Calvin Coolidge is remembered here in Northampton for many different things, but establishing the nation’s first federal drug treatment facility isn’t usually one of them. You can learn about it on May 27, when the Coolidge Museum (in the Forbes Library) will host a panel discussion on “A Century of Drug Rehab: What Is Coolidge’s Legacy?”

One of Coolidge’s last acts as president was signing into law the Narcotics Farms Act (HR 13645) establishing two federal drug addiction treatment facilities to combat the opioid crises of that era. Addiction was a disease, not a crime. Occupational therapy was part of the treatment. Run by the United States Public Health Service, the narcotic farms were intended to be models for the 48 states.

Cities competed to host the farms; Lexington, Kentucky and Fort Worth, Texas were the winners. But, you interrupt, Lexington was an epicenter of horse racing, tobacco growing, whiskey-making, and hemp production! Yes it was, but drinking, gambling, and smoking weren’t addictions as defined by the Act. Our understanding has evolved. And our institutions have, too. The Lexington farm’s Addiction Research Center (ARC) became the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Yet the opioid crisis continues. Why?

I bring no professional lens to these questions; my viewpoint is shaped by childhood memories. My father was a doctor at Narco, as the Lexington facility was called; he worked in his lab in the ARC to find a cure. I grew up free-range on its pastoral blue-grassed thousand acres. I remember patients from across the spectrum of the drug subcultures.

Li was thin and stooped, his hair was short and black. The only window in our basement was small, high and cobwebbed. An electric light bulb dangled dimly from a wire in the musty, humid air. Li filled our tub-like washing machine with a hose from the faucet at the sink, dumped in our family’s dirty clothes and a cup of powdered soap, and flicked the switch. Half an hour of noisy rattling later, he turned it off, drained the water, put our pants, shirts, skirts, and socks through a hand-turned wringer and pinned them to the clotheslines strung from wall to wall.

A day or two later, when the clothes had dried, Li set up the ironing board under the light bulb, plugged in the iron, and began ironing, always starting with my father’s white, long-sleeved, Public Health Service uniform shirts. After pressing the sleeves, he pressed the collar and the rest. On and on, all day long: laundry had been Li’s occupation in China and then in Chinatown; now it was his therapy.  

Bored and resentful, I sat in the basement hunched on a stool, watching Li iron; my mother had ordered him to teach me how. Li didn’t speak English, but he understood one word: candy. Each week, my mother inspected the stacks of perfectly ironed clothing I brought up from the basement and I graciously acknowledged her approval. She never discovered our deception.  

Some Narco patients were celebrities in the wider world — jazz musicians, movie stars, writers, athletes. “How about some boxing lessons from a pro?” my father asked me one morning. “Barney Ross is willing to teach you.” We met him in Narco’s gym. The world champion boxer looked just like his pictures in the newspapers and magazines: forward crouch, bulging biceps, wavy dark hair slicked back. He stopped punching the bag, straightened up, greeted me kindly, and slipped a pair of very large boxing gloves over my hands. He did his best to teach me to swing, but I missed every time. I never took another lesson.

In patient jargon, Li was a winder: he wound in and out of Narco for years. Barney Ross, in contrast, never relapsed. What made the difference? Is addiction a disease of the body, or of the psyche? Does culture play a role? My father pondered these questions in his lab and at our dinner table. On May 27, we’ll ponder them on the panel. The program will begin at 6:30 p.m., admission is free, and if you can’t make it to the museum you can watch it live on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/live/toSSEUbazGE.

The panelists will include an historian of addiction, a medical doctor specializing in addiction treatment, a professor of practice in public understanding of mental health research, a local director of substance use prevention, and me. We’ll share with each other and with the audience our very different perspectives on how well and why the Narcotic Farms Act did or didn’t work, and what has been learned in the 97 years since.  

Marjorie Senechal is the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College.