Overview

The first study of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm, an institution that played a critical role in fusing the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, and public health in the American West. In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a supposed rise in drug use reached a fevered pitch, the emergence of the nation’s first “narcotic farms” in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky, marked a watershed moment in the treatment of addiction. Rehab on the Range is the first in-depth history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its impacts on the American West. Throughout its operation from the 1930s to the 1970s, the institution was the only federally funded drug treatment center west of the Mississippi River. Designed to blend psychiatric treatment, physical rehabilitation, and vocational training, the Narcotic Farm, its proponents argued, would transform American treatment policies for the better. The reality was decidedly more complicated. Holly M. Karibo tells the story of how this institution—once framed as revolutionary for addiction care—ultimately contributed to the turn towards incarceration as the solution to the nation’s drug problem. Blending an intellectual history of addiction and imprisonment with a social history of addicts’ experiences, Rehab on the Range provides a nuanced picture of the Narcotic Farm and its cultural impacts. In doing so, it offers crucial historical context that can help us better understand our current debates over addiction, drug policy, and the rise of mass incarceration.

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9781477330340

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Reviews

Rehab on the Range is the definitive work on the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm. A significant contribution to the untold history of the West, this is a well-told tale of drug use and incarceration in the context of oil boom-and-bust, migratory labor, and settler farm families’ adaptation to the painful rigor of their ways of life. Karibo’s flair for detail brings the institution and its unique brand of moral therapy to life. -- Nancy D. Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, coauthor of The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts Deeply researched and carefully argued, Rehab on the Range expands the geography of the nation’s long war on drugs to include the American West, while illustrating how increasingly punitive drug policies fueled the growth of mass incarceration in the twentieth-century United States. This book should be required reading for academic historians, public health specialists, legal scholars, members of the advocacy community, and policymakers at the local, state, and national levels. -- William S. Bush, Texas A&M University, San Antonio, author of Who Gets a Childhood?: Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas

Author Information

Holly M. Karibo is an associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland and the coeditor of Border Policing: A History of Enforcement and Evasion in North America.

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