History of alcohol and drug rehab center
Alcoholism and dug addiction is a major problem around the world. The problem is exacerbated by the challenge of finding the rehab program or methodology best suited for individual addicts. In civilized societies, there have been rehab centers or half-way houses or rehab institutions for addicted people for almost as long as there has been the problem of alcoholism and drug addiction (Tracy, 2004). The earliest reference to alcoholism as a form of disorder came about around 1785 when the popularization of the concept of dealing with alcoholism as a physical or mental disorder through specific treatment techniques as opposed to a moral issue.
However, Colonial America was still hesitant to embrace this progressive idea at the time. Rather, the preferred treatment remedies to alcoholism were church-guided prayer, exorcism, sentencing the addict to an asylum, as well as imprisonment of the addict. Generally, various approaches of “treating” alcoholism and drug addiction in most old institutions and sanitariums were characteristically brutal, ranging from submersion in ice baths, near drowning, confinement to cages, and branding (Tracy, 2004).
An alcohol and drug rehab concept similar to the modern-day Alcohol Anonymous (AA) first surfaced in 1840 with the establishment of the Washington Movement (also referred to as Washingtonians, the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society, or the Washingtonian Temperance Society) in Chase’s Tavern on Liberty Street, Baltimore. Alcoholics and drug addicts would rely on one another, share their alcoholic struggles and seek divine intervention. The focus of The Temperance Movement, founded around the same time as the Washingtonians, was on the individual alcoholic instead of alcohol as a societal problem (Tracy, 2004). It promoted the concept of sobriety and abstinence.
During the mid-1800s, a number of reformatory homes and asylums were established for alcoholics where punitive treatments were used to “cure” alcoholism because the problem was associated with social decay. The notion of addiction as a disease was propagated by a group of physicians known as the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates in the 1870s (Tracy, 2004). The medical society argued that intemperance (drunkenness or excessive use of alcohol) was a disease. Meanwhile, the Temperance Movement clamored for the abolishment of alcohol, culminating in the enactment of the Prohibition Act of 1920 that outlawed the sale, possession, or use of alcohol in the United States. However, the Act was repealed 13 years later.
At the turn of the 18th century, opiate addiction emerged as major problem in the US mainly due to lack of legislation regulating any type of medicine. The fall out of this state of affairs was the taking root of the “snake oil salesmen” where “patent medicine” was sold to unsuspecting people (Tracy, 2004). The medicines would be administered to infants, children, the sick, or as a preventative measure with the belief that it could cure all ills. However, it only resulted in addiction to the medicines and some instances death of the user. In 1906, the FDA was established to tackle the opiate addiction among others.
The Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was formed in 1935 by Dr. Robert Smith and Bill Wilson as an abstinence-based program for the alcoholics. At the same time, drug abuse treatment centers adopted such opiates as codeine, methadone, and morphine in the addiction treatments to compliment group therapy and psychotherapy (Tracy, 2004). Efforts to encourage good work habits together with responsibility in patients were also undertaken.
In the 1980s, President Gerald Ford’s wife, an addict herself, founded the Betty Ford Clinic to offer help to those suffering from addiction.
More and more private and residential addiction treatment centers would emerge throughout the US thereafter.
References:
Tracy, S. W. (2004). Altering American consciousness: The history of alcohol and drug use in the United States, 1800-2000. Amherst, Mass. [u.a.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
