Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: views expressed here do not represent those of my Heart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, as an
Speaker 1: inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even
Speaker 1: represent my own. And nothing contained in this show should
Speaker 1: be used as medical advice or encouragement to use any
Speaker 1: type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. So today we're gonna
Speaker 1: delve into some history on a remarkable place called the
Speaker 1: Narcotic Farm. The Narcotic Farm that was in Lexington, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: created nineteen thirties as a place to sort of simultaneously
Speaker 1: punish and treat drug addicts. Now, my guest, who is
Speaker 1: this an extraordinary academic is Nancy Campbell. She's a professor
Speaker 1: at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is outside Albany, New York.
Speaker 1: She's been a leading drug scholar for many years. She's
Speaker 1: an historian of science and technology who's focused on legal
Speaker 1: and illegal drugs and on harm reduction. She's written two
Speaker 1: books on gender and addiction, but she's done also two
Speaker 1: books that are relevant to the subject at hand. One
Speaker 1: is a book she wrote some years ago called Discovering Addiction,
Speaker 1: about the science and politics of substance abuse research, and
Speaker 1: the other one is the book called The Narcotic Farm,
Speaker 1: the rise and fall of America's first prison for drug addicts. So, Nancy,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me on Psychoactive. I'm
Speaker 1: delighted to be here. Ethan. Well, you know, I should
Speaker 1: also tell our audience that you and I have, you know,
Speaker 1: cross paths a few times over the years, but our
Speaker 1: principal intersection was just a few months ago in June
Speaker 1: of this year, when we both attended the conference of
Speaker 1: an organization called Alcohol and Drug Historians Society a d
Speaker 1: h S, which was a place where I met all
Speaker 1: sorts of interesting people I want to have as guests
Speaker 1: on Psychoactive, and you're the first one from that conference
Speaker 1: I've invited, to be honest, So thank you so much
Speaker 1: for doing this with me. So let's just jump into
Speaker 1: this thing. I mean, obviously, this history about the creation
Speaker 1: of a sort of narcotic farm, a kind of cross
Speaker 1: between a prison and a treatment program that was set
Speaker 1: up in Lexington by the US government in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: At what brought you to be interested in this place? Well, so,
Speaker 1: I wrote a dissertation in the nineteen nineties about US
Speaker 1: drug policy in the nineteen In the nineteen fifties, there
Speaker 1: were a bunch of hearings. They're called the Daniel Hearings,
Speaker 1: and they were televised and they were held in seven
Speaker 1: cities around the country, and there were a lot of
Speaker 1: witnesses which testified in these hearings, and the New York hearings.
Speaker 1: Um New York City hearings involved these doctors and researchers, scientists,
Speaker 1: and what struck me about them was that they were
Speaker 1: all from Lexington, Kentucky, and they all sounded a little
Speaker 1: bit like drug policy reformers sound today. They saw drug
Speaker 1: users as human beings. They definitely did not think that
Speaker 1: incarceration or criminalization was the way to go, and they
Speaker 1: argued with the police and the law enforcement and the
Speaker 1: federal apparatus because they thought that drug addiction should be
Speaker 1: placed under the banner of medicine and that it was
Speaker 1: a health problem. And that sounds very familiar to our
Speaker 1: ears and so I got curious about them. I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, what did they put in the water in Lexington,
Speaker 1: Kentucky that would lead this group of researchers and doctors
Speaker 1: and people who treated people who were drug addicts and
Speaker 1: they called them addicts in those days, to make that argument.
Speaker 1: And that turned out to be a harder question to
Speaker 1: answer than I realized, and also easier because they were
Speaker 1: all at the U S Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: and they were all federal employees of the Public Health Service,
Speaker 1: the US Public Health Service, and they were there to
Speaker 1: kind of try to discover what they could about this
Speaker 1: this disease, and they thought of it as a chronic
Speaker 1: relapsing disease. And so they were an interesting group, and
Speaker 1: I tracked them from the mid nineties um into the
Speaker 1: early two thousands. I didn't have an opportunity to really
Speaker 1: track them down. And then in the early two thousand's,
Speaker 1: I thought it's time to try to figure out what
Speaker 1: this American institution was before everything about it really disappeared.
Speaker 1: I see, now we should explain to our audience, you know,
Speaker 1: when these institutions emerged. I mean, I will talk basically
Speaker 1: about the one in Lexington, which was the key one,
Speaker 1: but there was another one in Fort Worth which did
Speaker 1: not have a whole research program attached to it. But
Speaker 1: when we think about the emergence of these things, when
Speaker 1: Congress authorizes them in the nineteen thirties and when they're
Speaker 1: created in nineteen thirties, let's set the context for this,
Speaker 1: because I think you know, some of the our audience
Speaker 1: will know that you go back to nineteenth century and
Speaker 1: drugs like morphine and cocaine were legal, legally available, widely prescribed,
Speaker 1: could be gotten over the counter, ordered by mail order.
Speaker 1: They were recommended for, you know, all sorts of aches
Speaker 1: and pains. And then you see in the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: late nine or early twenties century, kind of growing backlash,
Speaker 1: growing concerns. Heroin had been invented in eight initially a
Speaker 1: cost suppression. People begin to realize it's it's dangerous. People
Speaker 1: can begin to realize the dangers of cocaine, and so
Speaker 1: you get the nineteen fourteen Harrison Narcotic Act, which begins
Speaker 1: to change the whole perspective of US drug policy. So
Speaker 1: if you could take us a little bit through that
Speaker 1: history from around fourteen, the Harrison Narcotic Act and the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, and how we land up in a much
Speaker 1: more punitive situation within a decade or so. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: actually a really interesting history and relevant to today's discussions.
Speaker 1: So the Harrison Act was a tax act, and it
Speaker 1: was not at all clear to anyone how exactly that
Speaker 1: was going to influence the practice of medicine, which had
Speaker 1: veered away from using the opiates and over prescribing the
Speaker 1: opiates um in the early twentieth century. So heroin, for instance,
Speaker 1: in the US was never indiscriminately available. It might be prescribed,
Speaker 1: but it was never really used medically, and so that,
Speaker 1: uh was an interesting thing. In nineteen fourteen, um the
Speaker 1: Harrison Act, there weren't that many people who were that
Speaker 1: concerned really honestly about the problems of opiate addiction. However,
Speaker 1: once the Act went into effect, there were a lot
Speaker 1: of people who were using medically using morphine, and that
Speaker 1: meant that there were suddenly a lot of people who
Speaker 1: were basically trying to get off morphine. And so we
Speaker 1: started in the US morphine maintenance clinics, and the morphine
Speaker 1: maintenance clinics went into effect towards the end of the
Speaker 1: of the teens of the nineteen tens, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of backlash to these morphine maintenance clinics, and they
Speaker 1: were in cities like Shreveport, Louisiana, or Jacksonville, Florida. The
Speaker 1: New York City clinic they were shut down in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen twenties. So by nineteen twenty one two they
Speaker 1: were mainly shut down for a variety of reasons, but
Speaker 1: mainly having to do with prosecution of the Harrison Act,
Speaker 1: because physicians began to be prosecuted, so that meant that
Speaker 1: physicians began to be scared. So these clinics that had
Speaker 1: popped over the years, were they actual see maintenance clinics
Speaker 1: or are they more detox clinics designed to get people off. No,
Speaker 1: they were they were maintenance clinics, but they functioned as
Speaker 1: detox clinics eventually, and they were shut down rapidly, so
Speaker 1: there was no real attention to the patient at that
Speaker 1: point and just doing detox. Even the ones saying we're
Speaker 1: going to give you declining doses to get you off morphine,
Speaker 1: even those ones start getting shut down by the authorities. Yes,
Speaker 1: so in this era, it's the Treasury Department which enforced
Speaker 1: prohibition they inforced, you know, they're they're doing the work
Speaker 1: rather than the Federal Bureau of Narcotics doesn't really start
Speaker 1: up until nineteen and so you have this period of
Speaker 1: time when it's really very unclear whether physicians are gonna
Speaker 1: It becomes clear to physicians that they are in danger
Speaker 1: of prosecution if they continue to maintain their patients on morphine,
Speaker 1: and so they basically eradicate the practice of morphine inuntenance
Speaker 1: and they switch a lot of people onto barbiturates, onto
Speaker 1: other sedatives, other drugs, and they basically create a kind
Speaker 1: of criminalization that gets heightened towards the end of the twenties.
