Pete A. Nicholson

Sunday, December 14, 2008

NY, 1972



The Vietnam War was spluttering to a close, and its servicemen were slowly returning home, many of them suffering the results of traumas that they would never fully recover from. Some wore the wounds on their bodies, others behind their eyes. Some returned home junkies and became wanderers, unable to find the tether of their previous life.


The government, so inept at dealing with the returning soldiers, was having particular trouble with the addicts, men who’d been using up to 90% pure heroin, and now found themselves reduced to hustling for 3-5% street dope. Senators called meetings, brought in specialists. Programs were set up, addicts rounded up and sent.


They failed miserably. The problem remained on the street, where junkie vets needed ten to fifteen times the amount of money the average addict did to support their habits, and were becoming violent. Quietly, though, in Spanish Harlem, a program was being set up to treat hardcore addicts, and was achieving a level of quiet success. SERA, or Services in Education and Rehabilitation in Addiction, was the first centre of its kind to open in the area, and had pioneered new ways of dealing with all types of addictions. Soon, other centres began sending files marked ‘incurable’ their way, and the government started taking notice.


Vets, SERA knew, were not your average junkies. Frank ‘Cheech’ Marrero, who was then Executive Clinical Director at SERA, and later became a Principle Addiction Specialist for New York, realised early on that conventional approaches to therapy would be useless with these men.

‘They were much more intelligent then your average heroin addict in New York City,’ he said. ‘These were men who’d been trained to kill and survive.’

Marrero, with his colleagues, had set up the ‘Drug Mending Zone’, or DMZ—24-hour, residential live-in communities for recovering addicts. For the Vets, they found a beat-up local building and set about having them work together to make it liveable. While some became more functional, there was, as Herbert Freudenberger, the psychoanalyst overseeing the program, wrote, ‘something missing in them as people. They were elusive. They talked, but did not really communicate.’


Several months after the Vets moved in, a group of SERA counsellors—many of them ex-addicts, some of them ex-cons—found a place where no one could disturb them, in the basement of a local synagogue. They fixed video cameras in the rooms, bought some black outfits, chose a theme, and decided on some character archetypes. They were going to have a marathon.


At once highly experimental and meticulously planned, the ‘marathons’ were the most extreme extension of what was sometimes dubbed ‘Primal Scream’ or ‘Catharsis’ therapy—a prolonged period where the patients are denied sleep and fed only minimally, while counsellors push and provoke them until something bursts. It is, as Freudenberger wrote, to get them to express the hole in themselves, the ‘hatred, violence, love, joy, suspicion, aggression, power manipulation, and…strength.’


Every detail of the theatre of the marathons was considered, from what the counsellors and participants wore, to the meals, music and decorations. Everything was required to fit the theme that was chosen. In the DMZ marathons, they chose ‘courage’—a trait, it was assumed, the Vets were familiar with from their service, and what they would most need to rely on to kick heroin.


 The counsellors, who, like most of the patients, were primarily black or Puerto Rican, were dressed as archetypes: the girl next door, the inexorable force of authority, the phallus, the drill sergeant. Friends were separated, toilet breaks supervised. There were no distractions. Running the whole event, dressed in a kimono, carrying a wand and a cross, symbolising God and the Orient, was Marrero, the ‘conductor.’ It was up to him to keep the whole thing in check, to keep the Vets, so often forgotten and manipulated, from seeing this as yet ‘another bullshit bag.’


Patients were unable to wear anything that identified them—no insignias, jewellery, anything that conveyed prestige. At various times, as the hours dragged on, music and monologues were piped through the speakers: Sam Cooke songs, Sidney Poitier’s voice, Ave Maria.


Nothing the men said, for the first part of the marathon, was believed; all their requests were denied. In every case, Marrero said, somewhere in the 72 hours, was a breakdown. And in every case, they were almost unbearable to watch; so intense that, at times, the video crew, watching in the next room, abandoned their posts.


What came out ran the gamut of human experience, from the innocent to the horrifying, from one soldier’s recounting of the first girl who rejected him, to another who came to after a battle to find his best friend’s head in his lap. Many regressed to child-like states, to lying in the lap of the counsellors and calling them Mommy and Daddy; others cried out for forgiveness from the Vietnamese they had killed.


The patients, once vulnerable, were told that they were loved, that they were forgiven. They were allowed to hold others, to be held.


In a bizarre finale, Freudenberger wrote, everyone would stand up, link arms in a circle and sing ‘O, Happy Days.’ People who were exhausted from the marathon ‘came alive’ during the song, he said. ‘It was quite a sight to behold.’


Written responses from the Vets, taken shortly afterward, read like a litany of relief. ‘I screamed until my voice was hoarse and my gut was empty from all the garbage that I had been stuffing my whole life,’ one participant, ‘A.R.’, remembered. ‘I felt so empty and clean it was too much to handle.’ All expressed renewed hope. ‘Before the experience,’ wrote ‘P.M’, ‘I was making a coffin, piece by piece, in Vietnam and the Bronx. Now I am going to build instead of destroy.’



At the time, the therapy was hailed as a breakthrough in the treatment of difficult cases. The army, desperate for any good news, met with SERA and transferred their patients there. Ultimately, though, Marrero, speaking from his home in California, compared its effect to that of a laxative on constipation. ‘It works for a while,’ he said. ‘It gives you temporary relief. But if nothing has changed in your understanding that is significant, you wind up getting constipated again.’





In 1972, only eight of the some seventy addicts stayed to complete the eight-month course; most of these became counsellors themselves. Many, though, stayed in touch with SERA, and reported that they were working, leading relatively normal lives. Only three disappeared completely, and were never heard from again.  

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