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.
A native Southerner, of national fame, high in the councils of his party, told me recently that habit-forming drugs, cocaine principally, have of late so complicated the negro problem of the South as to triple its difficulties and dangers.
These heroin and cocaine groups, lately so conspicuous, are insignificant in numbers and in tragedy when compared by those who know with the thousands to be found among our citizenship who, driven only into misery, not into viciousness or crime, by drug addictions, fall innocent victims to this most terrible of modern curses, sad sacrifices to illness and to pain, to ignorance and to cupidity.
The victims of drug habits who have been led into them through the mistaken methods of the doctor, who first administers the drug to ease acute physical suffering, and by the proprietary medicine or drug store preparation passed out as cure-alls with an indifference to or ignorance of consequences which must remain incredible to those who understand, is infinitely more numerous than the growing group of drug takers led into their addictions by the tendency towards dissipation.
Drugs are even taking hold upon our youth. Within the year many instances have been cited in the newspapers, which have uncovered peddlers of cocaine and heroin to school children. I listened recently to the appalling story of a seventeen-year-old Connecticut boy, brought by his father for treatment in this city, who told how he had been the center of a group of not less than a hundred other boys in his own town who gained the drug through him and were completely at his mercy.
I was present recently when this father told the story, having brought the boy to the metropolis for treatment. It was practically the duplicate of many, and illustrates the real necessity of legislation, which will impose upon the druggist and the medical profession a general restriction.
“My boy,” this sorrow-racked and disappointed father said, “was employed by a physician living near us to care for his automobile. He paid him for his work by giving him prescriptions for heroin. My boy quickly became a victim of the habit, and soon formed the centre of a group of twenty or more other boy victims, who secured from him the prescriptions by means of which they brought the drug.
“Two large manufacturing establishments in our home town were thus infected, and at the present time not less than one hundred boys have become slaves to the habit. They buy the drug in quantities as large as they can pay for from the largest drug store in our city, and are never questioned.”
Their home city is Bridgeport, Conn. I have in my possession one of the prescriptions given to the boy by the physician, who thus paid him for his services in attending to his motor car.