Webb v. United States

Summary

The Harrison Narcotic Act, signed on 17 December 1914, was written as a revenue law. Anyone who imported, manufactured, sold or dispensed opium, coca leaves or their derivatives had to register with the collector of internal revenue and pay a special tax, and sales had to be made on official order forms. The act exempted drugs dispensed or prescribed by a registered physician to a patient in the course of his professional practice. Within a few years federal prosecutors began to test how far that exemption reached. Dr. Webb, a Memphis physician, and Goldbaum, a Memphis druggist, were convicted in federal court of conspiring to violate the act. As the facts were certified by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Webb wrote morphine orders for habitual users at fifty cents apiece, not to cure the habit but in whatever quantities the users wanted to continue it, and Goldbaum, having stocked up through official order blanks, filled them. In eleven months Goldbaum bought thirty times the morphine of an ordinary druggist and filled over four thousand of Webb's orders. Unsure of the law, the appeals court certified three questions to the Supreme Court: whether section 2 barred a druggist from selling to a person who had neither an order form nor a valid prescription; whether that prohibition was constitutional; and whether an order written for an addicted person simply to keep up his customary use counted as a prescription. The defense position was that the statute was a tax law whose formal requirements the two men had met, that Congress could not use its taxing power to dictate medical practice, and that a registered physician's order was a prescription on its face. The government answered that the exemption protected genuine medical treatment and that a system of fifty-cent orders for maintenance was a scheme to evade the act's controls. The Court decided the case on 3 March 1919, the same day it upheld the act in United States v. Doremus. Justice Day's short opinion relied on Doremus to answer the first question yes and the second no. On the third he wrote that to call such an order a physician's prescription would be so plain a perversion of meaning that no discussion was required. Chief Justice White, joined by Justices McKenna, Van Devanter and McReynolds, dissented for the reasons he had given in Doremus, so the vote was five to four. The library text is the opinion as reported, with the appeals court's certified statement of facts; the wording of the three questions themselves does not appear in it, and notes are dropped. Federal agents and prosecutors read Webb as forbidding maintenance prescribing, and thousands of physicians and druggists were charged in the following years. In Linder v. United States (1925) the Court narrowed that reading, holding that a doctor's good-faith provision of small doses to an addicted patient was beyond the Harrison Act's reach.

Top Lessons

• A tax law that governs medicine

  The Harrison Act never said that addiction could not be treated. It set up a registration and tax system with an exemption for prescriptions, and the meaning of the word prescription became the real battleground. Webb shows how a revenue statute, read by courts and enforcement officers, came to shape what doctors could do.

• What makes an order a prescription?

  Day treats the answer as obvious: an order written at a set price, without examining the patient, in whatever amount the buyer wants, is not a prescription in any ordinary sense. The certified facts emphasize volume, payment and invented names. The case invites students to ask what separates a professional judgment from a sale.

• Deciding by reference to another case

  The opinion is short because its real reasoning sits in Doremus, decided the same day. Both the majority and the dissent simply point back to that case. Reading Webb teaches students that judicial opinions often depend on a web of companion decisions.

• Maintenance and cure

  The certified facts contrast orders written to cure the habit with orders written to continue it. That distinction between treatment aimed at ending use and supply aimed at maintaining it would be argued over by physicians, lawmakers and judges for decades afterward.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Webb is a landmark in the history of American addiction medicine and narcotics law. The certified facts distinguish orders meant to cure the morphine habit from orders meant to continue it, and the Court's refusal to treat maintenance orders as prescriptions was read by federal enforcement as a ban on maintenance prescribing, shaping physicians' practice with opiate-dependent patients until later decades revisited the question.

• Certificate of the Circuit Court of Appeals, sentence beginning: It was Webb's regular cus tom and practice to prescribe morphine for habitual users

  The appeals court's description of Webb's practice, contrasting orders intended to cure or break the habit with orders written for continuing use; the stored text splits the word custom.

• Opinion of the Court, answer to question three: to call such an order for the use of morphine a physician's prescription

  Justice Day's one-sentence holding that a maintenance order is not a prescription, the line later used to restrict physicians treating opiate dependence.