The entrepreneurs and their customers know Sterling Johnson. Now through this crowd of busy shoppers comes Sterling Johnson, Jr., New York City's special narcotics prosecutor, with police aides. Above the din is heard the shouting of esoteric names. There are more than 600 persons on the corner, a bustling display reminiscent of the floor of the stock exchange. The scene is The Pit, a street corner along Eighth Avenue in Harlem. Sometimes a single incident, a matter of seconds, can sum up a condition more eloquently and powerfully than reams of theory, argument, and statistics. "New York Medical Journal," May 17, 1917, commenting on the first drug prohibition law, the federal Harrison Act. These will be the failures of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes which will never be traced to their real cause and the influx of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives into hospitals for the mentally disordered." "The really serious results of this legislation…will only appear gradually and will not always be recognized as such.
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