In the sunshine of Los Angeles, there was a doctor in the early 1930s named Henry Smith Williams, with a long, unsmiling face. He wore small wire-framed glasses through which he peered down on the world and at almost everyone in it. This doctor shared all of Harry Anslinger’s hatreds. He said that addicts were “weaklings” who should never have been brought into the world and wrote that “the idea that every human life has genuine value . . . and therefore is something to be treasured, is an absurd banality. The world would be far better off if forty percent of its inhabitants had never been
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