Rehab on the Range

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.

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)

• List of Illustrations Introduction 1. “A Beautiful Place of Fresh Air and Sunlight”? Early Federal Drug Laws and Addiction Treatment in the West 2. “A Prison Is Not the Proper Place for These People”: Federal Incarceration and the Narcotic Farm Model 3. From Bald Prairies to Barbed Fences: Bringing the Narcotic Farm to Fruition 4. The Long Road to Texas: Re-creating Case Histories among Early Patients 5. A Troubled Home on the Range: The Narcotic Farm in the Postwar Environment 6. Relapse: The 1960s, Drug Policy, and the Death Knell of the Narcotic Farm Model Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index