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the rundown I drank a diet cola and suddenly could really taste it: every single
chemical!” He had recommended the Rundown to others, including his mother, when she
was seriously ill, and had persuaded a young writer on his sta to take the course in
order to wean herself from various medications. “She could tell Scientology worked by
the example I set,” Haggis told the magazine. “That made me feel very good.”
The Purication Rundown is a fundamental feature of Scientology’s drug
rehabilitation program, Narconon, which operates nearly two hundred residential
centers around the world. Celebrity Scientologists conspicuously promote Narconon,
citing the church’s claims that Narconon is “the most eective rehabilitation program
there is.” Kirstie Alley, who served as the national spokesperson for Narconon for a
number of years, describes herself as “the heart and soul of the project,” because it had
helped break her dependency on cocaine. A year after 9/11, Tom Cruise set up a
program for over a thousand rescue workers in New York to go through a similar
procedure, which was paid for in part by using city money. Many participants reported
positive results, saying that they had sweated a kind of black paste through their pores
while in the sauna. The Borough of Manhattan gratefully declared March 13 (Hubbard’s
birthday), 2004, as “Hubbard Detoxification Day.”
Kelly Preston has promoted Narconon in her native Hawaii. “Starting in the schools,
we’ve delivered to over ten thousand dierent kids,” she said. Preston and Travolta’s
sixteen-year-old son, Jett, who was autistic, died of a seizure in January 2009. His
parents had taken him o of Depakote, an anti-seizure medication, saying it was
ineective. (The church claims that it does not oppose the use of such drugs when
prescribed by a doctor; however, Hubbard himself denounced the use of anti-seizure
medications.) Previously, Preston asserted on the Montel Williams Show that Jett suered
from Kawasaki syndrome, a rare disorder that she thought was brought on by his
exposure to pesticides and household chemicals.
“With Jett, you started him on a program that I think is talked about in this book by
L. Ron Hubbard,” Williams said, holding up Clear Body, Clear Mind, which outlines the
principles of the Purification Rundown.
“Exactly,” Preston replied. 1 She then talked about her own profound experience on
the program. Novocaine from previous dental work began to surface. “I had my entire
mouth get numb again for an hour and a half,” she said. Other drugs were purged as
well, along with radiation exposure from the sun. “I had a bathing suit when I was
seven years old—this is completely true. I had a bathing suit that I thought was so cool
with holes in the side and a hole in the center,” she said. “And I got a sunburn in it. And
twenty years later, I had this same sunburn come out in my skin, the entire sunburn.”
Preston brought copies of Hubbard’s book for the entire studio audience.
DESPITE HIS EXUBERANT TESTIMONIAL, Haggis was increasingly troubled by the contradictions
in the church. Scientology had begun to seem like two dierent things: a systematic
approach to self-knowledge, which he found useful and insightful; and a religion that he
simply couldn’t grasp. He liked and admired his auditor, and the confessions were