Narcotic Farm No. 2

Busy as beavers these days are Josephine Roche, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of the U. S. Public Health Service, and her surgeon general, Thomas Parran Jr. They have the sanitation of the Ohio and Mississippi flood areas to supervise (see p. 19), the campaign against venereal diseases to energize (see above) and, a favorite project of both, they are starting a new Federal farm-hospital for narcotic addicts at Fort Worth, Tex. Miss Roche and Dr. Parran considered this project so important that, prior to the Ohio flood disaster, they had arranged to go to Fort Worth this week to lay the cornerstone of the $4,000,000 establishment.

The Fort Worth establishment will be a copy of the successful Federal narcotic farm opened at Lexington, Ky. nearly two years ago, except for a difference in the patients. Lexington is primarily for Federal prisoners who are addicts. Fort Worth is to be primarily for voluntary patients. Volunteers will be obliged to present certificates from their private doctors that they want to take the cure. They must sign an agreement that they will remain in the hospital until discharged. If they can afford it, they must pay $1 a day for board, room, and doctoring. Two years' experience at Lexington persuaded authorities that the system of cure which Dr. Lawrence Kolb has put into effect there is the best ever. Soon as a patient is admitted he receives physical and mental examination. If he has some "intercurrent defect," such as tuberculosis, which induces him to take drugs, he is put into an infirmary for special treatment. Soon as the defect is under control, the patient is deprived of his habitual drug supply. Dr. Kolb seldom uses "reduction treatment," i. e., diminishing doses of the drug to which the patient has been addicted. When Dr. Kolb tapers off a patient, he does so rapidly. "Cold turkey" produces better results. By this method, the patient is suddenly and completely deprived of drugs. He becomes irritable and restless. He cannot sleep. He sneezes and sweats, suffers diarrhea. He may collapse. Most of these "abstinence phenomena" disappear in three days. As. they wane, the patient gets sedative drugs (other than opiates), soothing baths and electric lamp treatments. In two weeks for the most responsive addicts, two months for the most refractory, the patients are discharged from the infirmary, to work and play under unobtrusive supervision. They grow all the vegetables and fruits the farm needs. They tend horses, cows, pigs and poultry, operate a slaughter house and a cannery, make uniforms to wear at the farm, clothes to wear when they go home. Last week, with the help of 447 prisoners transferred from the flooded reformatory at Frankfort, Lexington's convict-patients were enlarging their athletic field for baseball and horseshoe pitching. They have a gymnasium, a bowling alley, a band. Dr. Kolb expects to develop a concert series soon. In the Lexington farm's library, magazines and newspapers are uncensored. Patients eat from chinaware, .instead of prison tinware, and have comparatively small, cozy dining rooms instead of big, dreary mess halls. They attend church if they wish. The Lexington narcotic farm had admitted 1,864 UP to last week, discharged 1,048 as physically cured of addiction.

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