Drug Addiction from the Viewpoint of an Afflicted Physician
By a Prominent Medical Man, Formerly a Health Official of an American City
Maximum efficiency of every individual member of this nation is necessary today as never before in its history. Hence any condition responsible for lessened efficiency on the part of thousands of citizens is a thing to be seriously considered, especially when among these are to be found a large proportion of men and women who would otherwise be useful workers in every important field of activity.
Addiction to narcotic drugs is today depriving the country, either wholly or partially, of the services of thousands of individuals who but for this handicap would be entirely fit (many of them preeminently so) for work of the utmost importance. This is a problem of the first magnitude and one which will have to be solved largely by the medical profession.
But the medical profession as a whole is utterly lacking at the present time in such knowledge of addiction as is needed to enable them to attack the problem. For these reasons I feel it to be my duty to do my “bit” as a medical man, to put on record some of the lessons which, from years of personal experience, I have learned as to addiction itself, and the methods of treatment with which I have had experience in my efforts to be cured.
The subject is too important to excuse anything but the utmost frankness in speaking of the serious misconception which medical men only too generally share with the masses in regard to the subject of addiction. Unless the profession realizes its own ignorance, all point will be taken from the appeal which I wish to make to the physicians of this country to lose no time in equipping themselves to deal adequately with this great problem.
It may well be imagined that the task which I have thus set myself is no easy one, viewed from any one of half a dozen angles. Yet, if I am correct, in believing that I can thereby make a small contribution to the cause which now means so much to all of us, I must do so regardless of every difficulty.
Addiction with me goes back a number of years, covering in fact, almost my entire career as a physician. During this entire time, as will be more fully referred to, I have tried cure after cure, besides having, time and again, sought by own efforts to rid myself of this burden. I have naturally during these years studied and thought much about the problem which has meant so much to me. All this by way of showing why I believe that my experiences and opinions should have some value.
First of all, let it be clearly understood that the addiction which I shall discuss is limited strictly to opium and its derivatives; first, because my own experience is limited to this group and, second, because much that I shall have to say does not apply to all so-called habit-forming drugs to an equal extent, and to some of them not at all. Addiction as thus limited is as true a disease as any with which the human body is afflicted.
To look on the opium addict as a man with a vicious habit which he could quit if only he truly cared to do so displays a profound misunderstanding of plain facts. As well claim that a man with typical malarial infection has simply become so accustomed to having chills and fever at a given hour on certain days that when this hour arrives he quakes through mere habit as to claim that the equally characteristic and even more pronounced and distressing symptoms which manifest themselves when the addict is deprived of his drug are due to habit, that is, to “a condition which by repetition has become spontaneous.”