Acupuncture's Revolutionary History in America
“...our ability to get involved with acupuncture and to learn it, and to learn it from a very fundamental basis was an important contribution to that struggle...”
The Black Panther Party’s health activism grew out of its inception in 1966. The roots of medical racism were, and continue to be, far-reaching. Community service was the mission, with its “serve the people” programs. The growth of the Black Panther Party’s health activism from then until the 70s was due to the rapid organizational growth that began in the years immediately after the legal dismantling of Jim Crow, via the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By the 1970s, People’s Free Medical Clinics were established and were a chapter-wide requirement within the provision of the BPP’s revolutionary healthcare model.
An excerpt from A Radical History of Acupuncture in America reads:
The Black Panther Party and the Young Lords were revolutionary, anti-imperialist organizations who approached their struggles from many fronts. Both groups emphasized the need for material support of the people and implemented actions to improve public health, healthcare, nutrition, and quality of life for their respective communities- the scope of these programs was outstanding. They realized that [heroin] addiction was a threat to their communities, as well as their movement.
By 1970, Lincoln Hospital, known as the ‘butcher shop of the South Bronx”, was the only medical facility in the area. The Young Lords and The Panthers took over the facility briefly, to demand better health care for the community and confronted the administration about the lack of services for people addicted [to heroin]. This failed to produce any real change.
On November 10, 1970, members of each party, as well as other allies and supporters took over Lincoln Hospital and established a drug treatment program called The People’s Drug Program, which became known as the Lincoln Detox Center. Lincoln Detox was extremely successful and focused on exposing and treating the root cause of addiction. It consisted of three important components: acupuncture treatments, political education, and community service.
The Lincoln Detox Center was eventually forced to shut down in 1979. One of the most notable acupuncturists and the center’s Assistant Director, Mutulu Shakur, went on to co-found the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA) and opened an acupuncture clinic in Harlem, where he continued his work treating drug addiction.
Michael Smith is another name that you will hear quite often. As the director of Lincoln Detox Center, he went on to found the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) in 1985. Ear acupuncture, or auricular acupuncture, works for addiction withdrawal symptoms. Smith developed the five-point protocol after he and the Lincoln Detox Center staff read an article by Dr. H.L. Wen of Kwong Wah Hospital in Hong Kong. It began by using electrical stimulation of the lung point in the ear. Later, the method developed into five acupoints (in lieu of the lung point), which seemed to be more effective, flexible, and cost-efficient. Thes five points in the ear are what we as acupuncturists now know and utilize for the treatment of addiction, withdrawal, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Thus the NADA protocol was born.
