http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/00/08/supplement.php

12. JACKIE PANZIK

One of the many mysterious arms of the Church of Scientology, the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) takes out ads in the Pennysaver, rents a room on the bottom floor of Garden Grove Medical Center, and periodically breaks loose with a slide presentation extolling the evils of the corrupt and conspiratorial psychiatry industry. It’s a well-rehearsed show, complete with violent and disturbing slides and complicated overhead transparencies direct from L. Ron Hubbard’s Los Angeles office. According to Jackie Panzik, organizer of the OC chapter, the show offers abundant evidence that psychiatrists everywhere are playing backgammon with our brains—almost always with perilous results. But that ain’t the scary part. What makes Panzik scary is the fact that after shocking the audience into slack-jawedness, she and her group slyly offer what they believe is an escape from our destined shrink-induced stupor: Scientology. She doesn’t do so explicitly, mind you, but deftly, in a style that can only be described as L. Ronian. All books and brochures on display at the meeting are published by the church’s own publishing house, Bridge Publications Inc. And there are always a few strangely well-informed attendees seated among first timers to share shock and outrage and then help them make sense of the group’s ideas. But to anyone finding themselves at a CCHR meeting, we say: be afraid. Be very afraid. The Church of Scientology really doesn’t want you to surrender your mind to psychiatrists. They want it for themselves. MITIGATING FACTOR: Scientology is a church, and who could ever be afraid of a church?

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