THE NEED OF CONTROL BY THE GOVERNMENT AND BY PHYSICIANS
The prevalence of the drug habit, the magnitude of which is now startling the whole civilized and uncivilized world, can be checked only in one way—by controlling the distribution of habit-forming drugs. With the Government as the first distributor and a physician as the last, drug-taking merely as a habit would cease to be. If physicians were made accountable, they would use narcotics, hypnotics, and cocaine only when absolutely necessary. Nobody should be permitted to procure these drugs or the means of using them or any medicines containing them without a doctor’s prescription. By such restriction the intense misery due to the drug habit would be decreased by nine tenths, indeed, by much more than this; for when a physician dares no longer to be content with the mere alleviation of pain, which is only nature’s way of announcing the presence of some diseased condition, he will seek the more zealously to discover and remove its cause.
CHAPTER II
THE NEED OF ADEQUATE SPECIFIC TREATMENT FOR THE DRUG-TAKER
The Internal Revenue Reports are the only index to the extent of the drug consumption in the United States. They show for years past an annual increase in the importation of opium and its derivatives and cocaine, and for last year a very marked increase over that of any preceding year. This is not due to the increase in population; our immigrants are not drug-takers. Among the thousands of drug-users that I have treated or known, I have never seen an Italian, a Hungarian, a Russian, or a Pole. Moreover, I have met with only four cases of drug-taking by Hebrews. Few Jews—except in the under-world—acquire the habit knowingly. It may become fastened upon them through the use of a medicine the danger of which they do not realize, but, once freed, they will not again come under its power. The practical sagacity of their race is their surest safeguard.
What is commonly spoken of as the “American type,” highly nervous, living under pressure, always going to the full limit, or beyond, is peculiarly liable to disorders that lead to the habitual use of drugs. We are all hypochondriacal by nature, prone to “take something” whenever we feel badly. Lack of opportunity alone, of knowledge of what to take and how to procure it, has saved many a person under severe physical or mental strain from recklessly resorting to drugs. Since the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, which was intended to protect the public by requiring the express statement of any dangerous ingredients in a compound, the sale of preparations containing habit-forming drugs has preceptibly increased. It seems a just inference that the information given, instead of serving as a warning to the unwary, has been chiefly effective in pointing out a dangerous path to many who otherwise would not have known where to find it.
Women, it should be said, though constitutionally more liable than men to feel the need of medicines, form the lesser portion of the drug-taking class. In the beginning their addiction is due almost exclusively to a physician’s prescription, except in the under-world.
The habitual users of drugs in the United States come from every grade of society. Professional men of the highest responsibility and repute, laborers wearying of the dullness in a mining-camp, literary men, clergymen, newspaper men, wire-tappers, shoplifters, vagrants, and outcasts—all are among the number. Strangely assorted as they are, they become yet more strangely alike under the influence of the common habit. Shoplifting is not confined to the professional thief; it is noticeable in many a drug-user who has had every moral and worldly advantage.