Nancy Campbell on The Narcotic Farm

The Narcotic Farm was a remarkable institution. Opened in Lexington, Kentucky in 1935 and closed in the 1970s, the massive hybrid prison/treatment facility was for many decades one of the only publicly available drug treatment facilities in the United States. The writer, William Burroughs, spent time there, as did his son. So did jazz musicians like Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, Elvin Jones, Jackie McLean, Sonny Stitt, Joe Guy and many others. Staff and patients described it "as more like a prison than any hospital but more like a hospital than any prison,” and fully 1/3rd of its residents opted to go there entirely voluntarily. Moreover, the Farm’s Addiction Research Center was a pioneering, highly regarded center for addiction studies. It benefited from the ample number of experienced drug users willing and often eager to participate in experiments in which they were given opioids, barbiturates, all sorts of novel pharmaceuticals as well as psychedelics through CIA-funded studies. No one knows more about the Narcotic Farm than Professor Nancy Campbell, an historian of science, technology, and medicine who is one of America’s leading scholars of drug issues. Among her books are The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts, which she co-authored with JP Olsen and Luke Walden.

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