The darkly glamorous and important story of America’s first rehab
A mixture of jazz musicians, desperate addicts, and questionable science on a farm in Kentucky.
Imagine lounging among friends, playing cards, and listening to a Chet Baker-fronted jazz band on a 1000-acre farm set in the emerald Kentucky countryside. It sounds more like an acid trip than a stint at rehab, but that’s exactly what it was like at the Narcotic Farm, or “Narco,” the first modern American rehabilitation facility.
From the 1930s to the 1970s, the Lexington farm — the site of a massive federal prison — was temporarily home to Baker and many other notables, from Sonny Rollins to William Burroughs. Narco’s laboratory was also the birthplace of addiction science — though its doctors’ methods were ethically questionable at best.
In the 1930s and 1940s, heroin was abundant in US cities. The first “hipsters” were jazz-lovers who inhabited underground clubs, talked jive, and shot dope. Some were extraordinarily talented musicians themselves, which lent heroin a sheen of dark glamour.
But American attitudes toward drug addiction at the time were harsh and unforgiving. After nearly a century of activity, the temperance movement had succeeded in kicking off the Prohibition era with the Volstead Act in 1919. There was little tolerance, in public or private, for the cyclical and destructive behaviors of alcoholics and addicts.
Then, as now, addiction was largely seen as a depraved condition, a societal scourge. But opinions differed wildly on just what drove it: Was it a medical problem? A moral failing? A predilection for criminality?
The number of drug addicts was growing, but no reliable mechanism existed to help them. In fact, the medical establishment didn’t really know anything about addiction. And eventually the US government was forced to grapple with the fact that neither hospitals nor prisons wanted addicts. They decided on a novel solution.
Run by doctors in the US public health system, the Farm housed up to 1500 patients. About a thousand of them were federal inmates doing hard time, but the other 500 were desperate addicts who’d heard about the place and voluntarily hopped buses or trains to Lexington.
Looking at images of the Farm, or listening to former patients describe their experiences in this documentary, the draw of the place is obvious. For one thing, doctors palliated the horrors of cold-turkey withdrawal by easing patients off of drugs with sedatives (the process now known as medically-assisted detox).
The pastoral landscape was downright exotic to many addicts who’d been hustling their way through dense, inhospitable cities. The manual labor they did on the farm, like milking cows at daybreak, was a solid distraction and imparted a sense of wholesome pride. The food was good. And in group therapy sessions and leisure time, there was real camaraderie — never had many of these men and women been able to talk quite so freely about their experiences.
Over the course of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the Farm was temporarily home to many prominent jazz musicians — so many that it’s rumored that a few aspiring jazz greats checked themselves into the Farm just to get a chance to play with legends like Baker and Rollins. As the filmmakers behind the recent Narcotic Farm documentary write, “By the mid 1950s, Narco had become notorious as the meeting lodge of a new fraternity, the rapidly growing subculture of the American junkie. It became a destination, a rite of passage where addicted men and women of all ages and social backgrounds came together to share drug lore and lingo.” The mythology of Lexington was also bolstered by mentions of the Farm in the 1955 film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, William Burroughs’ Junkie, and the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park.
The Farm had a dark side, however. Many of its inhabitants were professional criminals and bullshit artists, who had little interest in talk therapy, and no real intention of staying clean. Most, as Burroughs noted in Junkie, just wanted to game the system. Many who finished the six-month program relapsed as soon as they left the grounds. Over time, the optimism that attended the founding of the Farm gave way to skepticism, in some cases cynicism.
But more importantly, because it was designed not just as a treatment facility but also a research hub, the Narcotic Farm’s basement was the setting for a kind of medical experimentation that’s now not only chilling but illegal. There, researchers attempted to understand the chemical and physiological dimensions of drug addiction. They administered all kinds of drugs to willing patients — and many, as you might imagine, were willing to get high — sometimes keeping them heavily drugged for days or weeks. Then, all at once, the drugs were taken away and patients were observed in the excruciating throes of withdrawal. Some patients were even “paid” in heroin for their participation in these studies; they could “bank” the drugs for later use. Similar experiments were performed on animals. In the Narcotic Farm documentary, one former subject describes the terrifying high-pitched screaming of monkeys in withdrawal.
In the 1970s, amid ethical concerns about drug studies being done on human subjects, and revelations that the Farm’s director had received CIA money to conduct studies on LSD (the infamous MKUltra “mind control” project), Narco was shut down, the last patient transferred from the premises in 1976.
Was the Narcotic Farm a success story? It’s complicated. It was among the first treatment programs for addicts based on the idea that they could and should be rehabilitated — medically, psychologically, morally. Doctors there didn’t find the cure they were looking for. In fact, tales of farming, bowling, dancing, laughing, and even doing drugs at Narco unwittingly cemented the lure of drug culture. But the approach was humane, and that was new. It was also the birthplace of addiction science. Though we now recognize that the much of the methodology was deeply flawed, it was researchers in Lexington who began the process of understanding the body and mind of the drug addict.
