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

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|Title= U.S. Narcotics Farm
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|Title= Woodlands Institution
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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= Woodlands institution opened in New Westminster on May 17, 1878 as the Provincial Asylum for the Insane, later re-named the Provincial Hospital for the Insane. In 1950 it was renamed Woodlands School and in 1974 the name was changed again - to Woodlands. Although the asylum was originally presented as a modern approach to treating “lunatics” and the “feebleminded, it was soon criticized as gloomy and unfit for its purpose of caring for people today referred to as having psychiatric disabilities and intellectual disabilities.
  
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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 philosophies of care and treatment changed over the decades, from custodial care and confinement to hospital or medical care to education and development. In the 1920’s, authorities decided that the Woodlands site would serve only people with intellectual disabilities, and other residents were moved to Essondale. While there were many exemplary staff at Woodlands and notable efforts - as early as 1885 - to ensure appropriate treatment of residents, inquiries and investigations into conditions, treatment and mistreatment of residents occurred in virtually every decade of Woodlands’ existence.
  
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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.
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Abuse and overcrowding were problems throughout its history. The 1940s saw a significant increase in staff training and the focus of the institution shifted to education in the 1950s. By the late 1950's there were approximately 1400 people living at Woodlands. Due largely to the advocacy efforts of families, in 1981 the provincial government announced plans to close Woodlands.  [[Woodlands Institution|Click here for more...]]
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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 03:46, 18 January 2016

Featured Article Of The Week

Woodlands Institution


Newwestminster.png

Woodlands institution opened in New Westminster on May 17, 1878 as the Provincial Asylum for the Insane, later re-named the Provincial Hospital for the Insane. In 1950 it was renamed Woodlands School and in 1974 the name was changed again - to Woodlands. Although the asylum was originally presented as a modern approach to treating “lunatics” and the “feebleminded, it was soon criticized as gloomy and unfit for its purpose of caring for people today referred to as having psychiatric disabilities and intellectual disabilities.

The philosophies of care and treatment changed over the decades, from custodial care and confinement to hospital or medical care to education and development. In the 1920’s, authorities decided that the Woodlands site would serve only people with intellectual disabilities, and other residents were moved to Essondale. While there were many exemplary staff at Woodlands and notable efforts - as early as 1885 - to ensure appropriate treatment of residents, inquiries and investigations into conditions, treatment and mistreatment of residents occurred in virtually every decade of Woodlands’ existence.

Abuse and overcrowding were problems throughout its history. The 1940s saw a significant increase in staff training and the focus of the institution shifted to education in the 1950s. By the late 1950's there were approximately 1400 people living at Woodlands. Due largely to the advocacy efforts of families, in 1981 the provincial government announced plans to close Woodlands. Click here for more...

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