Welcome to The Sunshine Place

The Sunshine Place

Audacy Podcasts | Team Downey

Society & Culture, True Crime

4.6 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2022

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You learn to use the needle to actually increase the high, because you can pull it back and
0:12.8	push it in and pull it back and push and every time you do that you get this warm rush
0:17.2	through your body. Heating it up, making sure it's clean, putting the strap around your
0:24.0	arm, finding a vein. I mean that's all part of like a ritual. I was addicted to heroin,
0:33.3	but I went in to Sinanon on October 1st, 1972, and that was the last day I've ever used
0:40.8	drugs.
0:47.0	You're probably wondering what exactly is Sinanon, and I guess it really all depends on who
0:52.8	you ask. Some people would tell you that it's the reason they're still alive.
0:58.0	They took me down to the police station. As soon as they put me in a cell I took off my blue jeans
1:03.5	and I hung myself. Sinanon, I saved my life. To people like my mom, it was a cutting edge social
1:11.1	experiment. I thought it was utopia. To many people, it was a religion. To others, it was a revolution.
1:20.6	But almost everyone will tell you that what it became was a violent cult.
1:29.4	They had the shotgun out the window and I grabbed the shotgun and I said to the guy,
1:35.6	I'm going to take your own shotgun and shoot your fucking head off.
1:40.5	Don't mess with Sinanon people. The truth is that at various times it was all of those things,
1:49.0	but before it was any of those things, it was only one person. The founder of Sinanon,
1:55.8	a man named Charles E. Dietrich, who most people called Chuck. Many, many thousands of people
2:03.6	were indebted to Sinanon and I have no way of being responsible for what they might do.
2:11.0	Chuck founded Sinanon as a first of its kind, drug rehab, with a radical claim. He could cure
2:17.7	your addiction. I'm quite convinced that he actually knows more about me than I know about myself.
2:23.0	Then Chuck made an even more radical claim. He could cure any of your problems. All he had to do
2:31.0	was move in. With success came others who simply saw a different way of life.
	...

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