Speaker 1: And in the end of the twenties and the late twenties.
Speaker 1: You remember nineteen twenty nine. Everyone knows that's the year
Speaker 1: of the Great Depression. But in early nineteen the US Congress,
Speaker 1: prior to the Great Depression beginning, they legislate the building
Speaker 1: of these narcotic farms. Because by that time there is
Speaker 1: overcrowding in prisons. About a third of the people who
Speaker 1: are in US federal prisons are drug users, and they
Speaker 1: decide that they don't want prisons containing drug users, and
Speaker 1: they decide to essentially divert them too large federal narcotic farms.
Speaker 1: And so in the twenties and thirties, right there is
Speaker 1: an attempt, a real attempt to find a cure. The
Speaker 1: idea is science can find a cure for drug addiction,
Speaker 1: and if we can only give our researchers are scientists,
Speaker 1: enough support, then we will be able to cure what
Speaker 1: is clearly too many a disease, and they call it
Speaker 1: a disease throughout that period. So the U s Narcotic
Speaker 1: Farm is authorized to be built by the US Congress
Speaker 1: in the early early in the year of nine. So
Speaker 1: I recently came across a new book by a fellow
Speaker 1: named Kenny Anderson, who I know from the world of
Speaker 1: sort of harm reduction advocacy around alcohol. But he has
Speaker 1: a new little book called From Inebriate Asylums to Narcotic Farms,
Speaker 1: and one thing he does is also placed the narcotic
Speaker 1: farm approach in this tradition of inebriate asylums of sending
Speaker 1: you know, people who are addicted to alcohol in a
Speaker 1: severe way to these asylums for some sort of quote
Speaker 1: unquote treatment and for segregating them from the general population.
Speaker 1: And I was curious. I mean, I didn't see much
Speaker 1: about this in the Narcotic Farm book. But do you
Speaker 1: see this as part of the broader kind of you know,
Speaker 1: zeitgeist of what's going on and the way people are
Speaker 1: thinking about addiction or in fact, is the narcotic and
Speaker 1: alcohol things so separate that you would say that they
Speaker 1: don't really overlap in any way. No, I I would
Speaker 1: say they do overlap, and that move from an asylum. Right.
Speaker 1: The thing about the asylums was that people of all
Speaker 1: kinds were in those, right. They might be alcoholics, they
Speaker 1: might be people who have co occurring mental health disorders
Speaker 1: with alcoholism or without, with drug addiction or without, and
Speaker 1: so you might have people who have no co occurring
Speaker 1: disorders but who are drug users also would sometimes be
Speaker 1: placed in those settings, and states, you know, did different
Speaker 1: things with them, but they definitely lumped everybody together. The
Speaker 1: Narcotic Farm was an attempt to separate out people whose
Speaker 1: sole problem was drug addiction narcotic addiction, and narcotics was
Speaker 1: a catchall term at that time that did refer to
Speaker 1: both opiates and cocaine, which is a little bit hard
Speaker 1: for us to understand because they are drugs that do
Speaker 1: very different things have very different effects. However, it was
Speaker 1: basically um what became the illicit market after the Harrison
Speaker 1: Narcotic Act. And so the narcotic farms did not accept
Speaker 1: alcoholics and did not even like to accept barbiturate users,
Speaker 1: although they did and they did study and try to
Speaker 1: figure out how to respond to barbiturates um withdrawal because
Speaker 1: that can cause seizures and death. They were primarily made
Speaker 1: for the opioid user, and at that time that meant
Speaker 1: heroin and that meant morphine. Now many many morphine users
Speaker 1: and heroin users would also use kane, but they did
Speaker 1: not regard it as their primary drug of choice, shall
Speaker 1: we say, And so that and other drugs were also
Speaker 1: very little represented in the narcotic farm. So cannabis, for instance,
Speaker 1: although that was studied slightly and people did refer to it,
Speaker 1: it was not thought of as an addictive substance in
Speaker 1: anything like the same way. These were really made for
Speaker 1: opiate users, you know, the opium problem. They're solving the
Speaker 1: opium problem. So the US Congress is solving the opium
Speaker 1: problem by building these farms. These large and they were
Speaker 1: they were a thousand acres and they were large buildings,
Speaker 1: large farms, sort of congregate care for people who have
Speaker 1: opium problems, and the idea was six months of essentially
Speaker 1: drying out and you'd be good. But the narcotic farms
Speaker 1: were also they were very interesting as instance, just to
Speaker 1: be clear here you say the narcotic farms, we were
Speaker 1: basically talking about two. Write the Lexington, the most famous
Speaker 1: one has opened up in ninety five and that has
Speaker 1: a major research part that we'll talk about later in
Speaker 1: our discussion. And then Fort Worth, Texas, which is the
Speaker 1: second one, opened up a few years later. And I
Speaker 1: think it's important, you know, for our listeners to know
Speaker 1: that when Lexington's launched, it's a big deal. None of
Speaker 1: the stuff we're talking about was secret. I mean, when
Speaker 1: Lexington gets opened, the surgeon generals there, the governor of
Speaker 1: Kentucky's there, there's national media that's describing the narcotic farm
Speaker 1: is everything from quote unquote a new deal for the
Speaker 1: drug addict to quote unquote a million dollar flop house
Speaker 1: for junkies. So I interrupted you there and saying, so
Speaker 1: why was it called a farm? Yeah, so that it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty interesting. It was an actual farm. They sought
Speaker 1: for at arable land, and so there were there were
Speaker 1: contests across the country for first of all, where would
Speaker 1: these things be cited. And remember this is the depression,
Speaker 1: and so cities and municipalities would compete to get federal jobs,
Speaker 1: and there were also competitions for what they would be named.
Speaker 1: And this was really thought of as an alternative to prison.
Speaker 1: This was thought of as a new deal for the
Speaker 1: drug addict, and that is how it was represented in
Speaker 1: things like editorial cartoons and so. The U S Narcotic Farm,
Speaker 1: and in its early days it was called that. But
Speaker 1: after a while people began to realize that there's a
Speaker 1: sort of joke in that, and that is that what
Speaker 1: are they doing growing narcotics there? You know, poppies or
Speaker 1: marijuana or whatever it might be. Um And so they
Speaker 1: gradually kind of moved away from using the term farm,
Speaker 1: but the farm was already within the lore of the
Speaker 1: drug using population. And in when the farm opens to
Speaker 1: great fanfare, I mean, this was the US Congress's answer
Speaker 1: to the opium problem. Is this massive, beautiful, very large structure.
Speaker 1: It's still there today. It's just a prison, but it's
Speaker 1: jointly run right by both the Bureau Prisons and the
Speaker 1: Public Health Division in the US government. Right, it's a
Speaker 1: joint enterprise of the two. So there's both the punishment
Speaker 1: side and there's the kind of rehab research. I kind
Speaker 1: of merged together in a kind of awkward sort of way, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's awkward in many ways because you can volunteer
Speaker 1: to go there. You can go up to the gates
Speaker 1: of the narcotic Farm and say, I'm a drug addict.
