I have before me a clipping from a newspaper published in Columbus, Ohio. There, after the enforcement of restrictive legislation, the authorities found it necessary to ask the governor for some special procedure which would authorize them to supply drug victims with their drugs until proper medical treatment was provided. This did not relate to those victims who had come exclusively from the under-world, but referred specially to those habitual drug-users whose habits had been acquired through illness. It can scarcely be expected that restrictive legislation will entirely prevent the sale and use of drugs in the under-world any more than restrictive legislation has been able to prevent the practice of burglary or any other type of crime or lawlessness. It is highly probable that the under-world will always be able to get its drugs; but it is nevertheless true that the passage of restrictive legislation and the enforcement of such laws will tend to prevent the descent of many into the criminal class.
Even this is comparatively unimportant. Those who suffer most are those who have been given the habit by physicians. These are honest drug-users, and to them at this writing no helping hand is anywhere held out save in New York State. I have been somewhat disgusted—I am sure that is the word I wish to use—by the continual outpouring of sympathy and constant manifestations of anxiety on the part of good people in regard to the under-world, when these same good people regard with indifference or classify as criminal the involuntary victim toward whom the most intense and understanding sympathy should be extended.
MENTAL ATTITUDE OF THE DRUG-TAKER AND THE ALCOHOLIC
The victim of drugs psychologically differs very materially from the victim of drink. Until his trouble has reached an acute stage, the alcoholic feels little interest in any of the methods advertised as remedial for alcoholism. Many men deny to their friends and even to themselves that they are alcoholics until they have reached a point akin to hopelessness in their friends’ eyes and their own. The drug-user, on the other hand, knows that he is a victim as soon as he becomes one; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he is immediately filled with an intense longing to be relieved of his habit. Thousands of alcoholics will defend their vice. A library might be filled with books, fictional and other, glorifying alcohol and the good-fellowship and conviviality that it is supposed to promote. One might search a long time for a victim of any drug habit who would speak with affection of the material which has enthralled him. No poet has ever written any song glorifying morphine. There is no drug-user in the world who would not hail with joy any opportunity that might lead to his relief. The drug-victim investigates every hint of hope with eager interest, reading, intelligently questioning, experimenting. He shrinks from publicity with a horror that is backed by an acute consciousness of his condition, while the victim of alcohol becomes so mentally distorted or deadened that he takes no thought of consequences, cares nothing for publicity, and finds himself unable to avoid public exhibitions of a kind that put him into the hands of the police. Public hospitals do not tempt the drug-user for, having investigated them, he knows that they are not competent to give him real relief.
EXPEDIENTS OF DRUG-TAKERS
Nothing but really enforced restrictive legislation, fashioned after the model of the present New York State law, will bring to light the drug-victims in any community. The New York law uncovered thousands of them, and within two weeks forced Bellevue and other hospitals to devote many beds to sufferers from drug-deprivation. Similar restrictive legislation would uncover every sufferer from drugs in the country and thus accomplish more good than could be achieved by any other similarly simple means. No man on earth is more pitiably affected than the drug-taker; no suffering is more intense than his when deprived of his drug. The fact that rather than undergo such suffering men and women will resort to the most desperate expedients has been proved a thousand times. When confronted by the terrible prospect of deprivation, they invented plans worthy of the mental agility of the most famous fictionist. Drugs were smuggled into prison hidden in the heels of visitors’ shoes. One wife who knew the agony her husband must endure if deprived of his regular morphine dosage took to him clean linen which was admitted to the prison without question, but which, as an accident revealed, had been “starched” with morphine. Another ingenious wife or sweetheart devised the expedient of sending in to a prisoner oranges from which the juice had been cleverly extracted and which had been filled hypodermically with a morphine solution.
If there is no length to which a drug victim will not go rather than find himself deprived of his drug, there is no length to which he will not go in order to obtain relief from a habit the existence of which fills him with horror. This has often been illustrated in the course of my practice, but perhaps never more strikingly than when I learned of the experiences of a certain judge in Jacksonville, Florida. This far-sighted, merciful, and progressive jurist had come in contact with one or more pitiable cases of the drug habit to which he wished to give relief. He communicated with me, and I was very glad to coöperate in aiding with definite medical relief several drug-victims taken before him. This procedure was commented upon in the public press, and presently the judge found himself importuned for help by those who had committed no crime, but expressed themselves as quite willing to be sent to prison as the only way in which they could get the treatment that was being administered under his auspices.
DRUG-TAKING MORE OFTEN THE CAUSE THAN THE RESULT OF CRIMINALITY
A careful study of the histories of drug-takers who upon one charge or another find themselves caught in the meshes of the law will reveal that in most cases, or at least in many cases, the drug habit has led to crime rather than the reverse. If an efficient treatment for the drug habit were established in a prison almost anywhere in the United States where such a treatment did not elsewhere exist, it would result, I am sure, in the actual commission of crimes by a certain number of people willing to endure the misery and disgrace of incarceration for the mere sake of securing treatment for their affliction. Any drug-user will tell you that no punishment recorded in the course of human history, no torture visualized by the most inventive imagination, can compare with the unspeakable agony of deprivation.
FALLACY OF IMPRISONING DRUG-TAKERS