In New York State and city the situation is not better. The police records have been full of “dope cases” for years. Morphine and heroin are doing serious work in the demoralization of the city, and the ravages of cocaine are as serious here as they can be among the negroes of the South.
Miss Katharine B. Davis, now in the full swing of her duties as Commissioner of Correction, tells me that she finds her problems complicated all along the line by drug addictions among inmates of the city’s prisons and jails, and the Mayor and other members of the city government are looking into the whole subject with deep interest.
In her efforts to discover how the city’s prisoners get drugs, Miss Davis has uncovered strange, almost uncanny methods. A prisoner’s wife or “girl” brings him clean handkerchiefs or shirts, stiffly starched. Left alone with them, he chews them eagerly, getting thus the morphine which impregnates the starch.
Another prisoner greedily sucks an orange which has been brought to him. Investigation shows that through a tiny puncture its juice has been withdrawn, to be replaced through a hypodermic syringe, after it has been transformed into a saturate solution of morphine.
Fountain-pens are now taboo among the prisoners. Their barrels may be filled with drug tablets.
In a letter now in my possession, written to Charles B. Towns, the drug expert, by Dr. Charles W. Farr, prison physician of Sing Sing, the doctor, after announcing the successful treatment of some drug addicts, continues:
“But the men seem to be able to get the various drugs as readily as ever. I suppose that the usual method is to have the guards bring it in for them. When questioned the prisoners always blame the traffic on the honest and unpopular guards who are not really concerned with it. I asked a convict to estimate the number of drug takers among the prisoners. He answered:
“‘Counting the habitual users and the “joy riders,” there are probably two hundred in this prison.’”
And while these demoralizing novelties are frequently discovered in the underworld, the hold which habit-forming drugs are getting elsewhere, with the worth while, is admittedly appalling. There are pharmacists in New York city whose important trade is drug traffic; there are physicians here, and not a few, who, while drug addicts themselves, find their practice also among drug addicts, furnishing prescriptions daily to habitues, collecting fees proportioned to their victims’ purses.
As these things have become generally known, so has work begun to check the evils. Within a few days the most comprehensive legislative plan which has so far been proposed for regulation of the traffic in all habit-forming drugs has been launched at Albany.
It will presently be launched in the New Jersey and all other State Legislatures. It is further planned to make this definitely comprehensive and effective by Federal legislation, already drafted and soon to be introduced at Washington.