Speaker 1: I have papers from my doctor. And before the World
Speaker 1: War Two, most of the people who went to the
Speaker 1: narcotic farm, so a third of them are volunteering in
Speaker 1: that manner where they're just showing up seeking treatment and
Speaker 1: getting it um largely for free. If they could pay,
Speaker 1: they were asked to pay. But it was a place
Speaker 1: where you might go if you were a drug user
Speaker 1: and you know, the snow is starting to fly in
Speaker 1: New York City and you don't really have a place
Speaker 1: to live. What we would call today a homeless or
Speaker 1: unhoused population often spent their winters at the narcotic Farm.
Speaker 1: But but I mean, you can think about it quite
Speaker 1: remarkable because here we have a place that's a prison,
Speaker 1: yet basically a third of the inmates are people who
Speaker 1: come knocked me at the door and say let me in.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are no other prisons that I'm aware
Speaker 1: of like that, right, And actually the other prisons right,
Speaker 1: Most of the people who went to Lexington had been
Speaker 1: incarcerated in prisons and jails and other places that were
Speaker 1: not devoted to UH curing the drug addict. And so
Speaker 1: they thought of Lexington the Narcotic Farm as a country club,
Speaker 1: and in fact it became known very much as a
Speaker 1: country club prison there. It is in the South, but
Speaker 1: it's not racially segregated, and it's not gender segregated after nine.
Speaker 1: So it's a strange institution. It's awkward in every way.
Speaker 1: So for the entire forty years that the Narcotic Farm
Speaker 1: operated UH ten at any given time. This is true
Speaker 1: of men as well as women. Were professionals, largely positions,
Speaker 1: largely people who had access to opiates or put their
Speaker 1: wives on them. And so you have a nurses and
Speaker 1: you know many many professionals who had greater access to
Speaker 1: opioids became habituated to them and ended up going to
Speaker 1: the narcotic Farm. UM. So it was a bizarre institution
Speaker 1: when you really think about it because it is so mixed.
Speaker 1: So in talking about the general population and we're talking
Speaker 1: about you know, they treated over a hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: in the time that they were operating. But you you
Speaker 1: really do see a kind of change in the pattern
Speaker 1: of who goes to the narcotic farm that reflects the
Speaker 1: changes in the pattern of who uses opioids. We'll be
Speaker 1: talking more after we hear this add you said it
Speaker 1: was regarded as something of a country club prisoner. They
Speaker 1: had all sorts of recreational facilities. They had all sorts
Speaker 1: of you know, nice ways of treating people, whether people
Speaker 1: got manicures and haircuts, there were social events, but you
Speaker 1: had gymnasiums, you had a golf course. I think you
Speaker 1: had a tennis court. Yeah, it's it's pretty interesting when
Speaker 1: when we looked at it um and I think Luke
Speaker 1: Walden and JP Olsen and I as we were trying
Speaker 1: to interpret these photographs that we were seeing in the
Speaker 1: archives and that we were trying to understand. Right, you
Speaker 1: see all kinds of recreational There was a bowling alley.
Speaker 1: They're bowling alleys in the narcotic farm. There's the second
Speaker 1: largest auditorium in the entire state of Kentucky for jazz concerts.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure there was some resent s mint, but
Speaker 1: it really looks like an American small town. You can
Speaker 1: see the mentality, right, it's kind of a city on
Speaker 1: a hill. This rolling hills of Kentucky, bluegrass. This is
Speaker 1: thoroughbred country, right, And they are farming. Everyone is, you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're harvesting vegetables, they're cutting the hay, they raise
Speaker 1: the pork. Products that are consumed at that facility are
Speaker 1: raised at that facility. They have all kinds of activities
Speaker 1: and they log the amount of time that UM their
Speaker 1: patient inmates spend at recreation, right, so they thousands of
Speaker 1: hours each year are recorded of people who are bowling
Speaker 1: or playing ping pong, or UM playing softball. There's a
Speaker 1: women's softball team, there's you know, there's there's there's every
Speaker 1: kind of recreation that they could a mad and how
Speaker 1: to fit in there. And that's because they are convinced
Speaker 1: very early on that UM, if people had better things
Speaker 1: to do with their time, they wouldn't use drugs. So
Speaker 1: the idea there is you find alternative reinforcers, activities that
Speaker 1: compel people, that make people feel part of something larger
Speaker 1: a community, whether it's basket weaving or whether it's um.
Speaker 1: You know, they had these outdoor concerts in the middle
Speaker 1: of the courtyard, and you know, they really tried to
Speaker 1: make sure that people were busy all the time. They
Speaker 1: had jobs. Everybody had a job, so you had to
Speaker 1: work and you had to play, and you had to sleep,
Speaker 1: and you had to eat. And that normalization project, and
Speaker 1: it really was it was like, we're going to take
Speaker 1: this institution and we're going to make an American small town,
Speaker 1: and we are going to um indicate to people how
Speaker 1: they could fit into that small town. You know. So
Speaker 1: it's a very interesting model and it's one that we
Speaker 1: to this day right have this idea that if we
Speaker 1: could provide alternative reinforcers, then people wouldn't use drugs and
Speaker 1: they wouldn't go back to using drugs. That turned out
Speaker 1: not to work. It turns out that the recidivism rates
Speaker 1: are off the charts. So it seems so that within
Speaker 1: the Arconic farm, does is it creates this place for
Speaker 1: people to chill out, gain some skills. Nobody's overdosing or
Speaker 1: dying there, right, And in fact, one of the elements
Speaker 1: I'm curious about is what was if two thirds of
Speaker 1: the people there have been sentenced under the federal drug laws,
Speaker 1: but one third are people who have showed up voluntarily,
Speaker 1: what was the dynamic like between the ones who are
Speaker 1: there voluntarily and the ones who were not. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was very little differentiation between We call them the balls,
Speaker 1: and many of the balls will repeat customers um. In fact,
Speaker 1: they were called winders because they would wind in and
Speaker 1: wind doubt and then they would wind back. The one
Speaker 1: that we found who was there the most was there
Speaker 1: forty four times and on his forty fifth time. After
Speaker 1: that he didn't didn't return. But many people were there,
Speaker 1: maybe nine ten. I mean, we know to this day
Speaker 1: right that that treatment often doesn't work the first time,
Speaker 1: and that people do have to try multiple modalities. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that they tried to do with
Speaker 1: the narcotic Farm was they tried to provide under one
Speaker 1: roof UM multiple modalities of treatment. So they tried a
Speaker 1: lot of different things. The other thing that they really believed,
Speaker 1: in addition to the alternative reinforcers I either play the
Speaker 1: recreational opportunities UM. Everyone had a job and were they
Speaker 1: were trained for these jobs, and these jobs ranged from
Speaker 1: auto mechanics two woodworking to working of course in the
Speaker 1: cooking um and clean up in the kitchen. But they
Speaker 1: also included skills training, so for instance, photography and dark
Speaker 1: room work or printing or other kinds of highly skilled
Speaker 1: activities where you really could imagine people getting jobs afterwards.
