Narco was unlike a typical prison. As part of their rehabilitation, patients were encouraged to take advantage of one of the farm’s many music studios or even to perform on the stage of its 1,300-seat theater. Back then, jazz and heroin often went side by side, and Chet Baker, Elvin Jones, Stan Levey, Jackie McLean, Red Rodney, Sonny Rollins, and many other famous jazz musicians all did time at Narco. In New York, Narco was spoken of as if it were an elite jazz workshop, and some musicians even lied about having a heroin habit just so they could check in and study from the greats.
Narco’s model also included “therapeutic labor” on the institution’s sprawling farm, where men from the city learned how to milk cows and grow kale in an idyllic setting: rolling green fields, silos, dairy barns, tomato crops, and cows grazing in the clover.
While they attempted to rehabilitate the farm’s patients, Narco scientists also saw them as the perfect subjects for drug addiction research and a locked environment as the ideal setting. That led them to conduct the first-large scale trial of methadone, a newly approved opioid in 1948. Narco’s scientists doubted pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly’s marketing, which claimed that the drug could be a highly effective, non-addictive, long-acting painkiller. With the help of 115 men who had been addicted to morphine, the Narco trial proved that methadone did, in fact, cause dependence.
Yet, this didn’t stop Narco doctors from beginning to use methadone in their standard detox protocol instead of morphine, probably because it lasted longer than the alternatives and didn’t cause a high. That introduced Dr. Marie Nyswander, one of the clinicians at Narco, to the drug. When a patient arrived addicted to heroin, Nyswander would carefully switch him over to methadone, gradually decreasing the dose over the course of two weeks until he was no longer taking any opioids at all. The process was known as “Medicated detox” At the time, abstinence-based therapy was the name of the game — the goal was to get all Narco patients off all opioids.
For all Narco’s promise, however, its methods simply didn’t work; 90% of patients relapsed after leaving the controlled environment of the farm. Nyswander observed this with her own patients: Narco’s therapeutic model could get them off heroin, but it couldn't keep them from relapsing within “one to twenty-four hours” after they left the drug-free environment. Engaging in talk therapy, participating in Addicts Anonymous meetings, playing music, working on the farm, and eating fresh, home-grown food simply was not enough to cure people of addiction.