Lincoln Detox was a drug detoxification clinic in Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. It was founded in 1970 by members and affiliates of the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the Young Lords, and Students for a Democratic Society. The clinic offered holistic drug rehabilitation, employing acupuncture, political education classes informed, among other ideologies, by Marxism, and community service. It became known as "The People's Program."
History
Background and Conditions at Lincoln Hospital According to New York Times coverage published the following day, "the demonstrators demanded no cutback in services or jobs, the quick completion of the new Lincoln Hospital, door‐to door preventative care emphasizing tests for lead poisoning, anemia and tuberculosis and drug addiction, and a day care center for patients who have to bring their children to the hospital." This was not the first time that these demands had been presented.
Weeks before on June 27, 1970, a rally had been held at St. Mary's Park in response to budget cuts, and the fatal mistreatment of 31-year-old Lincoln patient Carmen Rodríguez, wherein what should have been a routine abortion procedure became an avoidable death. Doctors failed to read her medical chart and note a cardiovascular condition of Rodríguez's, and administered a saline solution that triggered an allergic reaction sending her into a four-day coma, and eventually killing her days later, on July 20.
In an interview at the rally, Young Lord member Felipe Luciano would explain: "What we want this rally for is to express our desire to have community-worker control of Lincoln Hospital, a hospital that for some time has been condemned...paint is chipping from the Emergency Room, our uncles, our grandmothers, our mothers, have died in that hospital, and nobody has pushed malpractice suits--not the politicians who we've elected, nor the officials that's supposed to speak for the Puerto Rican people."
July 1970 Occupation
At 5:15am on July 14, 1970, a group of 150 persons led by members of the Young Lords occupied the Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing at 141st Street and Bruckner Boulevard for twelve hours and presented a list of demands that the hospital's administrator at the time, Dr. Antero Lecot, called "valid."
At an earlier news conference, Young Lords member Pablo Yoruba Guzman had declared, "We are here with nothing but love for our people...we will leave this hospital only when it starts serving the people."
Young Lords member and health lieutenant Gloria Cruz said that "The hospital had been taken to release its potential for the benefits of both patients and hospital staff. Lincoln Hospital is only butcher shop that kills patients and frustrates workers from serving these patients. This is because Lincoln exists under a capitalist system that only looks for profit. But even this system made an effort at scrapping this butcher shop by condemning this building 25 years ago."
List of Demands
The full and exact list of demands read as follows: NO CUTBACKS IN JOBS OR SERVICES IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM OR SECTION K. IMMEDIATE FUNDS TO COMPLETE THE BUILDING OF AND FULLY STAFF THE NEW LINCOLN HOSPITAL DOOR TO DOOR PREVENTIVE CARE PROGRAM EMPHASIZING NUTRITION DRUG ADDICTION, CHILD AND SENIOR CITIZEN CARE. WE WANT A PERMANENT 24 HOUR COMPLAINT TABLE. WE WANT $140 A WEEK MINIMUM WAGE FOR ALL WORKERS. WE WANT A DAYCARE CENTER FOR THE CHILDREN OF PATIENTS, WORKERS, AND VISITORS AT LINCOLN HOSPITAL. WE WANT TOTAL DETERMINATION OF ALL HEALTH SERVICES THROUGH A COMMUNITY-WORKER BOARD TO OPERATE LINCOLN HOSPITAL. THIS BOARD MUST HAVE SHOWN ITS COMMITMENT TO SERVE THE PEOPLE."
Patient Rights and Policy Influence
As recounted in several documented occasions by community and labor organizer, and one of the founding members of Lincoln Detox, Cleo Silvers, these demands emerged from thousands of complaints gathered at a complaint table set up in the Emergency Room of Lincoln Hospital by herself and several peers, and would inform what would eventually become known as the Patient's Bill of Rights, which she describes in a 2016 interview as "the result of a collaboration between members of the Young Lords and the Black Panther Party, with the assistance of the doctors, and written by me. Although it is considerably watered down now, you still find that Patient's Bill of Rights on the wall of every hospital. It's not as radical as the original . . . but still includes some of the issues we highlighted, such as the ability to have access to your medical records."
In the documentary film Dope is Death (2020, dir. Mia Donovan) Silvers insists: "Don't let anybody tell you that there was one minute of disruption of the delivery of health care at Lincoln Hospital when the Young Lords took it over. Never. We had our first conference where we said the hospital had been taken over and we were willing to negotiate, but these were the demands." These demands were not met right away, however, and this would not be the last occupation of the Lincoln Hospital.
Negotiations and Aftermath of July Occupation
Dr. Lacot, along with assistant to Mayor John Lindsay, Sid Davidoff, and other representatives of the city's new Health and Hospital Corporation, which had just taken control of the city's hospitals on July 1, met for over four hours with members of the Young Lords, a patient-worker committee of the hospital known as the Think Lincoln Committee, and members of Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, a citywide committee of hospital workers.
