Points is honored to welcome Dr. Holly Karibo, Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, about her book Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West. Rehab on the Range represents the first study of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its role in the development of American drug treatment, incarceration, and the War on Drugs.
Please tell readers a little bit about yourself
I’m a historian of vice and moral regulation in the North American borderlands. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where I was influenced by a particularly strong emphasis on transnational history. I am currently an associate professor of comparative borderlands history at Oklahoma State University.
What got you interested in the history of alcohol, drugs, and pharmacy?
In some ways, I came to the field of drug and alcohol history by way of borderland studies. As someone who grew up in Michigan and studied in Ontario, I became particularly fascinated by the relationship between border cities, and how borderland residents were both impacted by and shaped the meaning of national boundary lines. Alcohol, drugs, and other illicit economies have long flourished in these spaces ‘in-between’ nations, and in many ways have been pivotal industries linking communities across national lines. While this story has more commonly told in relation to the US-Mexico border, I because interested in uncovering how illicit networks impacted communities along the US-Canada borderline. I was first introduced to alcohol and drug history as a formal discipline during my final semester of undergrad studies at the University of Guelph. I happened to enroll in a senior seminar with Dr. Catherine Carstairs, who introduced us to a wide range of directions in the field. The discipline—which intersects with borderland studies in critical ways—has held my interest ever sense!
What motivated you to write this book specifically?
I’m particularly interested in the intersections of geography, space, and culture, and am often inspired to dig into the histories that surround me. When I began my first full-time teaching position in north Texas, near Forth Worth, I was reminded of the literature on the Lexington Narcotic Farm. Fort Worth was often mentioned only in passing, and I could find very little about the second of these two pivotal institutions. It seemed to me there had to be more to uncover. Pragmatically, living so close to the National Archives at Fort Worth, I thought I would take this on as a short-term project, maybe write a journal article or something along those lines. But as I began digging into the records, it seemed clear that there was much more to the story of the Texas institution. It was not simply a smaller ‘sister institution’ of Lexington, as it’s so often been framed. Instead, I began to see it as a vivid window into much larger developments affecting the US West during the mid-twentieth century, and how imprisonment and addiction treatment impacted communities living on the nation’s margins.
Explain your book in a way your bartender won't find boring.
Rehab on the Range traces the history of two trends that have impacted virtually all Americans over the last century: the massive expansion of nation’s prisons and the troubled system of addiction treatment. This book uses the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm—one of only two federally-funded drug treatment facilities in operation in the US during the mid-20th century—to bring these two threads together. Part prison, part hospital, it’s an institution that never fully fulfilled either mandate. I tell the story of the Farm from the perspective of the people who brought it to life: from the administrators who shaped the institution’s program; from the guards and attendants whose job it was to maintain order; and from the patients who ended up at Fort Worth through many complicated and often tragic pathways. Doing so reveals how hopeful visions for more humane treatment of addicts were ultimately stunted by forms of coercion and control. By tracing the history of addiction care at this quasi-penal facility, I uncover that many ways in which people shape and impact what otherwise seem like impersonal policy decisions. Documenting the rise and fall of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm also reveals the full-circle trajectory of the nation’s approach to addiction and punishment, and ultimately, their impact on some of its most vulnerable citizens.
Did you uncover anything particularly interesting or surprising during your work on this project?
Near the end of the book (spoiler!), I examine the debates that ensued over the proposed closing of the narcotic farms in the late-1960s. Many politicians, community groups, veterans’ groups, and former patients in Texas came out to forcefully denounce the closure of the Fort Worth facility. In many ways it’s a tragic story about community members knowing that—despite the failures of the narcotic farm model—simply closing them would leave a massive gap in treatment options available in the region. These debates also highlight the large divide between policy decisions made in Washington D.C. and the lived realities of people most affected by the institution. As we enter a new political moment that promises to bring an unraveling of major federal institutions and the potential closure of important agencies, the debates of the closing of Fort Worth and Lexington take on new and important light. Changing political priorities have long had a profound impact on access to addiction treatment, and proponents of the narcotics farms knew that all too well.
What do you think is the most important takeaway from your book?
Geography matters. Geography in a broad sense, that is. This may seem like an obvious statement on the surface, but as I researched the history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm, I became even more convinced of the need to place geo-social settings at the center of our understanding of both crime control and drug-using communities. While the narcotic farms were federal institutions, they were deeply shaped by the social, cultural, and political environments of the regions that surrounded them. Patients were likewise influenced by drug-using networks and communities they encountered on a daily basis. And those communities didn’t always map neatly on to national stereotypes of drug users or using patterns in other regions of the country. The rhythms of life—the labor people did; the migration patterns they followed; the social networks they built—were rooted in local and regional contexts. To understand users and addiction patterns, it’s essential to place them within these localized contexts.
Has this research led to your next endeavor—what else are you working on?
My current recent project is a return home of sorts, as it refocuses my attention back to the US-Canada border. I’m researching the history of women who worked in the illegal liquor industries in the Great Lakes region during the American prohibition years. The stories of male bootleggers, violent gangs, and failed state policies have been told in not only academic scholarship but also within popular culture. Yet, I argue, our popular perceptions of cross-border smuggling networks have obscured the impact of some of its most important participants. Women from diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds helped build smuggling networks and challenge state authority. In this new project I hope to uncover how women’s participation in these illegal markets fundamentally transformed both the smuggling game and the way that the state policed it during the 1920s and 1930s.
Based on your research and experience, what do you see as the future of the field (of alcohol, drugs, and pharmacy history)?
I think one of the most exciting developments is the extent to which drug, alcohol, and pharmacy history are becoming integrated into other fields within the discipline. It seems to me that, increasingly, scholars with a broad range of interests—public health; policing and prisons; foreign policy; race, ethnicity, and immigration; gender and sexuality; and so on—are integrating studies of drugs and alcohol into their broader work and research questions. Thus, I see an important part of the future of the field is its ability to be integrated with and inform larger social, cultural, political, and economic histories. It also provides an important gateway—pardon the pun—for students to gain interest in broader historical trends. Integrating drug and alcohol history into a wide variety of scholarly studies and the classroom in one important way to elevate the field’s impact in the future.