The University Press of Kentucky web site describes this book in the following manner:
"The United States Narcotic Farm opened in 1935 in the rolling hills of Kentucky horse country. Portrayed in the press as everything from a "New Deal for the drug addict" to a "million-dollar flophouse for junkies," the sprawling art deco facility was equal parts federal prison, treatment center, working farm, and research laboratory. Its mission was to rehabilitate addicts, who were increasingly criminalized and incarcerated as a result of strict new drug laws, and to discover a cure for opiate addiction.
This richly illustrated book offers an important history of this progressive yet ultimately doomed experiment. "Narco," as the locals called it, pioneered new treatments such as prescribing methadone to manage heroin withdrawal and developed drugs that blocked the action of opiates. The coed institution admitted federal prisoners as well as volunteers who checked themselves in for treatment, and through the years it hosted several legendary jazz musicians, including Chet Baker and Sonny Rollins, as well as actor Peter Lorre and writer William S. Burroughs. The facility ultimately closed in 1975 under a cloud as Congress learned that Narco researchers had recruited patients as test subjects for CIA-funded LSD experiments from 1953 to 1962, part of the notorious project MK-Ultra."
In the early 1970's, as a part of my intial involvement in the world of substance abuse treatment, I was an occasional visitor to The Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, as it is described in the quotation above. I always went there as part of a group of people, both professionials and patients, who were visiting the facility as an aspect of our involvement either as staff, patients,or volunteers in the field. I was never an employee or a patient/inmate at the facility. By that time, the name of the facility had been changed to the Federal Medical Center Lexington. I often attended group actitivities there and met numerous members of both their professional and patient/inmate populations. It was a fascinating place to visit since it was both a segment of the federal prison system and a treatment and research facility funded by the federal government as a part of the federal response to alcoholism and drug addiction. This book is a fine piece of work, especially in the area of the massive amount of research it required by the three co-authors. They must have spent mulitple years seeking, locating, and compiling the vast amounts of records, photographs, books, media articles, documentaries, and other records, both first hand and secondary, which comprise the book and its supporting documentation. It is somewhat easy for the casual reader to misinterpret this book as a "picture book". While that term can be accurate as a partial descriptor of the book, it is nowhere near a fully accurate assessment of the book. Yes, the book is documented with several hundred excellent and powerful photographs from a wide variety of sources, but is also comprised of thousands of words of written material which is divided between a fine written assessment of the work involved in the institution's work in the twelve areas which comprise the individual chapters, and dozens of lengthy descriptions of the multitudinous photographs which are primarily classic black and white highly professional documentation of the facility and its work with a smattering of more recent color photographs of generally equally professional work.
This book is a fine historical document of a facility which has lasted more than 90 years as both a prison and a treatment and research institution for what were often considered the most severely addicted persons in the nation. In the early days of the facility, its patient population was composed of both convicted felons and patients from the general American public who were allowed to voluntarily admit themselves to the facility as patients seeking treatment for their addictions. My impressions of this book are naturally dual in that I am writing about it as a general reader and also as a reflection of my own personal knowledge which was derived from actual time spent there as a visitor with experience in the field of substance abuse treatment. I strayed into my copy of this book at a local Goodwill Store as I often do with used books in a variety of fields, and my investment of $1.59 was repayed by my initial inspection of the photographs, Contents page, and the Index and Credits. Instantly, I was reminded of the two most interesting men I met during my visits to the facility. One was a somewhat aged but physically and mentally active man in his late fifties who was both a chronic alcoholic and sometime drug abuser who was also an inveterate con artist. He was able to achieve long term periods of abstinence especially at those itmes when he was in a controlled environment. But at those times such as his incarceration and treatment at the Narco Farm, he would invariably be ruminating about his impending release and perpetration of the "perfect con game". He also told a personal narrative of his first incarceration in a state prison in the northeastern United States shortly after he attained adult legal status. He claimed to have been the person who picked up a package containing some firearms which an outside source threw over the prison wall to be carried to the inmate who led one of the worst prison riots in American history. He claimed to have never been an active participant in the actual riot and related attacks on prison staff, and claimed to have never been prosecuted for his part in the riot planning. He always said he had simply been assigned to pick up and transport the package of firearms as the were thrown over the downtown prison's wall and transporting them to the key figure in the riot. During the time I knew this man, he was released from the federal prison system and instantly attained a job as a chef in a large hotel in Lexington. As the book discusses, it was not uncommon for inmates at the facility to be released and remain in Lexington. Almost immediately after his release, this man began the perpetration of his "perfect con game" and was subsequently reincarcerated because of it while claiming to have remained stone cold sober the entire time.
