Popular Depictions
Synanon is referred to in Bob Dylan's song "Lenny Bruce", from his album Shot of Love (Bruce "never made it to Synanon."). It is also referred to in the song "Opening Doors" from Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along, which mentions it as a hypothetical song title in a satirical revue of the 1960s.
The TV producer/ writer J. Michael Straczynski used a version of the Synanon Game in his science-fiction TV series Babylon 5, in the episodes "Signs and Portents" and "Comes the Inquisitor".
The New-Path drug treatment centers in the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly, bear numerous similarities to Synanon. Dick's novel VALIS also makes reference to the Synanon building in Oakland, California.
In his 1977 novel, "Not sleeping, Just Dead", Charles Alverson, who lived in Synanon for six months in 1967 as a straight, or non-addicted resident, sent his private eye, Joe Goodey, to solve a suspected murder at The Institute, an organization that bears more than a passing resemblance to Synanon.
Synanon is mentioned in Joan Didion's essay, The White Album.
Synanon appears in the movie "Unknown" as Liam Neeson is flipping through the yellow pages in Berlin.
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“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
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