of the United States personally reassured her.^[26]  He said the Act was intended simply to gather information. Meanwhile, down at Treasury, they were sharpening their lances.

It should be remembered that the men who were about to enforce the Harrison Narcotics Act were under the impression that a foolproof cure existed for addiction.  If the Towns formula could cure an addict in five days, obviously withdrawal was no big deal.  Any weak-willed pervert unwilling to take a simple treatment and get straight would have to be dealt with forcefully. Armed with righteous indignation, they set out to rid the nation of drug addiction. And thus Congress, without any clear sense of the enormity of what they had done, had set the stage for the criminalization of a quarter of a million drug addicted citizens.

Six weeks after the Harrison Act went into effect, the New York Medical Journal carried an ominous observation:  “...the immediate effects of the Harrison antinarcotic law were seen in the flocking of drug habitués to hospitals and sanitorium.  Sporadic crimes of violence were reported too, due usually to desperate efforts by addicts to obtain drugs...  The really serious results of this legislation, however, will only appear gradually and will not always be recognized as such.  These will be the failure of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes which will never be traced to their real cause, and the influx into hospitals for the mentally disordered of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives.”^[27]

One way to understand the mind of a drug addict is to use food as a metaphor.  Imagine you’ve just been told by the government that food is so bad for you it’s been taken off the market.  You might be able to handle it for a couple of days, and after that you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else—food—how to get it, where to get it, and where to steal the money now that a hot dog with mustard is suddenly $50. But even this metaphor is an inadequate measure of the addict’s urgency