He spent 10 years working at Lexington’s pioneering Narco Farm. Now he’s saving its history

A man who spent 10 years of his life educating the public about drug addiction while working at the Narcotic Farm in Lexington has made it his life’s mission to preserve the history that took place there.

Sidney S. Louis, now 92 and living in Fort Worth, Texas, is one of the last living employees of the Narcotic Farm – America’s first rehabilitation facility for drug addiction, which was located in Lexington.

Louis arrived in Lexington in August 1964, and worked as the nursing supervisor in the facility’s psychiatric unit at Kolb Hall. The facility was renamed the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, and then the National Institute of Mental Health Research Center where Louis was the associate chief of education and training.

Before his time in Lexington, he was commissioned to work at the sister facility in Fort Worth, Texas, where he spent four years. Later during his tenure in Lexington, Louis position was made an educator, where he was tasked with giving lectures and tours to the public about the facility, as well as what addiction is.

Louis is steadfast in his assertion that the two facilities have never gotten the full recognition they deserve regarding their historical significance for strides in addiction and drug studies. He has submitted hundreds of documents and multiple artifacts to the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, which continues to preserve his collection. It includes drug paraphernalia, patient artwork, photos, slides, videos, facility keys and annual reports.

His most recent submission to the historical society is the excerpt of a book he wrote titled, “For Shame Boone! For Shame, Iowa!”, which details his grievances with how little the Narcotic Farm’s work has been recognized in the 50 years since it closed.

‘Much of that history has been forever lost’

Louis got these artifacts when the closure was announced by the federal government in the 1970s.

When federal officials decided the Lexington Clinical Research Center (formerly known as the Narcotic Farm) was to close, the order was to “dump” everything, Louis said.

This was evidence of the turmoil going on in Washington within the National Institute of Mental Health, Louis told the Herald-Leader.

“Congress had unloaded seemingly truckloads of money at the Institute’s front door to handle the drug problem sweeping the country and growing larger daily,” he wrote. “Where there is money, there are politicians. There were (politicians) – who knew nothing about drug addiction – in there grasping for funds to go to their area, whether the prospective use would be useful or not.”

Louis claimed no one at the “top” really knew anything about the Lexington treatment center, and certainly not its proud history. He was horrified at the “dump everything” order, and attempted to save everything he could even though he had a small house with limited storage space.

“I held onto all of those artifacts for nearly 25 years – they were stored in a filing cabinet in my garage at Fort Worth,” Louis said. “... No one really knew anything about addiction: What it was. How to treat it. The first years of Lexington as a treatment center must have been an astonishing period. Unfortunately, much of that history has been forever lost.”

He has worked tediously over the years to preserve the history of the facilities, and advocate for their significance – to little avail, he claims.

Louis wrote the Fayette Historical Society in the 1980s with an offer to donate, he said. His letter went unanswered. The same happened with little historical agencies operating in Fort Worth, who never responded to Louis’ offers.

But the Kentucky Historical Society did accept Louis’ offer. He donated nearly 100 pounds of artifacts in 1998.

“I have been fiercely protective of the narcotic farms and their story, fearing they would be entirely forgotten for a time,” Louis wrote. “Then, perhaps a hundred years after they closed, someone would discover they once existed, become excited, and, because there was so very little ever written - so little that was accurate - hurriedly put out a bunch of garbage, most of which was completely wrong.”

Book relied on archive work, investigative journalism

In addition to his mission to preserve the two facilities’ history, he is adamant about the work inside those spaces being accurately represented.

Two modern instances of highlighting the Lexington facility came through a 2007 book and subsequent documentary which Louis hoped would have a more bureaucratic approach in covering the complexity of both facilities.

Nancy Campbell, one of the book’s authors and a historian of science, said her work is to assemble evidence from multiple sources in order to narrate the past.

“During that process, no one archive, no one interviewee, no one body of work, gets to determine the narrative. Historians must integrate multiple, often conflicting and even contending, sources,” Campbell said in an email to the Herald-Leader. “...The Narcotic Farm was an unusually compelling place, and people have multiple responses to it, to the work that was done there, and, most of all, to the great variety of people who lived and worked there.”

About a quarter of Louis’ donated artifacts were used or referenced in the documentary and book, according to JP Olsen, one of the book’s authors and currently the director of the Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University, where he teaches journalism.

Olsen told the Herald-Leader that he, Campbell and Luke Walden spent years together working on piecing together the Narcotic Farm’s extensive history. They used not only Louis’ submission to the Kentucky Historical Society, but spent days — sometimes weeks — going through the National Archives, the National Library of Medicine, newspaper morgues, the Library of Congress, and the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

Olsen even went knocking on doors in Brooklyn, New York, to try and find former Narco patients that lived there forty years ago. Sometimes they still did.

A large part of what they found out, Olsen said, was that much of the institutions’ history wasn’t preserved — just like Louis suggests.

Many people don’t know where to go or take their artifacts. Olsen referenced one example of a man he reached out to who was thought to have every intake card for patients at Narco, but had thrown them out just years before he was contacted.

Olsen said the man tried in vain to get the cards donated somewhere, but to no avail. Finally, he succumbed to throwing them out with much distaste in doing so.

The complete collection that Louis submitted can be accessed at the Kentucky Historical Society online and in-person.