Maintaining Orthodoxy: The Depression-Era Struggle over Morphine Maintenance in California

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, only to see its doctors arrested and the clinic closed by federal authorities in spite ofprotests by the mayor of Los Angeles and the City of Los Angeles' director of public health. Relying on new primary sources, this paper chronicles the struggle between California maintenance advocates and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics during the Great Depression.