Faced with this evidence, John Marks was beginning to believe that many “of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves.” In the clinic, they started to call the infections and abscesses and amputations “drug war wounds.” So he “slowly got,” he told me, “that this clinic was working wonders” by bypassing criminality and providing safer forms of the drug. John began to wonder: If prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more?