Speaker 1: Were sewing, tailoring, various kinds of things of this kind,
Speaker 1: and these were at that time in these were progressive
Speaker 1: elements of prison reform. The Federal Eureau of Prisons came
Speaker 1: into being in nineteen thirty and it came into um
Speaker 1: being at a time when people were really thinking about, um,
Speaker 1: is it possible to make people who are incarcerated gain
Speaker 1: new skills or take on new responsibilities. And with that,
Speaker 1: in fact, UM you know, helped them in their lives
Speaker 1: after they left these institutions. And so that vocational training,
Speaker 1: vocational skills. Aspect of the narcotic farm UM which included
Speaker 1: agricultural labor, they had cows, and so there are lots
Speaker 1: and lots of stories about these city boys UM finding
Speaker 1: themselves out milking cows early in the morning and splashing
Speaker 1: around in the manure. Right hard hard to see how
Speaker 1: learning how to milk a cow isn't help you when
Speaker 1: you go back to New York City after that. But
Speaker 1: you know, you talked also in the book about how
Speaker 1: after World War Two there's a change in the attic population.
Speaker 1: It's less about older guys, and now you have the
Speaker 1: first youth heroin epidemic, and you have the children of immigrants,
Speaker 1: you know, Italian and Jewish and Irish, and you have
Speaker 1: Puerto Ricans and and Blacks. And that results in the
Speaker 1: fifties in Congress enacting really incredibly draconian laws. And we
Speaker 1: sometimes think about the laws today, but in nineteen fifties six,
Speaker 1: in Narcotic Act that Congress passes after you know, one
Speaker 1: of the more more recent drug scares back then, has
Speaker 1: a five year minimum sentence for first time possession and
Speaker 1: a death penalty for dealers. So how does all this
Speaker 1: effect what's going on at the narcotic Farm. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's pretty interesting because the hearing that got me interested
Speaker 1: in the narcotic Farm was part of the lead up
Speaker 1: to that nineteen fifty six Act, and the people at
Speaker 1: the Narcotic Farm opposed the ninety Act, and that was
Speaker 1: partly because there were mandatory minimum sentences that were leveled
Speaker 1: initially in nineteen fifty one in the Bogs Act, and
Speaker 1: that was very much responsive to concerns about juvenile delinquency.
Speaker 1: These populations of largely young men, but young women as well,
Speaker 1: and I write about that in some of my other work.
Speaker 1: There was a famous study called the Road to H.
Speaker 1: H was the slang term for heroin at the time.
Speaker 1: So the Road to H was done at New York
Speaker 1: University and it um looks at this population and what's
Speaker 1: happening is that this younger, more racialized, more ethnicized population
Speaker 1: is starting to show up at the narcotic farm right
Speaker 1: around nineteen fifty one. So during the World War two,
Speaker 1: UM you've probably all heard at opioids were stockpiled. They
Speaker 1: were not just stockpiled at Fort Knox, although they were
Speaker 1: stockpiled there, but at stockpiles around the country for UM
Speaker 1: efforts during the war. One of the major purchasers of
Speaker 1: opioids is actually the US military, major users because UM codeine,
Speaker 1: cough suppression, other uses of morphine. Also, of course, during wartime,
Speaker 1: you need more morphine to be available for people who
Speaker 1: are injured UM in in the war. So you have Korea,
Speaker 1: you have lots of people who begin to get UM
Speaker 1: experience with the opioids, and you have after World War
Speaker 1: Two a kind of flushing out of those stockpiles, so
Speaker 1: that suddenly you find heroin in the streets again. You
Speaker 1: also have the nineteen forty on you have the US
Speaker 1: Mexico border. UM, A lot of opioids are coming into
Speaker 1: the country either well through through Mexico. Were guardless of
Speaker 1: whether they are UM produced in Mexico or whether they're
Speaker 1: produced in UM through the Asian routes, they're coming in
Speaker 1: that way. And then you also have of course other
Speaker 1: routes coming in from to the east coast. The Daniel
Speaker 1: hearings that led to that nineteen s act were about
Speaker 1: the border. And so you see, the nineteen fifties is
Speaker 1: a period of increasing criminalization, increasing buy in. So even
Speaker 1: though UM many people the doctor's lawyers, you know, people
Speaker 1: who had experience with UH drug addiction, like social workers,
Speaker 1: argued against criminalization, UH, they lost. They lost that fight.
Speaker 1: So in fact, in the nineteen fifties, this is back
Speaker 1: to my dissertation topic, UM, there was a wonderful American
Speaker 1: Medical Association American Bar Association effort called drug addiction crime
Speaker 1: or Disease, and there were a significant opponent of people
Speaker 1: who were saying, this is a disease and it should
Speaker 1: be treated as a disease. And of course that fit
Speaker 1: very well with the narcotic farm because they had always
Speaker 1: seen it as a disease and they in fact talked
Speaker 1: about it as a chronic relapsing condition. And the fifties
Speaker 1: is so interesting. It's so interesting because you have a
Speaker 1: culture Heroin using jazz culture. I can't I can't kind
Speaker 1: of convey how important Heroin was to the jazz culture.
Speaker 1: Um In ninety seven, a guy named Charles Winnick in
Speaker 1: New York City interviewed three hundred and fifty seven Heroin
Speaker 1: using jazz musicians. So this was definitely you know, I
Speaker 1: mean like that that's a very specialized population and to
Speaker 1: be able to find three hundred and fifty seven of
Speaker 1: them for your study is kind of surprising. But in
Speaker 1: many ways, Lexington became this kind of mecca of this
Speaker 1: cultural center really for this population, and the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: was it's heyday. And so across the nineteen fifties you
Speaker 1: begin to see a huge population shift really as a
Speaker 1: narcotic farm, so you have many more let's just focus
Speaker 1: on this jas saying because I'll tell you that for
Speaker 1: a long time. I mean, if if somebody mentioned the
Speaker 1: Narcotic Farm to me twenty years ago, the first thing
Speaker 1: that I would think of, Oh yeah, that was the
Speaker 1: federal narcotic prison where you had all the jazz, famous
Speaker 1: jazz players, and I mean, just for our listeners, if
Speaker 1: you know anything about jazz, it had Check Baker was there,
Speaker 1: Sonny Rollins, who's still playing and is widely regarded as
Speaker 1: maybe second only to John Coltrane, is the greatest of
Speaker 1: all saxophonists. Had Elvin Jones, Jackie McLean, Sonny State who
Speaker 1: I used to go see in the Upper West Side
Speaker 1: years ago, Joe Guy. So I mean, it really was
Speaker 1: an exceptional story. And then I think this is incident
Speaker 1: that you mentioned the book in nineteen sixty four. We're
Speaker 1: an orchestra made up of the jazz as players who
Speaker 1: are at Lexington performed on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Now
Speaker 1: unfortunately the tapes no longer exist, but I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess it was described as the greatest band you've never heard,
Speaker 1: So I mean, probably no other federal prison can claim
Speaker 1: that sort of link with great, you know, great artists.
Speaker 1: In America, Well, no other prison except perhaps Fort Worth,
Speaker 1: so the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm. They also had jazz
Speaker 1: greats and also celebrities. So that was the other thing
Speaker 1: about Lexington is that there was a celebrity culture UM.
Speaker 1: And so you might have actors, people you you would know,
Speaker 1: and the whole population would get very excited about oh,
Speaker 1: somebody's being admitted. UM. And you could also go here
Speaker 1: those concerts. They had practice rooms. They also bought musical
Speaker 1: instruments for the patient inmates, so a lot of people
Speaker 1: who never played together outside would play together at Lexington UM.
Speaker 1: And there were a lot of jazz fans, right, There
Speaker 1: were a lot of people who went to jazz clubs
Speaker 1: who also used heroine and who um had this lifestyle. UM.
