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tion of private house interiors, while never enforcing any of theregulations against the filthy neighborhood businesses and restaurants. Since the landlords wanted to break the leases with the hippies, who had been the first tenants in years in most of the buildings, and rent to secretaries and junior executives who would pay higher rents, the health inspections served as justification for the eviction notices that usually followed.

During this same time, a doctor named David E. Smith became friendly with Professor Wolf and set up an infirmary at Happening House which he modeled after the Digger operation. At first, everyone was glad about this new medical service and was happy that there was another benefit for the people, but those feelings soon changed. Everybody became disheartened when Smith, M.D., began his own self-aggrandizement with even more sensational press releases than L.S.D. Sox. He talked about an epidemic of "marijuana cough" and about drugs only he seemed to know anything about. One of these he called Love Juice, which he said was made by mixing DET with DMT--a concoction invented by syndicate mobsters in the East who brought it West to peddle in the Haight-Ashbury.

Smith, M.D., seemed to be more concerned with the pharmacology of the situation than with treating the ailing people who came to him for help. He seldom prescribed anything more beneficial than aspirin or thorazine, while keeping a log of his activities and compiling a mound of statistics about drugs and their abuse, which he used in his pitch for the funding of his own medical clinic, separate from any other facility. He had only been at Happening House for six weeks when he had raised enough money to open that kind of operation and cover the cost of paying himself a salary. It was an apartment on the second fioor of a building on the corner of Haight and Clayton streets and he converted it into an office complex which he called the Haight-Ashbury "Free" Medical Clinic. But it was far from being free. Just because no one was made to pay a fee when they went there, didn't make it a "Free Clinic." On the contrary, the patients were treated as "research subjects" and the facility itself was used to support whatever medical innovations were new and appropriate to the agency. And at least once a week there'd be an interview with David Smith, M.D., in the newspapers, or on the television, or in the folds of some national magazine, like Life, in which he'd expound on his feelings toward such dangerous drugs as STP, or B-2, a combat weapon and incapacitating agent created [end page 290]

 

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