they too were pressured into gradual reduction.  And the patients that Butler and his staff determined to be incurable—often people with untreatable cancer or advanced venerial disease—simply got whatever drugs they needed.  Once their dose was stabilized, everybody who could work was expected to, and if they didn’t have a job, Butler would get them one.  The same with a decent place to live.

It was this last group, the “incurable,” that got Butler in trouble with Washington.  Although the Treasury Department had originally encouraged the idea of public treatment facilities, federal policy had recently undergone a change in thinking.  By 1920, Charles Towns and his magic formula had been completely discredited, along with every other form of treatment then available.  The U.S. Public Health Service had reviewed them all and concluded that under the best of circumstances “only about 10 percent of cures have been reported... Our present methods of treating drug addiction must be considered failures.”^[43]  Rather than interpret this warning as a caution signal, Treasury took it as a green light.  Since treatment didn’t work—if in fact these people were going back on drugs the minute you turned them loose—gradual reduction was a waste of time.  Cold turkey was the answer.  And to make sure they stayed drug-free, the government would simply have to dry up all sources of supply—including well-meaning but deluded physicians like Willis Butler.^[44]

But the success of Dr. Butler’s operation was apparent even to the narcotics investigators who came to Shreveport to shut him down.  First they checked the local drugstores looking for evidence of criminal activity and found nothing.  Then they talked to the city’s leading physicians and got a chorus of praise for Butler and his clinic.  Then they met with the local Federal District Judge, and he warned them flat out not to make any move to close the place.  He said he could personally testify that the clinic had reduced crime in the city.  They got the same story from the chief of police, the sheriff, and the U.S. Marshall’s