Excerpt from "Chasing the Scream."
"When the Harrison Act banning heroin and cocaine was written in 1914, it contained a very clear and deliberately designed loophole. It said that doctors, vets, and dentists had the right to continue giving out these drugs as they saw fit---and that addicts should be dealt with compassionately. Yet the loophole was tossed onto the trash heap of history, as if it didn't exist---until Edward Willians decided to dig it out and act on it. He helped to build a free clinic for adults, and he volunteered his own time there. He wrote his prescriptions for whoever needed them. And he waited to see the results.
Even he was surprised by what he saw. Patients who had come in as unemployed physical wrecks were able, slowly and steadily, to go back to work, support their families, and look after themselves again, just as they had before drugs were criminalized. The order and calm that had existed before narcotics prohibition started to return to their neighborhoods. The mayor of Los Angeles came out and celebrated the clinic as a great gift to the city, and the local federal prosecutor announced that these clinics accomplished "more good...in one day than all the prosecutions in one month.""
