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Rehab on the Range

A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

About this book

2026 Texas Christian University (TCU) Texas Book Award Winner
2025 Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association
2025 Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE

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.

Author / Editor 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.

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

Exhaustively researched...Rehab on the Range intelligently describes one of the nation’s first and largest experiments in federally funded drug treatment, examining it within a century-long context of public and legal attitudes toward addiction. Karibo looks critically at all stages of the experiment: conception, execution, patient experience, external challenges...Fundamentally, this book reveals how the United States—and Texas—has long struggled to understand its own attitudes about drug addiction...These questions were already being asked 100 years ago, and we’re still waiting for answers.
— Texas Observer

Karibo has written a model monograph.
— CHOICE

By detailing the brief window of time when the federal government tried to balance solving drug use with punishment for it, the book... introduces a new way to situate Texas as a focal point for narcotics policy.
— Journal of Texas History

Readers of this book will be rewarded with its wide-ranging discussion of the evolution of early drug policies in the Southwest, especially in Texas.
— Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Rehab on the Range provides key historical context for studying the nation’s problem of mass incarceration and offers a framework for understanding how countless historical forces merge to create the conditions that allow, and even support, carceral expansion...Karibo not only examines the carceral influence of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm in the Southwest borderlands and U.S. West in the mid-twentieth century, but she paves a clear path for conceptualizing how government policies function to shift lasting ideologies about a variety of matters beyond yet still tied to imprisonment, such as immigrant labor, the roles of law enforcement and medical professionals, and public and professional perceptions of drug and alcohol addiction.

— California History

Grounded in thorough archival work and the rich historiographies of incarceration, drug addiction, and treatment, Rehab on the Range offers institutional history at its best…Karibo writes with an attention to detail and compassion for both patients and staff that do justice to the institution, its subjects, and their larger communities…[and she] makes a compelling case for the place of Fort Worth’s Narcotic Farm in the larger carceral geography historians have explored for a generation.

— Pacific Historical Review

Karibo’s work provides important insights,..[She] overcomes significant archival challenges—including the apparent loss or destruction of nearly all patient intake narrative files, save for a small batch from 1943—to construct a rich and nuanced account of daily life at the facility.

— American Historical Review

[This book is] an outstanding example of how one can write prisoners into carceral histories, and do so in ways that move beyond simple binaries of accommodation and resistance. Skillfully managing the modest extant primary sources, Karibo emphasizes the complexity and variety of prisoner experience...Rehab on the Range tells a wonderfully complicated story...and Karibo’s careful and detailed study should be required reading for students of the modern carceral state.

— Histoire Social / Social History

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    CONTENTS

    v
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    ILLUSTRATIONS

    vii
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    INTRODUCTION

    1
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    1 “A BEAUTIFUL PLACE OF FRESH AIR AND SUNLIGHT”? Early Federal Drug Laws and Addiction Treatment in the West

    19
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    2 “A PRISON IS NOT THE PROPER PLACE FOR THESE PEOPLE” Federal Incarceration and the Narcotic Farm Model

    49
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    3 FROM BALD PRAIRIES TO BARBED FENCES Bringing the Narcotic Farm to Fruition

    77
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    4 THE LONG ROAD TO TEXAS Re-creating Case Histories among Early Patients

    103
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    5 A TROUBLED HOME ON THE RANGE The Narcotic Farm Model and the Postwar Environment

    131
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    6 RELAPSE The 1960s, Drug Policy, and the Death Knell of the Narcotic Farm Model

    169
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    CONCLUSION

    207
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    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    217
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    NOTES

    221
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    INDEX

    253
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 29, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781477330357
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.7560/330340
eBook ISBN: 9781477330357
Keywords for this book
Addiction; Drugs; Narcotics; Treatment; Borderlands; US-Mexico border; Incarceration; Texas; Fort Worth; US West; Crime; Medical Humanities; Smuggling; Prison; Penitentiary; Penology
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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