switching to morphine.  In other words, one of the four founders of Johns Hopkins was a morphine addict for over forty years, and while one of his colleagues knew all about it, the others apparently never suspected.  According to all reports, it had no observable effect on his performance at home or at the office.  Listen to British surgeon Lord Moynihan on Halsted’s technique: “frequently light, swift, sparing movements with the sharpest of knives, instead of free, heavy-handed deep cutting... the minimum of hemorrhage instead of the severance of many vessels...”  Throughout his career Halsted tried to kick the habit and couldn’t.  He was never able to get by with less than 180 milligrams of morphine a day.  “On this,” said Osler, “he could do his work comfortably and maintain his excellent physical vigor.”^[30]

Halsted’s story is revealing not only because it shows that a morphine addict on the proper maintenance dose can be productive.  It also illustrates the incredible power of the drug in question.  Here was a man with almost unlimited resources—moral, physical, financial, medical—who tried everything he could think of and he was hooked until the day he died. It brings into focus the plight of those addicts all over the country who were about to be cut off with nothing.

But the problem which seemed so daunting to medical men like Terry and Halsted looked like a piece of cake to the lawmen.  Addicts—and the doctors and pharmacists who enabled them—were to be hunted down and forced to change their ways or else.  Another hint of their naivete about the scale of the problem is contained in the Harrison Act itself.  It calls for an appropriation of $150,000 for enforcement. Eighty years later we are spending that much every three minutes.^[31]

The Justice Department strategists understood quite clearly that the Harrison Act was on shaky ground constitutionally.  Hamilton Wright and his colleagues had been so skillful in disguising it as a tax law that judges all over the country were interpreting it as a tax law.  And when the first case reached the