The other man I met at the Narcotic Farm was an early perpetrator of an airliner hijacking. He had been a traveling salesman based in a fairly large southeastern city. He said that he had gotten on a commercial airliner in his home city while in an alcoholic blackout during an extended drunk. Shortly after the plane reached cruising altitude, he said he had told a stewardess "This is a hijacking and I want to go to Cuba." The pilots and other personnnel had pacified him to the best of their ability while communicating with federal law enforcement the entire time. They told him that the plane did not have enough fuel for the long trip to Cuba and they would need to stop somewhere to refuel. Being a somewhat sociable alcoholic, he agreed, and the plane landed at a major airport in another city. When they landed, the crew advised him that none of the other passengers wanted to go to Cuba that day. Once again being a really nice alcoholic, he agreed and allowed the passengers and most of the support staff to leave the plane. The entire story had, of course, been a ruse and as the other passengers completed their deboarding an FBI team boarded the plane and arrested him. This man always swore that he had been in an alcoholic blackout the entire time and remembered nothing of the incident until he regained consciousness in a federal prison holding cell in that second city. He said when he regained consciousness he knew he was in a jail which was unlike any he had ever been in before. He said he could see a television on the wall near the end of the cellblock in which he was being held. He said that the first thing he could remember seeing was himself on the evening local news being led off the plane by two FBI agents. He was convicted of the hijacking but was able with the help of a fine attorney and a good psychiatrist who examined and hypnotized him to convince the necessary authorities that he truly had been in a total blackout due to his alcoholism and had no organic memory of the event. He received a sentence which was shorter than most hijackers at the time and was eventually admitted to the Lexington facility for treatment. I have no idea what happened to this man upon his eventual release from prison.
The Narcotic Farm was often the temporary home and treatment facility for a variety of high profile inmates. It came to be known as a hotbed for jazz music due to the heavy involvement of narcotics in the jazz music scene. The book records that at times aspiring jazz musicians would actually volunteer to become patients at the facility in order to get to play with the actual stars who were incarcerated there at any given time. The book records that:
Chet Baker, Elvin Jones, Stan Levey, Jackie McLean, Red Rodney, Sonny Rollins, Howard McGee, Benny Green, and Tad Dameron.."
were at various time incarcerate there. The Beat Writer William S. Burroughs, Sr. who wrote the classic book "Junkie" did time there as did his son the writer William Lee Burroughs. In addition to "Junkie" by the elder Burroughs, several other well known books were written, at least in part, about time spent at the facility by their authors. Those books include "Kentucky Ham" by William Lee Burroughs, "The Fantastic Lodge: The Autobiography of a Girl Addict" edited by Helen MacGill Hughes, and "The Farm" by Clarence L. Cooper, Jr. Recently, the facility received the latest of its celebrity inmates when Joseph “Joe Exotic” Maldonado, the star of the Netflix documentary series “Tiger King,” was tranferred there. The facility in Lexington is and always was a unique location in the federal prison system. This book is equally unique and well worth reading by a variety of readers including musicians, clean and sober alcoholics and addicts, workers in the addictions and correctinos fields, writers both aspiring and famous, photographers who still love to see exceptional work by others in their chosen profession, and general readers in search of a change of pace in their reading matter.
