Joel Fort, iconoclastic psychiatrist dies at 86

Joel Fort, an iconoclastic psychiatrist who was an early advocate for decriminalizing marijuana and who gave expert testimony on drugs and brainwashing in the Patty Hearst case and more than 300 other criminal trials, has died. He was 86.

His death Sunday at his home in El Cerrito, outside San Francisco, was caused by cancer, his daughter Parcae Lockman said.

A skeptic about standard mental health treatment, Fort liked to call himself a “sociatrist” — an activist who tried to help troubled individuals by effecting social change.

In the 1960s, he started treating addicts, alcoholics and the flower children surging into San Francisco at a public clinic he called the Center for Solving Special Social and Health Problems. It later became the nonprofit Fort Help, where clients were called “guests” and counselors were “helper/problemExamination rooms had names like “Happiness” and “Tranquillity.”

At Fort Help, on the edge of the city’s skid row, there were no titles, no departments, no waiting rooms, and no distinction between staff and volunteers. Traditional ideas of disease were subjected to Fort’s skeptical eye. He was outraged at the then-popular notion that homosexuality required a “cure.” And he saw addiction not as a character failing but as a symptom of deep societal malaise.

“However soft, Fort’s voice is one that has been widely heard in the past decade or so as America has wrestled with its drug abuse problems,” a writer for Human Behavior magazine said in 1973. “Back in the heyday of the hippies and the Haight-Ashbury, he was the first to advance the heretical thesis that youthful drug-takers could not be viewed apart from an entire society conditioned to seek a chemical solution for every problem.

“He pointed out that young people who saw the law being violated by both individuals and government every day were not likely to get deterred by arguments that drug use was illegal.”

In 1972, Fort helped lead a California campaign to decriminalize pot. It failed.

He frequently challenged authority, and sometimes prevailed.

Fort’s survivors include Maria, his wife of 64 years; sister Elodee Portigal; son Titan; daughters Parcae Lockman and Gita Paquette; and three grandchildren.