Henry Smith Williams’s policies prevailed in Britain, and nowhere else on earth. The result was that while heroin addiction was swelling into the hundreds of thousands in the United States, the picture in Britain was different. The number of addicts never exceeded a thousand, and, as Mike Gray explains,13 “the addict population in England remained pretty much as it was—little old ladies, self-medicating doctors, chronic pain sufferers, ne’er-do-wells, ‘all middle-aged people’—most of them leading otherwise normal lives.” British doctors insisted there was such a thing as a “stabilized
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