months in search of a worthy demon.  It’s hard to imagine what took him so long.  The evil drug heroin was practically tailor made for a moral crusade.  Not only could it be held accountable for all crime and vice, it had the added advantage of being a foreign import.  In a frenzy of public appearances, lectures, and writings, Hobson introduced a chilling new concept.  Heroin, he said, transforms the addict into a monster who has no control over himself and is compelled to spread his disease like Count Dracula. It was a masterstroke in the art of propaganda.  “The addict has an insane desire to make addicts of others,” said Hobson, and he horrified audiences with stories of wretched young zombies infecting their pals with heroin-laced ice cream cones.  “One addict will recruit seven others in his lifetime," he said, and he claimed there were over four million addicts in the United States—a figure sixteen times higher than the Public Health Service estimates. ^[34] 

Hobson’s impact would have been powerful under any circumstances but the early 1920s saw the dawn of commercial radio, and almost overnight the great crusader found himself addressing the whole country at once.  NBC, one of the new national networks, gave him uninterrupted free time on four hundred stations—an unprecedented audience—and he warned America that there was evil afoot: “Suppose it were announced that there were more than a million lepers among our people.  Think what a shock the announcement would produce!  Yet drug addiction is far more incurable than leprosy... more communicable... and is spreading like a moral and physical scourge. The whole human race, though largely ignorant on this subject, is now in the midst of a life and death struggle with the deadliest foe that has ever menaced its future.”^[35]

In fact there was never a shred of evidence to back Hobson’s psuedo-scientific speculations, but his crusade quickly united all the old prohibition allies—the Kiwanis, the Masons, the Elks, the WCTU—and they simply overwhelmed the handful of scientists who tried to put the brakes on this juggernaut.  And