I grew up on a narcotics farm

Marjorie’s father was Abraham Wikler, a US Public Health Service psychiatrist. She and her family lived in a house on the grounds of “Narco”, as the locals called it, from the time she was one year old. Marjorie was allowed free run on the farm, which was formerly an old slave owner’s estate. Here she tells her story...

We lived in one of the cottages for the slaves, in beautiful grounds. We got to know the patients who worked in the house, and we never called them prisoners, we called them patients.

One favourite was Joe Moore. We got to know him really well because he kept on relapsing and so came back again and again after he’d been released. We kids could do what we wanted and go where we wanted: the grounds, the horse barn, the farms, kittens in the hayloft, everything was open to us and we had a wonderful time.

We could never go into the residential areas where the prisoners lived, but we could go into the main hall, and if you went to the right and downstairs, you came to the canteen for staff, where you could get sandwiches and candy bars and milkshakes.

If you crossed the courtyard and went into the other wing, you got to the auditorium. We could go there whenever there was a concert, or a movie.

Narco concerts were something else again. The patients included a long roll call of famous jazz musicians, including Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, and Lee Morgan, and part of their treatment was to play music.

I knew it was supposed to be the best jazz in the word. They weren’t just improvising non-stop, they were thinking carefully about the music, practising and working together, like a music camp. The doctors were as excited about the music as anybody else.

My father would sometimes say in the mornings “Guess who came in last night”, you know, some movie star, some jazz person, and they were thrilled out of their minds.

One time, he said that Barney Ross, the boxer, was there, and did I want to take boxing lessons, and I thought “yeah that would be great!”, so I did…. one lesson! I was terrible at it, but at least I got to see him.

Alongside the jazz sat Marjorie’s father’s work.

He was the Associate Director of the research centre, in a wing separate from the prison, but attached to it somewhere, and that was where they did the animal experiments. The doctors wore military uniforms because the Public Health Service was under the marine.

My father only had three stripes on his sleeve, and so I would say “why don’t you have four stripes, daddy,” and he said, “because if I have four stripes, then I have to be an administrator! I don’t want to have to run anything, I like to do the research.”

He took me into his lab and there were cats walking round and round in a circle in a big pen, and they didn’t pay attention and they didn’t stop. I said, “What’s going on here, what’s happened to them," and he said he had decorticated them.

He was trying to see if he could addict them, because Pavlov had said that without a cortex there could be no addiction. He worked directly with animals, also with some of the prisoners, but that part we never talked about at home.