snake-oil salesman.  So he decided to leap over all these small-minded practitioners and present his case directly to one of the country’s leading authorities on addiction and alcoholism.  Dr. Alexander Lambert of Cornell University was, above all else, an open minded scientist and he agreed to let Towns demonstrate his cure on a few addicts at Bellevue.  The results were impressive, or so they seemed, and the fact that Dr. Lambert had personally witnessed it was another star-crossed collision, for Lambert happened to be Teddy Roosevelt’s personal physician.  Word of Towns’s magical mystery cure quickly made it to Washington, and everybody was so relieved that any questions were swept aside.^[21] 

The reason for the apparent success of this poisonous remedy was that nobody ever bothered to do a follow-up study.  Since it was the rare individual indeed who showed up for a second treatment, Towns claimed his method was 90 percent successful.  A full decade later, it finally occurred to Dr. Lambert that there was a gaping hole in the evidence, and he set out to track down a number of ex-patients to see how they were doing.  He was stunned.  Of some 200 people he had treated at Bellevue, “I found that about four or five percent really stayed off.”^[22]  So the 90 percent cure rate was in fact a 95 percent failure rate, but by then the damage had been done.  The mistaken idea that there was a cheap, easy cure for addiction had become one of the founding myths underlying our narcotics laws.  It explains to some degree why the several hundred thousand citizens who were already addicted—many of whom had acquired the habit innocently—would soon be simply cast adrift to fend for themselves.  By 1920 Towns and his cure had been discredited, but our unforgiving approach to dealing with addicts was already institutionalized.^[23

The Second International Conference on Opium was finally set for December of 1911 at The Hague.  By badgering his superiors at State, and threatening and tormenting foreign