Speaker 1: That kind of became part of the place to the
Speaker 1: point where many many people remember the music above everything
Speaker 1: else about Lexington. Well, that was certainly my case until
Speaker 1: I read your book. You know. So what happens is
Speaker 1: from the thirties and through into the fifties and early sixties,
Speaker 1: there's still the basic model, which is engaged people in
Speaker 1: agricultural work and have them fresh hair and have tremendous
Speaker 1: recreational facilities and vocational training and hope that all of
Speaker 1: this stuff works out that people won't recidivate, which turns
Speaker 1: out to be false. Although you know, as we also
Speaker 1: know with drug addiction, that even when most of the
Speaker 1: people who volunteered to go to the Narcotic Farm, they
Speaker 1: weren't exactly looking to get clean to get off drugs.
Speaker 1: They were mostly looking to kind of chill out for
Speaker 1: a while when they were burning out on the life
Speaker 1: on the streets. So it did add some value in
Speaker 1: that sense. But then there's a moment, I think in
Speaker 1: the sixties where people begin to give up on the
Speaker 1: whole agriculture as treatment modeled, and where the Narcotic Farm
Speaker 1: shifts and it begins to embrace some of these therapeutic
Speaker 1: community approaches that were happening outside. And maybe there's some
Speaker 1: things that are initially ground in alcoholics anonymous programs like
Speaker 1: day Top and the one Synanon which became quite notorious.
Speaker 1: But say a little more about that transition that happens
Speaker 1: in the sixties in the last ten years of the
Speaker 1: life of the Narcotic Farm. Yeah, so the food at Lexington,
Speaker 1: like the music was legendary, so people actually liked the food.
Speaker 1: It was good food, and it was grown there. It
Speaker 1: was fresh um. It was not like other institutional food.
Speaker 1: And this was kind of well well known, well documented.
Speaker 1: And then in the nineties sixties there begins to be
Speaker 1: prison reform that says you can't make people work, and
Speaker 1: so you can't make people work in the same way,
Speaker 1: which means you can't really run an agricultural enterprise. Because
Speaker 1: the agricultural enterprise, although it was headed by um, a
Speaker 1: staff member, it was really entirely patient in my labor.
Speaker 1: This was also true in the kitchen. And so what
Speaker 1: happens is there begin to be shifts in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: partly as a result of that changing pattern of race
Speaker 1: and ethnicity that began in the nine fifties, and there's
Speaker 1: also federal prison reform that changes things. In addition, there's
Speaker 1: a shift away from psychotherapy individual or group uh that
Speaker 1: had been in its heyday in the fifties, towards these
Speaker 1: more affordable kind of alcoholics anonymous style, narcotics, anonymous style
Speaker 1: and counter groups and things like that that make more
Speaker 1: sense with a large population than individual psychotherapy. That's be
Speaker 1: difficult to achieve, and nobody really embraced it um in
Speaker 1: the patient inmate population, because most people, as you said,
Speaker 1: weren't going there to get off drugs. They were going
Speaker 1: there to reduce the cost of their habit There were also,
Speaker 1: i would say hardening attitudes among the staff um, partly
Speaker 1: because the idealism of the early days didn't outlast the
Speaker 1: post war wave that idealism. People begin to see right
Speaker 1: that people are coming back, that it's kind of a
Speaker 1: revolving door, and everyone who's kind of in charge begins
Speaker 1: to realize that we are not having the impact or
Speaker 1: effect that we wish we would had. And actually, even
Speaker 1: from the nineteen forties, there were concerns about after care.
Speaker 1: The people who ran the narcotic farm believed that there
Speaker 1: should be after care, that there should be follow up,
Speaker 1: that people shouldn't just like leave the institution and just
Speaker 1: go back to their neighborhoods. There began to be, in fact,
Speaker 1: a scientific um investigation of relapse. What was it and
Speaker 1: why was it that people could be on the train
Speaker 1: or the bus back to their neighborhoods where they had
Speaker 1: used and they would feel like they were going into
Speaker 1: withdrawal again, even if they had been cleaned for months,
Speaker 1: And so what was that phenomenon. They begin to kind
Speaker 1: of get really curious about that. Now. The therapeutic communities
Speaker 1: are actually many of them started by people who were
Speaker 1: at the narcotic farm and then left the narcotic farm
Speaker 1: were critical of the model of abstinence only and they
Speaker 1: basically said, this needs to be a much more confrontational
Speaker 1: version of abstinence only. So therapeutic communities or tcs UH
Speaker 1: sent and On being the largest and most notorious, and
Speaker 1: day Top Village following on were much more you know
Speaker 1: that their therapies were things like the hot seat where
Speaker 1: you had just sit there and just take or or
Speaker 1: dunce caps. So they really used humiliation and what I
Speaker 1: would call coercion UH to get people to stop using drugs.
Speaker 1: And they used the power of a community, a larger
Speaker 1: group of people to try to keep people. You know,
Speaker 1: they would have them do very menial work, unpaid, you know, toothbrushing,
Speaker 1: the grout in the showers or on the stairways. Very
Speaker 1: humiliating things were done in the that movement, and that
Speaker 1: was even tried. The administrators at Lexington gave over a
Speaker 1: building where the women used to be housed. They were
Speaker 1: now housed in the main part of the facility. In
Speaker 1: a separate wing, they gave over a building to a
Speaker 1: therapeutic community called Matrix House. To see, right, if they
Speaker 1: could perhaps um be more successful in terms of more
Speaker 1: effective at treatment, um if they used these more confrontational techniques.
Speaker 1: Let's take a break here and go to an ad
Speaker 1: purely by coincidence, this past weekend, I was hanging out
Speaker 1: with a friend of mine, Howard Josepher, at his summer
Speaker 1: home on Fire Island in New York. And Howard is
Speaker 1: somebody who was one of the founders of Phoenix House,
Speaker 1: and then he started a remarkable harm reduction program in
Speaker 1: New York called Exponents. But he back in the sixties
Speaker 1: landed up at Lexington And I asked him what did
Speaker 1: he remember about being at Lexington in the mid sixties,
Speaker 1: And what he remembered was those confrontational therapeutic sorts of programs.
Speaker 1: You know, he was among the number of people whom
Speaker 1: that who sort of was drawn to that model at
Speaker 1: least initially about challenging people. But his one recollection was
Speaker 1: that confrontation know, you know, therapeutic programs at Lexington at
Speaker 1: that time. It's such an interesting paradox isn't it. So
Speaker 1: one of the things about the narcotic farm is that
Speaker 1: they would give wings two therapeutic communities, often configured around
Speaker 1: racial or ethnic identity, and they would allow them to
Speaker 1: choose their name Newman House or Unity spelled with a
Speaker 1: y o u uh, and both men and women uh
Speaker 1: could try to do this kind of thing within the institution.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Actually, in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties there were really big changes in the federal
Speaker 1: prison system, and there were big changes in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: six that affected the institution in ways that allowed for
Speaker 1: more of this sort of thing. In nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act was passed and NARA, it
Speaker 1: was called the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act, was a federal
Speaker 1: act that essentially changed the way treatment was done. So
Speaker 1: if you think about what is a treatment infrastructure, well,
Speaker 1: for from until nineteen sixty six, it's these two massive
Speaker 1: narcotic farms. It's centralized, it's federal, it's one east of
Speaker 1: the Mississippi and one west of the Mississippi River. And
Speaker 1: after nineteen sixty six, that legislation essentially says you have
Speaker 1: to get treatment in your home community. So every state,
Speaker 1: every town, every city is supposed to have drug treatment. Well,
Speaker 1: how are you going to do that? Right? Maybe? Okay,
Speaker 1: So you have federal contractors who set out to make
Speaker 1: sure that everywhere that a person who is a drug
Speaker 1: user comes from has drug treatment. And so treatment essentially
Speaker 1: devolves to the states. Away from the federal They use
Speaker 1: the narcotic farm essentially to uh, you go there for
Speaker 1: six months only and then you are discharged to your
Speaker 1: home community. And so that's why they're experimenting with these
Speaker 1: other kinds of forms of treatment, because who is going
Speaker 1: to provide all that treatment? Well, who comes forward is
Speaker 1: the salvation army, these new therapeutic communities, right, Alcoholics anonymous,
Speaker 1: narcotics anonymous UM. And they are provided federal money to
Speaker 1: start up treatment in Philadelphia or in um, you know,
Speaker 1: small towns in say Pennsylvania. Right, So you have a
Speaker 1: decentralization of the whole treatment infrastructure to the states and
Speaker 1: then to the cities where people who are having drug
Speaker 1: problems are coming from. That changes everything at the narcotic farm. Now,
Speaker 1: there's also something else emerging at that time, right, which
Speaker 1: is that when people were initially admitted to Lexington or
Speaker 1: four works, right, one of the first things that would
Speaker 1: happen is they would be detoxed from their morphine or
Speaker 1: heroin addiction, typically with I think, you know, declining doses
Speaker 1: of morphine until they just stopped, and then after you know,
Speaker 1: last I thought it was morphine tight, and then methodon after.
