Georgie Hallbach L&S Social Sciences
Getting Clean: Early Drug Rehabilitation Centers in the Vietnam War
This research project will investigate the thirteen drug rehabilitation centers in Vietnam founded by Army directive 600-32 in December 1970. In 1970 heroin use increased sharply among servicemen after years of steady alcohol and marijuana consumption. Major media outlets like The New York Times published sensationalist accounts of drug-addicted troops. In response to public outcry, Nixon launched a “War on Drugs” in June 1971. Evaluating the effectiveness of Nixon’s program is often the focus of scholarship, while the Army rehab centers that predated this program are lost in the narrative. These centers were intimate and self-directed, often staffed with enlisted men, some of whom were former drug users: a stark contrast to Nixon’s program of urine testing and incarceration. The popularity of the program diverges from the commonplace misperception that addicted soldiers had to be forced into sobriety via Nixon’s crackdown. By examining archival material, oral histories, and veteran-produced media my project will be a corrective to the misperception and recover an overlooked, yet effective Army drug rehabilitation program.
Message To Sponsor
I would like to express my gratitude to my SURF donor for providing the funding for this research project. I am humbled by their confidence in me to produce original scholarship on drug use during the Vietnam War, a subject that is inexorably tied to the dominating, and rather negative view of American involvement in Vietnam. Without their support I would not have been able to spend my summer doing archival research to unearth a new facet of this historical narrative.