"For decades, pharmaceutical heroine was prescribed by doctors to patients who had become addicted after operations, particularly soldiers who had undergone battlefield surgery.They spent years on a legal supply: it did them no damage, and they led healthy, fruitful lives. Enid Bagnold, for example,who wrote National Velvet, was prescribed it after a hip operation and spent twelve years injecting up to 350 mg a day. Enid- as far as history records-never mugged a single person or sold her body on the streets, but died quietly in bed at the age of ninety-one. Until the American prohibitionists closed him down in the 1920s, Dr Willis Butler, ran a famous clinic in Shreveport, Louisiana, for some of these 'therapeutic addicts'. Amongst his patients, he included four doctors, two church ministers, two retired judges, an attorney, an architect, a newspaper editor, a musician from a symphony orchestra, a printer, two glass blowers and the mother of the commissioner of police. None of them showed any ill effect from the years they spent on Dr Butler's prescriptions. And, as Dr Butler later recalled, ' I never found one which we could give an overdose to, even if we had wanted to. I saw a man take twelve grains intravenously at one time. He stood up and said, " There, that's just fine", and went on about his business.' "
Nick Davies-Flat Earth News 2008
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