Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the RemedyTowns, Charles Barnes
Science
Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy
Towns, Charles Barnes
Alcoholism; Opium abuse -- United States; Tobacco use
Nothing but really enforced restrictive legislation, fashioned after the
model of the present New York State law, will bring to light the
drug-victims in any community. The New York law uncovered thousands of
them, and within two weeks forced Bellevue and other hospitals to devote
many beds to sufferers from drug-deprivation. Similar restrictive
legislation would uncover every sufferer from drugs in the country and
thus accomplish more good than could be achieved by any other similarly
simple means. No man on earth is more pitiably affected than the
drug-taker; no suffering is more intense than his when deprived of his
drug. The fact that rather than undergo such suffering men and women will
resort to the most desperate expedients has been proved a thousand times.
When confronted by the terrible prospect of deprivation, they invented
plans worthy of the mental agility of the most famous fictionist. Drugs
were smuggled into prison hidden in the heels of visitors' shoes. One wife
who knew the agony her husband must endure if deprived of his regular
morphine dosage took to him clean linen which was admitted to the prison
without question, but which, as an accident revealed, had been "starched"
with morphine. Another ingenious wife or sweetheart devised the expedient
of sending in to a prisoner oranges from which the juice had been cleverly
extracted and which had been filled hypodermically with a morphine
solution.
If there is no length to which a drug victim will not go rather than find
himself deprived of his drug, there is no length to which he will not go
in order to obtain relief from a habit the existence of which fills him
with horror. This has often been illustrated in the course of my practice,
but perhaps never more strikingly than when I learned of the experiences
of a certain judge in Jacksonville, Florida. This far-sighted, merciful,
and progressive jurist had come in contact with one or more pitiable cases
of the drug habit to which he wished to give relief. He communicated with
me, and I was very glad to coöperate in aiding with definite medical
relief several drug-victims taken before him. This procedure was commented
upon in the public press, and presently the judge found himself importuned
for help by those who had committed no crime, but expressed themselves as
quite willing to be sent to prison as the only way in which they could get
the treatment that was being administered under his auspices.
DRUG-TAKING MORE OFTEN THE CAUSE THAN THE RESULT OF CRIMINALITY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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