Speaker 1: But what happens in the sixties is Vincent Dola Marine
Speaker 1: Nice wandering their research suggesting that methodon should be used
Speaker 1: not just for detox but for maintenance purposes. So you
Speaker 1: have sort of simultaneous with the growth of the therapeutic
Speaker 1: community model, also the beginnings of methodon maintenance programs beginning
Speaker 1: to open up in communities around the country. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: method on maintenance is, like all the old morphine maintenance
Speaker 1: pretty contested, and it's very much contested by the Federal
Speaker 1: Bureau of Narcotics Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs d
Speaker 1: E a drug enforcement agency administration. So you have methodon
Speaker 1: maintenance is a pilot program. It's experimental well into the
Speaker 1: seventies um, and it is contained within a methodone clinic system.
Speaker 1: It's not generalized to medicine more generally, and so methodon
Speaker 1: maintenance is does become available in some of these destination
Speaker 1: cities Detroit, New York certainly, so you see a rapid
Speaker 1: scaling up of availability of methodone in certain places and
Speaker 1: complete non availability in other places. The Narcotic Farm is
Speaker 1: interesting in terms of they were anti maintenance in certain
Speaker 1: ways because they felt that, um, you could overdose on methodone.
Speaker 1: Methodone was very little different in their minds from morphine
Speaker 1: or even heroin, and so they had fights actually with
Speaker 1: Vincent Dole and Marie nice Wander. Nice Wander herself had
Speaker 1: been at the Narcotic Farm. They had one of the
Speaker 1: first psychiatric residency programs in the country at the Narcotic Farm,
Speaker 1: and so she had been there and she had observed
Speaker 1: and she did not feel very positive about the program
Speaker 1: at Lexington. Vincent Dole had a very different theory of addiction.
Speaker 1: He had a theory um that addiction was a metabolic disease,
Speaker 1: and that was in some ways a very different kind
Speaker 1: of theory than a theory of a neurochemical kind of
Speaker 1: disease that the people at the Narcotic Farm were functioning with.
Speaker 1: Between the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act and METHODO maintenance. It
Speaker 1: is very clear in the early seventies that the narcotic
Speaker 1: farms are becoming what we might call white elephants, right.
Speaker 1: They are out of step with the times. They are
Speaker 1: carceerole environments, and it's evolving towards something really different as
Speaker 1: a result of of the Narcotic adict Rehabilitation Act, because
Speaker 1: the states are beginning to come on and say, all right,
Speaker 1: let's see what works, and let's start up treatment in
Speaker 1: our states and in our cities and in our towns.
Speaker 1: That makes sense for the people who come from this area.
Speaker 1: But let's turn now to the Addiction Research Center. It
Speaker 1: became known as Addiction Research Center. I mean, my understanding
Speaker 1: was you had leading researchers and scientists, They had already
Speaker 1: made population of drug addicts who were right there, and
Speaker 1: that for decades they conducted thousands of studies, published over
Speaker 1: five articles and leading scientific journals. You know, really had
Speaker 1: all sorts of sort of breakthroughs and understanding addictions. So
Speaker 1: just tell us more about that Addiction Research Center and
Speaker 1: what was so special about it and what it really
Speaker 1: added to our broader knowledge historically about drug use and
Speaker 1: drug addiction. Sure, um, the Addiction Research Center is the
Speaker 1: name that was given to the laboratory that congress Man
Speaker 1: dated UM be in the U. S. Narcotic Farm, you know,
Speaker 1: back when the farm begins. UM, when it opens in
Speaker 1: n U S. Congress has great faith that science is
Speaker 1: going to be able to find a cure for drug addiction.
Speaker 1: And they really believe that UM nine. They really believe
Speaker 1: that they mandate that there be a scientific effort, and
Speaker 1: that effort UM is going to begin actually before the
Speaker 1: narcotic Farm opens. The person who's going to become the
Speaker 1: director of that laboratory based effort, Clifton Himmel's block, is
Speaker 1: doing research at Fort Leavenworth, which is the largest prison
Speaker 1: in the country at that time, and he's doing research
Speaker 1: on that population of people who are drug users who
Speaker 1: find themselves in federal prison. And he's also doing research
Speaker 1: at cancer hospitals, and he's trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: is drug addiction scientifically? What is it? UM? How does
Speaker 1: it work? UM? Why does it happen with opioids and
Speaker 1: nothing else? Right? Why do these and he draws out
Speaker 1: these UM charts and he finds out that this is
Speaker 1: a very predictable situation. Right, you have a very predictable
Speaker 1: lead up too tolerance, and then you have if you withdraw,
Speaker 1: then a subject will go into withdrawal and there will
Speaker 1: be a very predictable pattern of symptoms and of physiological
Speaker 1: responses to that withdrawal. And so he invents this thing
Speaker 1: called the morphine abstinence syndrome. You know what happens when
Speaker 1: somebody is addicted and you take away that substance. What
Speaker 1: do they do? And um, he begins to study it
Speaker 1: in very small groups of people. Six is the usual
Speaker 1: size from well into the post war period. You have
Speaker 1: very small subject populations. And he believes subjects should know
Speaker 1: what they're getting into, that they should sign consent forms,
Speaker 1: and that um, they should understand, you know, what's going on.
Speaker 1: And so he says, you can only do these studies
Speaker 1: on people who are seasoned morphine or heroin users who
Speaker 1: do not want to be cured. Right, So these are
Speaker 1: people who say that they are never going to stop using,
Speaker 1: that they will use, um, you know, as soon as
Speaker 1: they get out of the institution. No one who hopes
Speaker 1: for a cure is supposed to be accepted into these studies.
Speaker 1: So the laboratory is a pretty interesting place because at
Speaker 1: that time You have to imagine, we know nothing scientifically
Speaker 1: about this condition, and we don't even know really what
Speaker 1: kind of condition it is. We have to define it,
Speaker 1: we have to chart it out, etcetera. And in addition
Speaker 1: to that, our subjects no more about the condition. Then
Speaker 1: the researchers do. They don't know anything about this condition.
