About 13 years after it was first published, a book co-authored by Nancy Campbell, the head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, exploring a complex chapter in the nation’s history of drug addiction and treatment will be republished on March 16, 2021.

Written with JP Olsen and Luke Walden, The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts features extensive archival photographs and offers a vital perspective on U.S. drug policy, addiction, and incarceration as the nation struggles with the third wave of a continuing opioid epidemic.

South Limestone, an imprint of University Press of Kentucky, will reissue the book with a new forward by journalist and author Sam Quinones.

The Narcotic Farm details the history of the United States Narcotic Farm, a federal institution that opened in 1935 outside of Lexington, Kentucky. Jointly operated from 1935 to 1975 by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Narcotic Farm was a combination prison, hospital, working farm, rehabilitation center, and research laboratory.

The facility, which was also the subject of a 2009 documentary featuring Campbell and produced by her coauthors, has a complicated legacy. It revolutionized treatment methods commonly accepted today, such as using methadone to medically manage heroin detox and the development of drugs like naloxone and buprenorphine. But it fell under a cloud of suspicion in 1975, when Congress learned that researchers had recruited patients as test subjects for CIA-funded LSD experiments as part of the notorious MK-Ultra project.

A leading figure in the social history of drugs, drug policy, and harm reduction, Campbell’s most recent book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, was published in 2020. She is also the author of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice and Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research, as well as the co-author of Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World.