and 80's and all they got for their trouble was more drugs, more crime, and more addicts.  So they went back to their old way of letting doctors prescribe whatever drug a particular addict was hooked on.  Does it work?”

 

John Marks, interviewed on camera as the psychiatrist in charge of the Chapel Street Clinic, was blunt. “If a drug taker is determined to continue their drug use, treating them is an expensive waste of time.”

But what about curing addiction?

“Cure people?  Nobody can.  Regardless of whether you stick them in prison, give them shock treatment, put them in a nice rehab center away in the country and pat them on the head, give them drugs, give them no drugs—no matter what you do, five percent per annum—one in twenty per year—get off spontaneously. They seem to mature out of addiction regardless of any intervention in the interim.  But you can keep them alive and healthy and legal during that ten years if you wish to.”

The explosive images that followed—young Liverpudlians getting prescriptions filled for their drug of choice—flew in the face of everything U.S. drug policy stood for, and it didn’t take long for the shockwave to rebound.  Friends in the Home Office warned Marks that the Embassy in Washington was getting heat over the broadcast.  They said a high level meeting had been called and the Americans asked the English to ‘harmonize’ their drug policy with the U.S.^[2]  But in spite of all the arm-flapping on the other side of the Atlantic, there was not much anyone could do about Marks. The British Government simply had no authority to stop a licensed clinical psychiatrist from prescribing heroin—or anything else—to whomever he chose, in whatever dose, for a day, a week, or a lifetime. Doctor Marks’ remarkable invulnerability in this regard was rooted in the bedrock of the British medical establishment. Back in the 1920s, while the American Medical Association was allowing its members to be hounded and jailed by Harry Anslinger, the Royal College of Physicians proved to be of sterner stuff.  When the