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
When the efficacy of this treatment was assured, it began to attract the
attention of some of the best-known medical men in the country--men who
were interested in this line of study. They followed carefully the medical
administration of the new treatment of these cases.
It was only a matter of time before the value of the work was thoroughly
established and became a medical fact. After hundreds of definite clinical
histories had been recorded, the formula was publicly announced, first, at
the International Opium Conference at Shanghai in 1909, and a month later
to the medical world. Since the complete information concerning my work
has been given to the medical profession, and after all these years of
study and investigation and medical comment, I have never yet had from any
physician an entirely satisfactory explanation as to why or how we were
able successfully to unpoison these cases in this short period. At present
this treatment is, so far as I know, the only one known to medical science
that will bring about this definite physiological change.
The intelligent beginning of help in these cases is to unpoison the
patient, put him physically on his feet, where he does not want drugs or
drink, and where he does not feel the slightest desire or craving for
them, and has no dread of ever drifting into these habits again. When you
have brought about this definite physical change, you are invariably able
to get a definite mental change. You cannot hope to get the mental change
until you have first cleared the system of poison, for in this state the
patient is in a most responsive condition to deal with. If physical
building up, change of environment, change of surroundings in any way
whatever are necessary, they can then be taken up intelligently.
LEGISLATIVE EFFORTS
The knowledge I gained from dealing medically with those afflicted with
habits and addictions led me to take up personally the movement to bring
about definite legislation with a view to subordinating as much as
possible the traffic and consumption of drugs to legitimate medical needs;
and to put an end to the criminal negligence by which such drugs have been
permitted to be imported, manufactured, and distributed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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