The Conservative government decided to “merge” John’s clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean—a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters. John was powerless to help them. The results came quickly. In all the time Dr. Marks had been prescribing, from 1982 to 1995, he never had a drug-related death among his patients. Now Sydney, the Liverpool docker, went back to buying adulterated crap on the streets and died.
