lawmen attempted to get between the British doctor and his patient, they were brushed aside like gnats. A committee of eminent physicians led by Baron Humphrey Rolleston concluded in 1926 that drug addiction was a medical problem and the cops should stay out of it. So the “British System,” which the Americans came to abhor, was really no system at all. They simply left it up to the individual doctor to deal with each addict as he saw fit.^[3]

This single distinction set the two countries down separate paths with starkly different results. While the American addict was being run to earth in a nationwide game of fox and hounds, the Englishman with a habit could go to his family physician, get a prescription for heroin—or morphine, or cocaine, or whatever—and pick it up at the corner pharmacy. In this low-key environment, drugs failed to acquire the kind of underground cachet they enjoyed in the States, and coincidentally the addict population in England remained pretty much as it was—little old ladies, self-medicating doctors, chronic pain sufferers, ne’er-do-wells, "all middle-aged people”—most of them leading otherwise normal lives.^[4]

For the next forty years, American medical experts and academics would visit England, note the dramatic difference in crime and addiction rates, then go home and write books calling for a switch to the British system.^[5] Commissioner Anslinger would invariably smack down these suggestions, condemning the British numbers as unreliable and questioning the motives of the messengers. Besides, he would point out, Britain was an island. But in 1965, Anslinger could claim he had been vindicated.  The numbers, which he now chose to believe, showed that the addiction rate in the U.K. had doubled over the previous five years—clear proof that the British system was a failure. Anslinger skipped over the fact that the doubling had been from 700 addicts to a total of 1400 in the whole of England. In the U.S. at that same moment there were an estimated 20,000^ addicts in Manhattan alone.^[6]