Behavior: Getting Straight On Delancey Street

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Other profitmaking undertakings are auto repair and construction businesses. The family also runs shorthand classes and sends younger members to public trade schools. One student goes to the San Francisco Art Institute; others attend Drew School, a prep school that exchanges scholarships for the labor of Delancey residents. "We know public high school campuses are flooded with narcotics, and we want to protect our kids from that," says Indian-born Mon Sandhu, 27. "That's why we send them to private school."

Rough. Although Delancey Street's orientation toward the future sets it apart from Synanon, the new organization is carrying on one old Synanon tradition: subjecting members to rituals of a kind that Sociologist Erving Goffman calls "degradation ceremonies." New male residents are required to shave their heads; women are compelled to go without makeup for as long as six months. All residents must take part in "the circus," Delancey Street's version of the Synanon "game." Under the leadership of a "ringmaster," members indulge in three-hour bouts of name-calling and mutual criticism. Admits Family Member George Lopez: "We put people together by first taking them apart; it can be rough, really rough."

Some specialists consider such tactics destructive. In an American Psychiatric Association study of Synanon and other therapeutic communities, five drug experts observed that if addiction is partly the result of low selfesteem, "one can wonder whether the most appropriate corrective experience is to persuade the person of his worthless-ness." Members of Delancey Street, however, defend their rules on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to let off steam, teach humility and prepare the way for a kind of rebirth by erasing an addict's old image of himself.

It is too soon to know which side is right. So far, twelve ex-addicts have "graduated" from the family and are said to be drug-free after two to six months in the outside world. Another 13, having held regular full-time jobs for six months, will graduate soon. No family member has been arrested while living on Pacific Heights, and crime in the area has not increased, though hostile neighbors are trying to evict the group on the grounds that they are not really a family and thus are violating zoning regulations.

Prisons in the Bay Area regularly admit Delancey Street residents to screen recruits, and courts sometimes put addict-criminals on probation if they join the family. Says San Francisco County Sheriff Richard Hongisto: "Delancey Street doesn't cost the taxpayers money and it's not bureaucratic. It is reasonably humane—it doesn't keep people locked up. And it has had a reasonable degree of success. Few rehabilitation programs do as well."