A penetrating look at a community of ex-drug addicts who help one another through the exhausting experience of withdrawal and rehabilitation by using radical “haircutting” sessions in which members of the community probe their problems with savage candor. Here are Synanon’s successes – a rehabilitation rate far higher than those of more “legitimate” agencies – as well as its failures. Here is a thoughtful and sympathetic analysis of Synanon’s unique, and widely misunderstood, theories about addiction and its cure: the use of ex-addicts in weaning away narcotics users, the lifelong effects of addiction and the resultant need for a supportive environment. Here, too, is the troubled history of Synanon, both within the profession and with the greater society “outside” which all too often turns its back on the brutal facts of our nation’s addiction problem.