Dr Lennox Johnston had been injecting himself with pure nicotine for years before his wife found him lying on the floor and close to death. Suddenly aware of her husband's unusual secret habit, she implored him to put an end to it and, for a time, he did. Johnston, a Glaswegian GP who lived and worked in Merseyside, had given up smoking with little difficulty in 1928 before joining the National Society of Non-Smokers (NSNS), the organisation that emerged from the ashes of the recently dissolved British Anti-Tobacco Society. The NSNS substituted the dream of a nonsmoking world for the more attainable goal of securing smoke-free places for the country's dwindling number of abstainers. Temperance activists were amply represented in the organisation but religious fervour did not dominate the society as it had its predecessors. In Lennox Johnston, however, it had a member as fanatical as any who had ever lived.

Johnston was an extraordinary character by any standard. Fascinated to the point of obsession with the addictive properties of nicotine, his clinical experiments into its effects largely consisted of giving himself injections of small but unadulterated doses of the drug. After being chastised by his wife, he abandoned this line of research but, in 1940, the onset of bombing and the evacuation of his family allowed him to recommence his work.

Thereafter, he gave himself hundreds of nicotine shots before deciding, for the purposes of comparative analysis, to experiment with cocaine...

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