Porter Narcotic Farm Act

Context

The Harrison Narcotic Act was implemented in March 1915 and made possession of medically non-prescribed opiates (among other drugs) a federal offense. After 1919, the prevailing legal view held that the Harrison Act banned doctors from furnishing maintenance doses of opiates to addicts. Over 40 local maintenance clinics around the United States were closed by 1923, legal surveillance of physicians intensified, and as a result, during the 1920s several thousand addicts accumulated in federal prisons. For the first time, federal wardens faced the longstanding problems of local jailers and state prison and hospital officials: addicts smuggled drugs into their institutions and these became the basis of an inmate economy; after regaining their basic health, addicts “eloped” whenever they could; most relapsed quickly upon release and turned up in the inmate population again. Whatever its therapeutic purpose, the Porter Act aimed mainly to relieve the federal prisons of considerable nuisance.

Unlike the failed France bill of 1920, which would have provided federal matching funds to support local and state drug treatment, the Porter Act did not aim to create significant federal responsibility for such care. This remained a state and local responsibility. Indeed, during the federal hospitals' lifespan, most drug offenders were arrested under state drug or vagrancy laws, not the Harrison Act, and went to local and state lockups or sometimes to state mental hospitals with wards dedicated to the treatment of addicts.

The U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, provided treatment for addicts from 1935 until the 1970s.

The use of the term farm in the title of the Porter Act reflected a hoary rehabilitative ideal and an enduring practical reality of institutional management. Therapeutically, a rural location isolated from urban vice and old associates was held to be salubrious. Further, engagement with strenuous work and collective purpose intended to help an addict recover physically, become attentive to the cooperative requirements of life, and learn occupational skills that might transfer into the world beyond the institution. (While the hospitals operated farms, they also had manufacturing workshops.) As a practical matter, the labor of the patient/inmates produced goods like clothes and furniture that could be used throughout federal institutions (especially the prisons), thus reducing their operating costs.

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