The Delinquent (Vol. IV, No. 3, March 1914)

Entered as second-class mail matter at New York.
Habit-forming drugs and their ravages, destructive of both the morals and the health of the community, seem at last to have aroused commensurate human indignation, at least in New York city.
Discussion is continual of this strangest and saddest of the problems of our modern civilization; city officials are definitely interested, studying and planning; a committee, including in its membership magistrates and others of sociological force, works on an impulse supplied by Mrs. Vanderbilt; and from a third source definite legislation emanates to be offered in the Legislatures of this and other States and in the National Congress.
Nothing more astonishing, nothing more appalling than the hold which habit-forming drugs have taken on the community at large can be found among the tragedies peculiar to modern civilization.
And all this has come suddenly. Not so many years ago the opium smoker was the only known victim, and he was a curiosity of Chinatown; the morphine taker was a rare, and troubled spirit, stalking solitary in its slavery and misery; the cocaine fiend remained unknown, and the heroin addict—latest in all this incomparably tragic company—was undreamed of.
Now opium smoking, though still the cause of an occasional police raid, has sunk into insignificance by comparison with morphine taking; cocaine habitues are not uncommon sights upon the streets to those with the depressing knowledge which identifies them; police slang has coined a name for them—“snowbirds”; and we read in almost every issue of our daily newspapers of new developments of the “heroin habit.”
Habit-forming drugs of one kind or another have gained so strong a hold upon the people of this country, more especially upon the people of American cities, that they have reached the dread proportions of a national curse.
They play their tragic part in uncounted domestic tragedies; an annual crop of business and professional failures numerically approaching the sad army of alcoholic wrecks is thrust into the various bins wherein we hide our human refuse; drugs send their yearly thousands of young men into the prisons, of young women to the streets.