When Philip Seymour Hoffman was a toddler — just four years old — Richard Nixon tried to save his life. It was 1971. The President called a press conference to tell the American people that their “public enemy No 1” was drug abuse. There was to be an all-out war on users and sellers, a fight to the death.

To be fair he really meant it: this was no empty gesture born of distaste for hippies. Nixon was being told that too many of the young men arriving as troops in Vietnam were drugged up and useless — and many more were becoming addicts after being posted in Indochina. The defence of democracy was at stake. So he vastly increased the size (and cost) of