Wiley Blount Rutledge

“ They were not restricted as to sale by order form, registration, or other requirements. When they left the seller's stock and passed to the purchaser's hands, they were not in themselves restricted commodities, incapable of further legal use except by compliance with rigid regulations, such as apply to morphine sulphate. The difference is like that between toy pistols or hunting rifles and machine guns. All articles of commerce may be put to illegal ends. But all do not have inherently the sam susceptibility to harmful and illegal use. ”

“ A considerable degree of carelessness coupled with casual transactions is tolerable outside the boundary of conspiracy. There may be also a fairly broad latitude of immunity for a more continuous course of sales, made either with strong suspicion of the buyer's wrongful use or with knowledge, but without stimulation or active incitement to purchase.↑ Cf. ”

“ The testimony shows the average physician in the United States does not require more than 400 one-quarter grain tablets annually for legitimate use. Although Tate's initial purchases in 1933 were smaller, they gradually increased until, from November, 1937, to January, 1940, they amounted to 79,000 one-half grain tablets. In the last six months of 1939, petitioner's shipments to him averaged 5,000 to 6,000 half-grain tablets a month, enough as the Government points out to enable him to give 400 average doses every day. ”

“ When the evidence discloses such a system, working in prolonged cooperation with a physician's unlawful purpose to supply him with his stock in trade for his illicit enterprise, there is no legal obstacle to finding that the supplier not only knows and acquiesces, but joins both mind and hand with him to make its accomplishment possible. ”

“ Nor, by the same token, do all embody the same capacity, from their very nature, for giving the seller notice the buyer will use them unlawfully. Gangsters, not hunters or small boys, comprise the normal private market for machine guns. ”

“ This being true, it can make no difference the agreement was a tacit understanding, created by a long course of conduct and executed in the same way. [11] Not the form or manner in which the understanding is made, but the fact of its existene and the further one of making it effective by overt conduct are the crucial matters. ”

“ They do not create new legal demand and new classes of legitimare patrons, as they do for sugar, tobacco and other free commodities. Beyond narrow limits, the normal legal market for opiates is not capable of being extended by such methods. ”

“ Petitioner is a registered drug manufacturer and wholesaler. [2] It conducts a nationwide mail-order business from Buffalo, New York. The evidence relates chiefly to its transactions with one Dr. John V. Tate and his dealings with others. He was a registered physician, practicing in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, a community of about 2000 persons. He dispensed illegally vast quantities of morphine sulphate purchased by mail from petitioner. The indictment charged petitioner, Dr. ”