on the non-German victim, and his system craved ever greater quantities...” then the Huns would cut off the supply and the Yanks would be on their knees.^[38]

By 1919 public attitudes about narcotics had shifted so radically that even government documents were referring to addicts as “dope fiends,” and the Treasury Department decided the time was ripe to make another run at the Supreme Court. After three years of patient sifting, they found a case involving an outrageous hack named Webb who sold prescriptions for fifty cents apiece to any and all comers.  His patients numbered in the thousands and he never bothered to examine anybody.  He wasn’t practicing medicine, he was dealing drugs.  But the genius of the prosecutors was to proceed as if Webb was just an ordinary physician who’s method of treatment happened to include giving his patients unlimited quantities of dope.  The question they posed to the court was: is this legitimate medical practice? This time Justice Holmes came down on the side of the lawmen. “To call such an order... a prescription... would be a perversion of meaning...”^[39] It was a major win for Treasury, and because of the skillful way they had framed the case, they were now able to state that any doctor who prescribed narcotics to an addict was looking at a possible jail term.  This decision was soon reinforced by a couple of others and in no time at all the medical profession more or less washed their hands of the narcotics problem.^[40]

It may seem strange that a guild as powerful as the American Medical Association would allow a bunch of Treasury men to wade into their profession and start telling them how to write prescriptions, but the fact is most doctors found the narcotics issue disgusting.  Addiction wasn’t studied in medical school, nobody seemed to know much about it, and the only experience for most physicians these days was the occasional junkie who showed up wild-eyed, unwashed, and desperate, terrorizing everybody in the waiting room.  Every word from his mouth was likely to be a lie and if you turned your back he’d clean the place