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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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