Phoenix House Oral History - Incite at Columbia University

The Phoenix House Foundation commissioned the Columbia Center for Oral History Research at Incite Institute to carry out a long-discussed oral history project.

The goal of the project was to conduct a series of interviews in order to document the history of the Phoenix House and its leadership in drug treatment innovation.

A total of 31 narrators were interviewed for this project over a total of 80 hours of recorded audio. Some of these narrators were involved in Phoenix House for a short period of time, while others remained connected over the span of decades. Each speaks to a series of themes that captures the richness and dynamics of the institution's history.

Together, they illustrate how Phoenix House changed drug rehabilitation by proving that the power of treatment lies in the peer group. The Phoenix House story gains from the diversity of narrators’ voices, whose perceptions, experiences, and opinions at times complement and at times compete with one another.

We delved deeply into the activities at Phoenix House in an effort to understand its development, important internal changes, leadership transitions, expansion of programs, and so on. In order to create an oral history that was both rich and representative, we identified three periods of inquiry in Phoenix House’s history: origins, growth, and leader. We selected periods that make the most effective use of the actual experience of potential interviewees, spanning the House's founding in 1967 through today.

Themes discussed by the narrators of the Phoenix House Foundation Oral History project include increasing medicalization of the treatment model and professionalization of staff, new health insurance funding structures, the self-help model of drug treatment, organizational culture and expansion, leadership, educational programs, incarceration and drug courts, the evolution of the board of directors, research and evaluating outcomes, sustainability of treatment, methadone and other drug therapies, fundraising, acquisitions, psychology, spirituality, addiction, government regulation, philanthropy, adolescents, advocacy, public relations, built environment, abstinence, marijuana legalization, journalism, consulting, social networks, stigma, therapy, crack epidemics, and more.