Speaker 1: Who knows? Drug users know and they are the experts
Speaker 1: in this area, and so they talk to them. They
Speaker 1: have a specific ward set aside that's called the research ward,
Speaker 1: and um they stay in that ward during the time
Speaker 1: that they're participating in these studies. They are never allowed
Speaker 1: back in the general population when they are participating in
Speaker 1: these studies. So from nineteen thirty five to nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: there is no requirement in the US for clinical trials
Speaker 1: prior to a drug going onto the market. But the
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical companies who are putting these drugs on the market
Speaker 1: do want human testing. They do want to know if
Speaker 1: their drugs work, if they're dangerous, etcetera. And so what
Speaker 1: they do is they evolve a system. This laboratory of
Speaker 1: the Narcotic Farm works very closely with a committee of
Speaker 1: the National Academies of Science and the National Research Council
Speaker 1: because during that the war there was a lot of
Speaker 1: interest and was it possible to do something with the
Speaker 1: morphine molecule, to dissect it, to get rid of the
Speaker 1: addictive potential, and to heighten the painkilling effect and the
Speaker 1: beneficial effects of morphine and get rid of all of
Speaker 1: the bad effects, the the addictive effects. This turns out
Speaker 1: to be a quest that we are still engaged in.
Speaker 1: It is a tough nut to crack scientifically, but that
Speaker 1: laboratory was always in conversation with other laboratories that we're
Speaker 1: doing this at the chemical bench and in UH animal
Speaker 1: pharmacology at the University of Michigan, you have essentially Lexington.
Speaker 1: That laboratory becomes a node in a network of three
Speaker 1: laboratories that are looking at the molecular level, the animal
Speaker 1: pharmacology and the human or clinical pharmacology. So the laboratory
Speaker 1: at Lexington is called the Addiction Research Center. After nineteen
Speaker 1: when it is joined, it becomes one of two working
Speaker 1: laboratories of the National Institute of Mental Health. So and
Speaker 1: I m H comes into being in and that laboratory,
Speaker 1: along with one in Washington, d C, is joined together.
Speaker 1: The idea is still being UH find a cure. But
Speaker 1: if you can't find a cure, then now we have
Speaker 1: a new goal. Find a way to change the morphine
Speaker 1: molecule so that it won't be addictive. And in meanwhile,
Speaker 1: all these other drugs are being produced by the pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: company and all those ones need to be tested for
Speaker 1: their potential for addiction another. Right, So you basically have
Speaker 1: a population at Lexington of people both inmates about both
Speaker 1: those who are incarcerated as well as those who are
Speaker 1: volunteers who are basically volunteering for these programs to say,
Speaker 1: test these drugs on me and use me as a
Speaker 1: guinea pig um And by the way, and it returned.
Speaker 1: What did they get in return for participant in the studies? Well,
Speaker 1: so the question of compensation was always a big one
Speaker 1: at Lexington. And that's partly because when you take a
Speaker 1: prisoner out of a prison population think about this is
Speaker 1: a big prison people. Uh, it's loud, You never have
Speaker 1: any time to yourself, you don't have any privacy, any
Speaker 1: private room. And so that's what they got. The compensation
Speaker 1: was essentially to move out of the general population and
Speaker 1: into a much quieter much you know. In addition, they
Speaker 1: had five to late forties, they could designate compensation in
Speaker 1: terms of their drug of choice, so they could save
Speaker 1: up morphine or heroin. UM. Because the the other thing
Speaker 1: that I haven't explained is that the drugs that are
Speaker 1: being used in the laboratory are essentially cleaned up drugs
Speaker 1: that are confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and
Speaker 1: they are cycled back into research at Lexington after they
Speaker 1: have been um, you know, cleaned up. And so there
Speaker 1: is heroin there, and there is morphine, and they can
Speaker 1: save that up and if they want to, they can
Speaker 1: wait until they want to use that drug. So it's
Speaker 1: called the drug bank, and we would view it today
Speaker 1: as a highly unethical practice. But at the time they
Speaker 1: weren't allowed to pay research subjects at all. They couldn't
Speaker 1: pay any money um. And so they thought about, well,
Speaker 1: what can we use to compensate people for uh, their
Speaker 1: time and their trouble and their uh you know, kind
Speaker 1: of giving giving their bodies to science um. And so
Speaker 1: they came up with that answer. If you step back
Speaker 1: and you say, here are people volunteering for these studies
Speaker 1: and they can be given you know, later in later
Speaker 1: years money or maybe a reduction in sentence, or they
Speaker 1: can be given access to the drugs they would like
Speaker 1: for a while. And you're dealing with a population of
Speaker 1: people who say they never want to quit using drugs.
Speaker 1: It does raise the bigger question like why, really, on
Speaker 1: some bigger level, is that on ethical? Why wouldn't I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously we can see how everybody got caught up and
Speaker 1: see how what do you mean you're giving these people drugs?
Speaker 1: You know that that's on ethical blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: You're sustaining their addiction. But these are people who went
Speaker 1: into being research subjects saying I never want to quit.
Speaker 1: I mean, so, what do you think was it really
Speaker 1: unethical to pay these folks and drugs? Yeah? So, um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get myself in trouble by saying this, But
Speaker 1: to tell you the truth, the scale of human experimentation
Speaker 1: with currently illegal drugs today is huge, enormous, much bigger
Speaker 1: than the scale and the levels of control um that
Speaker 1: were in place at the Narcotic Farm, and in fact,
Speaker 1: in the book Discovering Addiction, I try really hard to
Speaker 1: differentiate between the ethics of these studies. I try really
Speaker 1: hard to look at those kinds of questions, UM, in
Speaker 1: part because I don't have the same response that many
Speaker 1: people do. I don't say that that was unethical in
Speaker 1: the ways that other people might say that it is.
Speaker 1: The fact is the narcotic farm was a very small
Speaker 1: research enterprise. UM and the larger pharmaceutical companies who are
Speaker 1: innovating the nineteen fifties, we were awash in new pharmaceuticals
Speaker 1: and they needed to be understood do they have addicted
Speaker 1: potential or addiction liability as they would call it UM
Speaker 1: or not? And so what they were the places where
Speaker 1: these kinds of tests were being done at to scale.
Speaker 1: We're actually state penitentiaries where pharmaceutical companies were building clinical
Speaker 1: research facilities on the grounds of like Jackson State in
Speaker 1: Michigan up John Park Davis right ultimately becomes Fiser Right.
Speaker 1: All of these pharmaceutical companies are building clinical research facilities
Speaker 1: because after nineteen sixty two you have to go through
Speaker 1: Phase one, two and three trials, and Phase one was
Speaker 1: all done on prisoners. UM. Almost Phase one trials in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties were done on prisoners. UH. There was
Speaker 1: nothing like the effort that we have today. You know,
Speaker 1: for Phase one trials and one arguably can say that
Speaker 1: we're proceeding in an unethical way today because today we
Speaker 1: ask people to volunteer for Phase one trials and um,
Speaker 1: they're largely people of color, they're largely poor people. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a very different world. Um. And you can say
Speaker 1: that they are freer, but are they That's a real question.
Speaker 1: And I have to say, Um, so much we that
Speaker 1: we know in humans was generated initially at the Narcotic Farm.
Speaker 1: It was known basically all over the world. The World
Speaker 1: Health Organization turned to the laboratory, the Addiction Research Center UM.
