William Jennings Bryan smelled liquor on Wright’s breath once too often, the two men got into an argument, Bryan threatened to fire him, and Wright left in a huff.  Wright assumed that he was indispensable, and he wrote the President asking him to intervene.  The reply never came.  And thus, the man who had guided the nations of the world toward international narcotics prohibition was suddenly yanked off the stage.  After an embarrassing round of begging for another assignment, he left for France to join the war effort as an ambulance driver, and he died three years later as the result of injuries from an auto accident.  He was not quite 50.  His legacy, however, is with us still.

The anti-narcotics legislation that Wright fashioned finally made its way through Congress in the winter of 1914. The Harrison Narcotics Act, named for the Tammany Hall Democrat who ushered it through the House, appeared on the surface to be nothing more than a means of gathering information.  It called on everybody in the drug trade to purchase a license and keep precise records. The debate had little to do with the evils of addiction, focusing instead on the nation’s international obligation under The Hague Convention. At the final reading, the bill passed in a few minutes. The New York Times didn’t even mention it.^[25] 

Although the medical profession had largely been brought around in support of the act, they were in for a rude awakening. Hamilton Wright had installed a couple of land mines in the bill, and the tripwire was hidden in a clause the doctors thought was supposed to protect them. There was one extra word in the sentence. A physician could prescribe narcotics “in the course of his professional practice only.”  The interpretation of this phrase was left to the Treasury Department, and to the revenue agents, giving dope to an addict was not “professional practice,” it was simply feeding a bad habit—not only immoral, but now illegal.

The medical profession was completely unaware of this development.  When one middle-aged morphine addict expressed her fear that the Harrison Act would cut her off, the Surgeon General