Rehab on the Shooting Range: What Can Fort Worth’s Narcotic Farm Teach Us Today?

Anyone who knows the history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm knows the history of the American West in the mid-20th century. Migration patterns and local economies shaped people’s lifestyles and created a unique drug culture that impacted the federal facility’s ability to treat addicts.

Holly Karibo’s new book from the University of Texas Press, Rehab on the rangeis a deep dive into the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its impact on the American West. Built southwest of the city now home to the Federal Medical Center, the farm was the only federally funded drug treatment center west of the Mississippi when patients began arriving in 1938.

The facility was both revolutionary and fatally flawed. The emphasis on treating addiction as a disease rather than a crime and combining psychiatric treatment with physical rehabilitation and job training on an open, leafy campus was considered progressive at the time. However, the mixing of federal drug inmates and self-admitted patients seeking treatment created an unsustainable culture, while chronic underfunding hindered attempts at more advanced treatment programs.

Karibo is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University and has edited and written several books on the history of policing and incarceration. In Rehab on the rangeShe tells the story of how this advanced treatment center helped pave the way for mass incarceration by the federal government to combat the country’s drug problem, and how the farm tells the story of the American West.

Understanding the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm’s unique population and their differences from its sister farm in Lexington, Kentucky illuminates life west of the Mississippi. “The patient population looked very different, and the communities they built in the facilities in Kentucky and Texas were shaped by the communities and realities in that geographic region,” Karibo says.

The book takes the reader through the history of addiction treatment in the Western United States and the development of the drug farm model as a new method of treating addicts. Karibo’s research recreates case histories and identifies patient populations and care trends. From the initial tension between voluntary patients undergoing a treatment program and involuntary criminal patients who often resisted the programming, to the shift during World War II to providing psychiatric care to soldiers, the farm’s demographics and mission ensured a challenging work.

And yes, a real farm was used to develop professional skills, where patients raised cows, pigs and chickens. At one point, the facility produced enough milk to feed the farm’s population at every meal.

In the post-war years, the country took increasingly strict action against addicts, with high penalties and mandatory minimum sentences. For both voluntary and involuntary patients, drug farm operations during this period were no longer at odds with the federal prison system. For many, the farm’s isolation and prison created a tension between treatment and punishment and “consolidated rather than challenged their status as addicts – social pariahs unfit for life in the larger community,” Karibo writes in the book.

This tension affected the effectiveness of the facility. In 1949, a drug farms report found that 60 percent of patients did not meet standards, and in 1957, a report found that 50 percent of former drug farms patients were using drugs again.

“Although it is not a formal prison, the same type of toxic prison environment has been recreated in the institutional setting,” Karibo says. “Some patients requested greater separation from other patients who were not like them. In my opinion, this issue appeared to be a comprehensive challenge to the institution’s ability to fulfill its mission.”

The drug culture of the 1960s blurred the line between upstanding citizens and junkies and created a movement to deinstitutionalize drug treatment. The Kennedy administration and medical authorities began to redefine what it meant to be addicted to a medical disorder that required medical intervention rather than a crime that required punishment.

As drug treatment moved away from prison-like environments, the government began cutting funding to the drug farms, and staff were informed in 1968 that the farms were to be closed. When Texas politicians learned that the state’s largest federal facility was about to close, they launched a fight to save the farm.

Senator Ralph Yarborough led the charge and held federal hearings across the country, delaying the end of the farm. But in the end, the company’s low recidivism rate, the difficult conditions for the staff and new laws made the model fail. The Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act, passed in 1966, allowed those who violated federal drug laws to elect treatment rather than incarceration, with charges dropped if they showed improvement within three years.

Despite disputes over the facilities’ importance for research, innovations in drug treatment, and the moral question of closing a drug treatment center in the middle of a drug abuse crisis, the facility was transferred to the Department of Justice in 1971 to function as a general purpose medical facility for prisoners, which it remains today still exists.

Karibo hopes the book finds an audience among academic researchers of drug and alcohol history, prisons and incarceration, and the Southwest, but knows some readers will have a personal connection. She contacted the families of those who spent time at the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and wanted to learn more about what her family went through. “I hope the book gives a fuller sense of how it worked, what it looked like and what people might have experienced,” says Karibo.

In her conclusion, Karibo summarizes the drug farm’s journey succinctly. “Arising from the legacies of Progressive Era reform efforts, coming of age in the punitive postwar era, and failing under the push for deinstitutionalization, the arc of the drug farm model was shaped by changes in the country’s prison structures in the pre-1970s era.”

Today, the Lew Sterrett Justice Center prison in Dallas County is the region’s largest mental health provider for those involved in the criminal justice system and the second largest mental health facility in the state. The modern “fusion of public health and cancer control,” as Karibo describes it, began with the development of the drug farm model and continues today.

Another legacy of the drug farm is that North Texas continues to be the home of innovation in mental health. Models like Dallas County’s Rapid Integrated Group Healthcare Team (RIGHT Care) program, launched in 2018, which pairs mental health professionals with a police officer and a paramedic to respond to mental health emergency calls, have shown promising results.

As the country learns to deal with an opioid epidemic, entrepreneurs like Dr. Michael Giles continues to look for ways to improve results. Giles founded Sonara Health to use technology to overcome opioid addiction by removing barriers to treatment and has secured numerous partnerships with treatment centers. Initiatives like RIGHT Care and Sonara Health are evidence of how changing perceptions toward addiction and mental health can lead to better outcomes.

It’s a lesson Karibo hopes readers will learn from the book. “We need to understand drug-using communities in their own context if we have any hope of understanding what drove people to use drugs,” she says. “One of the important parts of the book is bringing the history of the West, and particularly the Southwest, back into our national conversation.”

Get the book here.