Speaker 1: Prior to our having the Controlled Substances Act and the
Speaker 1: scheduling that we have today, the laboratory at Lexington rendered
Speaker 1: decisions for whole Narcotic Control Sparatus. The Global Narcotic Control
Speaker 1: Apparatus paid attention to the science at Lexington because it
Speaker 1: was the only place where it was really set up
Speaker 1: to be done. And that's partly because yes, they have
Speaker 1: a captive population, but it's also a population that has knowledge,
Speaker 1: has expertise, right, can be tapped to understand the effects
Speaker 1: that these drugs have on people, not animals, right, not
Speaker 1: in petri dishes or something right, but here you have
Speaker 1: people who can actually talk to you and who have
Speaker 1: a lingo, who have a way of describing their experiences, UM,
Speaker 1: characterizing their experiences very accurately and precisely. Now in the
Speaker 1: nineties seventies, there begins to be a real UH what
Speaker 1: I would call a knowledge explosion, late sixties, early seventies
Speaker 1: knowledge explosion, and UH the Addiction Research Center is no
Speaker 1: longer the only game in town, and so they begin
Speaker 1: to be competing paradigms. That begins to be inquiry UM elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And that's really important. But one of the things about
Speaker 1: Lexington is that the science changed over time. So in
Speaker 1: the beginning, you don't have neuro psycho pharmacology, right, you
Speaker 1: don't have neuropharmacology until the fifties, and when they begin
Speaker 1: to hire people to study the brain UM, and they
Speaker 1: hire a neuropharmacologist UM in the sixties who comes in
Speaker 1: and who begins to really look at UM what's going
Speaker 1: on in the brain, and from clinical description is able
Speaker 1: to characterize UH the opiate receptor, right, that there are
Speaker 1: more than one, that there are multiple opioid receptors, and
Speaker 1: UH shows essentially where they are and what they're doing
Speaker 1: in the brain. And so this early identification of opiate
Speaker 1: receptors in the brain in the nineteen sixties that the
Speaker 1: Addiction Research Center is really important for our studies today.
Speaker 1: But there's one other big piece of the research that
Speaker 1: was going on, which was the research on psychedelics and
Speaker 1: giving some of these inmates LSD and mescaline and psilocybin um,
Speaker 1: you know, not unlike what Learry and Albert were doing
Speaker 1: their early days at Harvard, and a lot of this
Speaker 1: research back in the fifties being funded, you know, quietly
Speaker 1: by the CIA. It was not publicly revealed at that time.
Speaker 1: But there were some very serious studies, I mean, beneficial
Speaker 1: studies that are still regarded, you know, as legitimate scientific
Speaker 1: studies that came out of those narcotic farm studies of
Speaker 1: giving the inmates, uh some psycholic just say more about
Speaker 1: that psycholic thing. Yeah, it's a fascinating story. So in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, I don't know, there was something like
Speaker 1: a D laboratories studying LSD. LSD was a tremendously well
Speaker 1: studied drug and um the people at the Narcotic Farm,
Speaker 1: We're pretty sure that L. S. Steve Esklin. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of interest in those drugs because they worked
Speaker 1: completely differently. They had a different effect on the brain,
Speaker 1: They worked through different neural pathways, and that was known
Speaker 1: at the Addiction Research Center, and so they were interested
Speaker 1: in that because they realized these didn't have the same
Speaker 1: tolerance um and withdrawal effects that they were used to
Speaker 1: seeing with morphine. And so, if you are studying LSD
Speaker 1: UM in the fifties, you are typically funded by the CIA.
Speaker 1: The CIA comes knocking at your door. The Addiction Research
Speaker 1: Center suddenly became very um well equipped as a result
Speaker 1: of these LSD studies, and they benefited for about ten
Speaker 1: years from the funding of the CIA, and in particular
Speaker 1: that UM favorite UM program UH, the mk Ultra program UH.
Speaker 1: And so that of course got them into considerable trouble
Speaker 1: later in the nineteen seventies when Congress started to look
Speaker 1: at what had been done in the fifties. Because in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, by the time the Congress, Teddy Kennedy
Speaker 1: and so forth began to investigate human research on federal prisoners,
Speaker 1: the Narcotic Farm is the only place where there are
Speaker 1: still federal prisoners who are participating in drug studies. State prisons, yes,
Speaker 1: but federal no. And so one of the things that
Speaker 1: the a r C had trouble with in the sixties
Speaker 1: was that change that I talked about earlier in sixty six,
Speaker 1: the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act. It meant that no one
Speaker 1: was at Lexington for more than six months. And um,
Speaker 1: it was a requirement at the Addiction Research Center that
Speaker 1: to be in a study you had to be drug
Speaker 1: free for six months before release. So they could not
Speaker 1: use people who went there under the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Acts.
Speaker 1: So what they did I didn't realize that really is
Speaker 1: a book, because I mean a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who had been in the studies were people who had
Speaker 1: been sentenced to very long prison sentences, and that was almost,
Speaker 1: I think, one of the requirements of admitting somebody. And
Speaker 1: so after by the mid sixties, after Narcotic Addic Rehabilitation Act,
Speaker 1: it means that nobody going to Lexington is stand there
Speaker 1: for more than six months. So I mean, as your sense,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously you co authored a book in the
Speaker 1: Narcotic Farm, and another book grew out of a lot
Speaker 1: of the research that happened there. Would you say in
Speaker 1: retrospect it was a net plus in terms of the
Speaker 1: American history of dealing with drugs. I always sit with
Speaker 1: the paradox that there will never be another narcotic farm.
Speaker 1: I don't think that there's a reason to return to
Speaker 1: a narcotic farm model. But um, I also think that
Speaker 1: we learned something in terms of this was a low
Speaker 1: coercion kind of institution. People who went there learned, in
Speaker 1: some cases for the first time that they were human beings.
Speaker 1: There was a largely humane and compassionate ethos to the place,
Speaker 1: and they were respected, and some of them got well,
Speaker 1: and some of them didn't come back. And actually, I
Speaker 1: look at the rates of relapse and recidivism at the
Speaker 1: Narcotic Farm, and I have to say they're just not
Speaker 1: that different from what we see in a lot of
Speaker 1: treatment programs, most treatment programs today. Yeah, I mean, the
Speaker 1: simple fact that a third of the inmates were people
Speaker 1: who went there voluntarily, which cannot be said of any
Speaker 1: other prison I've ever heard about in history, is a
Speaker 1: sort of remarkable fact as well. So, Nancy, I wanna
Speaker 1: thank you very very much for having this conversation with me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just loved reading A Narcotic Farm. There's
Speaker 1: those who a documentary U based on the book that
Speaker 1: people can find I think on YouTube. I think you
Speaker 1: can find on vimeo. Actually, Ben, thank you Ethan for
Speaker 1: all the work that you have done to bring this
Speaker 1: kind of perspective to the American people. Well, thank you
Speaker 1: very much. Okay, take care. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please
Speaker 1: tell your friends about it, or you can write us
Speaker 1: a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave
Speaker 1: us a message at one eight three three seven seven
Speaker 1: nine six that's eight three three psycho zero, or you
Speaker 1: can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can
Speaker 1: also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by me Ethan they Adelman is produced by Noam
Speaker 1: Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden,
Speaker 1: Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus, and Darren Aronovsky. From Protozoma Pictures,
Speaker 1: Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blusien and
Speaker 1: a special thanks to a. Brios f Bianca Grimshaw and
Speaker 1: Robert Deep. Next week we'll be talking about the country
Speaker 1: with perhaps the most fascinating drug policy in the world.
Speaker 1: That's the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has also been
Speaker 1: a huge supporter of harm reduction policies. My guest will
Speaker 1: be Mazzi ar Gabi, professor at the University of Exeter
Speaker 1: in the UK. I just kind of recall a statement
Speaker 1: by the late Amany, you know, the leader of the
Speaker 1: revolution Supreme Lider Iran in the eighties that he said
Speaker 1: that we have to fight the war on two fronts.
Speaker 1: The first front the war against the Iraq, but the
Speaker 1: second front was the war against drug and addiction. So
Speaker 1: this is just to give you a sense of how
Speaker 1: entrenched it was with the political history of revolution Iran.
Speaker 1: It made me understand that it really needed to be
Speaker 1: discussed with all new attention. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see
Speaker 1: you don't miss it.