Davidoff claimed to prefer that the police not become involved in a more direct capacity, but emphasized that this was contingent on the building of a new hospital not being announced, though he promised the negotiators that this key demand of theirs would ultimately be met, a promise that was taken with a large grain of salt.
Around 4:30pm, Dr. Lacot and the other negotiators emerged from a third‐floor library room and announced that an agreement had been reached. According to a New York Times article, "while it was being typed, the Young Lords learned that a police officer, in civilian clothes, had attempted to enter the building. They charged that he had tried to seize one of their members who was checking credentials at the entrance and called the negotiations off. The agreement included an end to the hospital takeover, but the Young Lords were given permission to run certain community programs within the hospital, with the aid of hospital staff and administration."
As the NYPD began to mobilize to raid the hospital, someone made the suggestion that the Lords and other demonstrators leave under the guise of medical attire through the only exit that had not been covered by the police. In the words of Juan Gonzalez, with the police poised to take action, the demonstrators had to make a choice between staying and "[forcing] the mayor's hand and [having] the police [enter], or...figure out a way to declare a victory and leave."
Silvers recalled, "The adrenaline is pumping because we all know we're gonna go do something really big. We could all be killed. We could all be shot up. Beaten up."
November 1970 Takeover and Creation of the Program
Four months later on November 10, 1970, as the hospital hesitated over the funding of the drug detoxification program that had been proposed, activists took over Lincoln Hospital yet another time. Funds had been anticipated from the city's Addiction Services Program (ASA), but Lincoln's track record overshadowed its promises.
Having established overnight control of the sixth floor, the activists sought to "implement a drug program that would serve the community effectively and be run by the community."
At noon on November 11, "35 addicts along with workers from the hospital and community people" established what they called "The People's Program". Later that day, cops in riot gear broke through the barricade, arresting 15 people.
Eventually, organizers arrived at an agreement with the hospital, and were granted use of Lincoln's anticipated ASA funds; the use of the old Nurse's Auditorium in the Administration Building for the Detox Program; and a little office space in the Psychiatry Department.
Program Structure and Activities In the program, participants learned about their addiction within a political context, exploring how their addiction harmed themselves, their family, and their community.
The program also explored the role of governmental institutions such as the CIA and the NYPD in drug trafficking and profiteering as well as how drug addiction has worked against progressive and revolutionary change.
Activities at the program included ones by the People's Program court collective, which recruited and assisted lawyers to help some of the thousands of poor people who were being railroaded through courthouses into prisons.
They helped organized rent strikes, building takeovers, women's health work, and organizations of construction workers. This, and much more information was written in a pamphlet published by White Lightning, "a revolutionary organization founded by ex-addicts."
They wrote: "The people at Lincoln Detox see that all these struggles and many more are necessary before the roots of drug addiction can be ripped out of our land."
Staffing and Organization
The clinic was staffed largely by former patients who had detoxified through the program. In the first five years of its existence, it detoxified 35,000 users of heroin and methadone.
Mutulu Shakur shares: "Every department was a collective, so the administration was a collective, the counselors were the counselor collective, the nurses aid, the medical department, so there was no leadership, there was no one person in charge, it was a collective, a collective effort...there was no one single leader. We tried to imitate the socialist methods around the world, you know, from Russia, to China, to Cuba, and so that's what we were trying to do–that's why I call it socialized medicine, because it had never been done in America before."
Methadone: Background and Critique Methadone, a synthetic narcotic first synthesized by German scientists during World War II because of a shortage of morphine, was introduced into the U.S. in 1947 as an analgesic under the generic name Dolophine.
Its use as a narcotics maintenance treatment modality for heroin dependence emerged in the 1960s, as a result of the work of physician-scientist of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and chair of the committee on major medical problems for the Health Research Council of the City of New York, Vincent P. Dole, who, in 1964, began clinical tests with methadone.
By the early 1970s, methadone maintenance programs were being established in clinics across the country.
At the time of the White Lightning pamphlet's publishing (in or c. 1974), "over 100,000 people [were] on methadone maintenance programs...almost totally financed by federal grants and medicaid payments", and methadone had become "virtually the only drug treatment offered by the Veteran's Administration for the thousands of vets who come home with serious drug problems."
Per The Rockefeller University's website, "[methadone] is not a curative and must be administered to patients indefinitely."
Criticism
White Lightning members wrote further on the subject: Many people who are not addicted at the time, are forced onto methadone maintenance by judges, parole boards, and the welfare department. For drug victims, it's much easier to get on welfare, if they are on methadone maintenance programs. Many are tricked into believing methadone is a cure, and then realize that they have been cruelly betrayed. Maintenance programs won't let you detoxify, even if you are pregnant, unless they feel you are 'psychologically ready'.