because a junkie, though starving, will trade food for dope.  This consuming desperation, never clearly grasped by either the lawman or the average physician, would prove to be the fatal flaw in the plan to free humanity from the scourge of addiction.  What Hamilton Wright and his colleagues had expected to be a brief skirmish would turn instead into the longest running war in U.S. history.  As one contemporary put it: “we had counted without the peddler.  We had not realized that the moment restrictive legislation made these drugs difficult to secure legitimately, the drugs would also be made profitable to illicit traffickers.”^[28]

The man who wrote those words was in a position to know.  In 1914 Dr. Charles E. Terry was the City Health Officer for Jacksonville, Florida. He’s considered one of the leading authorities on this period, and his book—The Opium Problem—is quoted in every history of the era. Terry’s study flew in the face of conventional wisdom when he found that most addicts were women, and that whites outnumbered blacks two to one. And the cure rate—even with the famous Towns formula—was never more than five percent. But his report contains one fact that is as stunning today as it must have been to Dr. Terry: “One of the most important discoveries we made at that time was that a very large proportion of the users of opiate drugs were respectable hard-working individuals in all walks of life, and that only about 18 percent could in any way be considered as belonging to the underworld.”^[29]   In other words 80 percent of his patients had jobs, homes, families, and reputations.  And while it may seem bizarre to read that narcotics addicts could hold down jobs and be useful, productive citizens, it turns out there is no scientific evidence to the contrary.  In fact, the medical literature is filled with thoroughly documented records of addicts who functioned normally throughout their lives.  Among the mountain of case histories, one of the most remarkable is the story of Dr. William Stewart Halsted, “the father of modern surgery.”

Halsted, the dashing young son of a distinguished New York family and former captain of the Yale football team, was already