and hit the streets, where they found the price of heroin had undergone a 600 percent jump.  The black market exploded, and violence exploded along with it. “In the late '70s you began to see the sort of thing, the traffic in heroin, that you had in America.” said Spear.  “Up until the Brain Committee report, illicit heroin was not something that was ever known in this country.”^[10] 

But away up in the north country, far from the hurley-burly of Picadilly, there were occasional heretics who chose to ignore the American advice, and here and there you could still find a clinic that continued the old practice of heroin maintenance. One such backwater was the Chapel Street Clinic in the Liverpool suburb of Widnes, and in the spring of 1982, Dr. John Marks, M.B.Ch.B (Edinburgh) M.R.C. Psych. (London), arrived with his newly framed certificates to take over as consultant psychiatrist. “When I took up my post, I found this old British System clinic that was handing out a ration of drugs, and I was a bit surprised. I thought, ‘This is a silly policy.’ I was interested in real madmen. Drug takers to me are not mentally ill, and I missed real psychiatry. I thought, ‘We'll evaluate it to make sure it doesn't work, close it down, and use the money for a new schizophrenic hospice.’”

But as he began digging through the records, Marks made a series of surprising discoveries. Among the cohort of serious needle-users now in his charge, he expected to find 15 to 20 percent infected with the AIDS virus—Liverpool is a port city after all—but there was not a single case in the whole roster. When he checked for drug-related deaths he found the same thing. Then he interviewed the patients and was dismayed to find them in good health, most with jobs, and all clean and properly dressed.^[11]  His next surprise came from the local police. Heroin maintenance, they said, cut crime.  In one test, the Cheshire Drug Squad tracked a hundred users before and after they entered the clinic and found a 94 percent drop in theft, burglary, and property crimes.^[12]  But the most interesting finding was the decline in