with cocaine.  Time and Newsweek were carrying titillating tales about the “smart set” offering coke spoons along with the caviar at fashionable gatherings in Manhattan and Hollywood.^[17] But this latest romance with the magic powder would be a replay of the cocaine rush the country experienced earlier in the century, beginning with a rhapsody of praise, followed by assurances that it’s non-addictive, ending with the grim realization that a lot of people couldn’t quit if their lives depended on it. But in the opening phase of any drug cycle, people always manage to convince themselves there is such a thing as a free lunch, and in 1977 cocaine was the miracle energizer that made you witty and charming.  In the end, it would devour everything in its path including Dr. Peter Bourne.

As well-meaning government officials have discovered time and again this century, just talking about re-examining drug policy makes you politically vulnerable.  The slightest misstep and you’re down like a gut-shot buffalo.  In the case of Peter Bourne, the wounds were largely self-inflicted.  On a hot summer day in 1978 a young woman on his staff told him she needed a sedative.  She was breaking up with her boyfriend and hadn’t slept in days.  Dr. Bourne wrote a prescription for fifteen tablets of methaqualone, all perfectly legal, but since she was a member of the White House staff, he made it out to a fictitious name to protect her identity. She made the terminal mistake of asking a girlfriend to get it filled for her, and the girlfriend happened into a drug store that was being audited by a state pharmacy inspector.  He became suspicious, asked for I.D., nothing matched, he called the cops, and the cops called on the doctor who wrote the prescription.  Bourne, of course, had a perfectly logical explanation for all this, but as far as the press was concerned the explanation was coming from an outspoken drug-legalizer who was caught passing a bogus scrip for Quaaludes—a known sex enhancer—to a lovely young female assistant. Within days every mistake Peter Bourne ever made hit the front page and one of his mistakes was attending a Christmas party