Quote:"Why now, after so many years, should we want to read the story of Synanon, the drug rehabilitation center turned alternative lifestyle commune, and its visionary and demented leader, Charles Dederich? Let me count the ways: 1. It's the first full and accurate account of an historically important organization whose beliefs and techniques have influenced so many others attempting to offer help to the afflicted. Where it succeeded and where and how it tragically failed are important lessons to this day, many alledged caregivers have yet to learn. 2. It's a compelling rendering of the vagaries and vulnerabilities of human behavior that still threaten our society today. 3. It's a heck of a yarn."

"Paul Morantz has seen the good, the bad and the ugly of Synanon and offers here an authoritative narrative of the organization - from its unorthodox creation to its soaring early successes and finally, to its plummeting fall from grace and eventual demise - and of the paralle! path taken by its charismatic leader."
- Hol Lancaster Co-author (with Paul Morantz) "Escape: My Lifelong War Against Cults"

"Paul Morantz and | became acquainted in June 1978 when I was publishing The Point Reyes Light in a Marin County town near the doorsteps of Synanon. We shared common goals of exposing Synanon and staying alive."

"Four months later Morantz would barely survive an attack by the cult, and eleven months later my weekly newspaper's editorial campaign and expose warning of the wrongdoing by the cult would win the Pulitzer Prize for public service."

"By 1974, Synanon, a former drug rehab was calling itself a church and trained its own hit force to attack its enemies. Once exposed it took thirteen years for those who fought it to see it closed."
- Dave Mitchell, Point Reyes Station