“Don’t tell me, young man!” said Grandma Sharpless. “You doctors are prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old folks have used ‘em long enough to know which are good and which are bad. Now I don’t claim but what the Indian herb remedies and the ‘ready reliefs’ and that lot are frauds. But my family was brought up on teething powders and soothing syrups.”
“Then you’re fortunate,” said Dr. Strong sternly, “that none of them has turned out to be an opium fiend.”
The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had sped true to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from Grandma Sharpless’s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at him.
“And speaking of Indian remedies,” went on the doctor glibly, “I remember as a boy—”
“Stop a minute,” said Grandma Sharpless steadily. “The truth isn’t going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it’s right it should. I had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for drug-habit when he was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on soothing syrups; had to have them all the time, because he was such a nervous little fellow; always having earache and stomach-ache, until he was eight or nine years old. Then he got better and became a strong, active boy, and a robust man. After his college course he went to Philadelphia, and was doing well when he contracted the morphine habit—how or why, we never knew. It killed him in three years. Do you think—is it possible that the soothing syrups—I’ve heard they have morphine in them—had anything to do with his ruin?”
“Why, Mrs. Sharpless,” said the other, very gently, “I can only put it before you in this way. Here is one of the most subtle and enslaving of all drugs, morphine. It is fed to a child, in the plastic and formative years of life, regularly. What surer way could there be of planting the seeds of drug-habit? Suppose, for illustration, we substitute alcohol, which is far less dangerous. If you gave a child, from the time of his second year to his eighth, let us say, two or three drinks of whiskey every day, and that child, when grown up, developed into a drunkard, would you think it strange?”
“I’d think it strange if he didn’t.”
“Apply the same logic to opium, or its derivative, morphine. There are a dozen preparations regularly used for children, containing opium, or morphine, such as Mrs. Winslow’s ‘Soothing Syrup,’ and Kopp’s ‘Baby Friend.’ This is well known, and it is also a recognized fact that the morphine and opium habit is steadily increasing in this country. Isn’t it reasonable to infer a connection between the two? Further, some of the highest authorities believe that the use of these drugs in childhood predisposes to the drink habit also, later in life. The nerves are unsettled; they are habituated to a morbid craving, and, at a later period, that craving is liable to return in a changed manifestation.”
“But a drug-store can’t sell opium or morphine except on prescription, can it?” asked Mr. Clyde.
“It can in a patent medicine,” replied the doctor. “That’s one of the ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it’s possible to find honest people who believe in these dopes and even give testimonials to them.”