:01):
Many many thousands of people who are indebted to Synada,
and I have no way of being responsible for what
they might do.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Chuck founded Synanon as a first of its kind drug
rehead with a radical claim he could cure your addiction.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
I'm quite convinced he actually knows more about me than
I know about myself.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Then Chuck made an even more radical claim, he could
cure any of your problems. All you had to do
was move in. With success. Came others who simply sought
a different way of life, And wherever Chuck went, his
people followed.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
I think that he could lead people anywhere that he
wanted to. He's that forceful human being.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
But Chuck was leading his followers down a path of destruction.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
And they brought the guys back and they shaved their heads,
and I thought, God, damn, you know that's out of control.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
People being beaten up in Son and on and outside
of Synanon, and then the guns and it went fucking crazy.
To my father, Synanon was the group he owed everything
to and they tried to make him pay with his life.

Speaker 4 (03:16):
We never start anything, We never do and never had it.
But nobody is going to mess with us. Nobody.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
This is the story of Synanon in a way, it's
never been told from the inside out by those of
us who are finally ready to talk about it, like me.
My name is Sary Crawford. Listen to the Sunshine Place,
a creation and presentation of c thirteen Originals, a Cadence

(03:47):
thirteen Studio executive produced with Susan Downey and Robert Downey Junior.
Available for free now wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
SA