Document Type
Article
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publication Title
Contemporary Drug Problems
Volume
27
Publication Date
2000
Abstract
With the closure of the Shreveport Clinic in 1923, the United States entered a 40-year period during which legal opiate maintenance was limited to a small number of registered medical addicts, most of them cancer patients. Addicts were demonized, hounded by law enforcement personnel, and rarely treated outside of jails. Abstinence was the only legitimate goal of treatment. Quite correctly, historians regard the period between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s as the Dark Ages of American drug policy. Even so, there was resistance to such therapeutic orthodoxy, notably on the West Coast. Indeed, the Los Angeles County Medical Association sponsored a morphine maintenance clinic during the early 1930s.
Publisher's Statement
Copyright © 2000 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc., with all rights reserved. No portion of the contents may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the Publisher.
Citation
Baumohl, Jim. "Maintaining Orthodoxy: The Depression-Era Struggle over Morphine Maintenance in California." Contemporary Drug Problems 27, no. 1 (2000): 17-75.