despite the fact that fifty years of medical research has consistently debased each of Hobson’s assumptions in detail, his terrifying stereotype of the addict as infected blood-sucker lives on in the headlines—and in the American psyche—to this day. 

But a phenomenon like Hobson is only possible when there is a receptive audience.  His amazing success was the product of two powerful social currents that collided just before World War I.  First, the moral surge that crested with national alcohol prohibition had been building for fifty years. And second, rural America’s growing fear of the immigrant tide—specifically the flood of European Catholics pouring into the cities—had been hammered into a powerful sword by the Anti-Saloon League.  “Besodden Europe,” wrote one prohibitionist editor, “sends here her drink-makers, her drunkard-makers, and her drunkards... with all their un-American and anti-American ideas of morality and government... ”^[36]  Into this xenophobic hotbed came the First World War.  When wartime propaganda painted the Germans as thick-necked beasts, the venom inevitably spilled onto Germans in America, and again the Anti-Saloon League wasted no time in lighting the torches: Pabst and Busch and most of the major brewers were Germans, so beer was obviously subversive.  Drunken soldiers couldn’t shoot straight.  Worse, brewing used up eleven million loaves of barley bread a day that could have been used to feed our starving Allies. Clearly, brewers and distillers were guilty of treason.  “In this orgy of simplicity,” writes historian Andrew Sinclair, “the arguments of the drys seemed irrefutable.  They were for God and for America, against the saloon and against Germany.  The wets therefore must be for Satan and for Germany...”^[37]

The narcotics reformers naturally climbed on board this flag-decked bandwagon.  To these people it was becoming clear what the evil Hun had in mind.  An editorial in the New York Times passed on this rumor of German fiendishness: “Into well-known German brands of tooth paste... habit-forming drugs were to be introduced; at first a little, then more, and as the habit grew