Difference between revisions of "Portal:Featured Article Of The Week"

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|Title= U.S. Narcotics Farm
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|Title= Larned State Hospital
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|Body= For nearly four decades, from the 1930s to the '70s, Lexington was a center for drug research and treatment. It drew addicts talented and desperate, obscure and celebrated, and provided free treatment and more: job training, sports, dental help, music lessons, even manicures. Research done there, much of it conducted with volunteer human subjects, yielded insights into drug addiction that still resonate today.
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|Body= Larned State Hospital was first opened on April 17th, 1914. The hospital was opened to ease overcrowding in two other established state hospitals in Kansas which were located in the eastern part of the state, Osawatomie State Hospital and Topeka State Hospital. The new ‘insane asylum’ at Larned was a preferred location because of the plentiful water supply. ‘Useful employment’ (farming) was the method of treatment to be used at LSH. In fact, early criteria critical to the selection of the first patients to populate the new hospital were being male, possessing the ability to work on the farm and being diagnosed as never becoming well enough to be discharged. No female patients were admitted until 1916. In an effort to ease the overcrowding, an annex was opened at the Army Air Force base in Great Bend which housed approximately 300 patients in 1947. The unit was designed to exclusively deal with elderly and custodial patients.The farming operation continued until the 1950’s. Adolescents and children were not admitted until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
  
Jazz greats Chet Baker and Elvin Jones took the Lexington Cure. So did William S. Burroughs and his son, both of whom wrote about it. The father described the grueling detox but opined that the food was excellent. The son wrote about the place's isolation, and the joys of landing an easy job on-site.
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The Adult Treatment Center building opened in 1990 to house the general psychiatric population on what is now called the Psychiatric Services Program, serving individuals admitted from the LSH catchment area as a voluntary or civilly committed patients.  [[Larned State Hospital|Click here for more...]]
 
 
A 1930s New Deal era project, Narco was a joint venture of the Public Health Service and the Bureau of Prisons. The notion that thorny problems are best solved by a centralized bureaucracy is a concept that has seen happier days, but Narco's founders were sure that government, fueled by money and manpower, could change a nation's social landscape — from Lexington and a facility in Fort Worth Texas, that opened in 1938.
 
 
 
Lexington's countryside setting was important because this was a project that idealized rural life, built on a belief that if you turned up hopelessly addicted and worked in the sun, learned wholesome values, got dental care and played golf, maybe you could leave drugs behind. The nation, in the throes of the Depression, was flush with ambition if not cash, and drug addiction was seen as more of a bad habit than a brain-based physiological craving. But the odds of success with treatment at Narco were, it turned out, abysmally bad — as low as 7 percent, according to a 1962 survey.  [[U.S. Narcotics Farm|Click here for more...]]
 
 
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Revision as of 04:19, 12 May 2024

Featured Article Of The Week

Larned State Hospital


Oldcampus.gif

Larned State Hospital was first opened on April 17th, 1914. The hospital was opened to ease overcrowding in two other established state hospitals in Kansas which were located in the eastern part of the state, Osawatomie State Hospital and Topeka State Hospital. The new ‘insane asylum’ at Larned was a preferred location because of the plentiful water supply. ‘Useful employment’ (farming) was the method of treatment to be used at LSH. In fact, early criteria critical to the selection of the first patients to populate the new hospital were being male, possessing the ability to work on the farm and being diagnosed as never becoming well enough to be discharged. No female patients were admitted until 1916. In an effort to ease the overcrowding, an annex was opened at the Army Air Force base in Great Bend which housed approximately 300 patients in 1947. The unit was designed to exclusively deal with elderly and custodial patients.The farming operation continued until the 1950’s. Adolescents and children were not admitted until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

The Adult Treatment Center building opened in 1990 to house the general psychiatric population on what is now called the Psychiatric Services Program, serving individuals admitted from the LSH catchment area as a voluntary or civilly committed patients. Click here for more...