The experience of the Missouri Institute of Psychiatry in operating Archway House, as well as research findings from the similar therapeutic communities in other states, leads the authors to conclude that while the ex-addict may provide the best therapy for the rehabilitation ofother addicts, if untrained as a manager, he is encountering significant difficulties in operating today’s larger therapeutic communities which require the expertise of professional managers. Therefore, a recommended solution to the problem might be to put management in the hands of professionals, particularly where finances and control procedures are involved, and assign only the treatment aspects of the therapeutic communities to the ex-addicts. The functions of planning, staffing, directing, and controlling would be handled by the trained manager, the director. Yet the ex-addicts could work to achieve the desired results in treatment, permitting the average community to bypass many of the pitfalls of usingeither the professional or the ex-addict to the exclusion of the other. It appears that the therapeutic community, to survive and operate more economically, as well as clinically efficient, must be operated in a business-like manner in order to survive and assist in the rehabilitation of many thousands of addicts in the country today, and the returning veterans as well. Effective management practices to properly account for vast financial resources being devoted and planned for rehabilitation must replace the non-professional efforts now being made by ex-addicts, whose understanding of drug abuse and its correction may make them specialists in the therapeutic side of the rehabilitation effort. Poor financial control or failure to introduce necessary, if unpopular, internal control procedures for the safeguarding of ever-growing cash and other assets, allocated to combat drug abuse, could throw the entire “therapeutic community” concept into public ridicule to the real detriment of those who really need it-the addicted. Therefore, professional administrators must not fail to insist on observance of sound management practices, with emphasis on control procedures, required universally in management. If the goals of the enterprise are to be realized, as planned in today’s therapeutic communities, and if the objectives voiced by President Nixon, Congressmen Dorn, Murphy, and others cited in the introduction of this paper are to be attained in meeting and solving the national problem of drug abuse and veteran rehabilitation, sound management practices must be introduced and maintained.