the dreams she lost in the haze of the previous decade. “Three years ago, I wouldn't have even considered going to college.  Now I've got a much wider scope.  I want to do everything.”  And, as Marks expected, there was even a chance that Julie might be among the lucky five percent who escape addiction every year.  Secure in the knowledge that the clinic would be there for her if she relapsed, she was beginning to talk about permanent withdrawal. “Now I'm at the point where I'm thinking... I don't get stoned at all, I live a normal life... why bother taking it?  It's as if it's run its course with me.”

Unfortunately, Julie would never get the chance to find out. Dr. Marks may have been personally invulnerable to his critics, but the Widnes clinic was not, and in 1995 the local health authority simply pulled the plug on Chapel Street and gave the contract for psychiatric services to somebody else. On April 1, some 450 of Dr. Marks’ former patients were handed over to the Warrington Community Health Care Trust.  The new organization, not surprisingly, was in perfect sync with the American concept of total abstinence, and the addicts were informed that they were to be taken off  heroin and cocaine completely. “The idea is to negotiate with clients,” said one official,  “offering a gradual change to methadone.”^[14] Unfortunately, a survey of the clients themselves revealed that 60 percent would probably refuse methadone treatment, and when the dust finally settled, most of them were back in the streets.^[15]  “Two years later,” said Marks, “twenty-five of the addicts were dead.”^[16]

And what of Julie, the heroin user with three children who planned to go to college?  “I saw Julie the other day,” said Marks. “She was desperate, back to criminality, a lot of her friends are back in prison.  She’s on the streets.  She saw me in passing and asked if I could take her back on. Her doctor tried to refer her to me but the Warrington Health Authority refused to defray the costs.”^[17]   And so the state, in its righteous determination to set everything straight, has managed to teach Julie and her children a lesson. It’s a lesson they won’t soon forget.