These, then, the narcotics, cocaine, and the hypnotics, are the chief habit-forming drugs. They form habits because it is necessary to increase the dose in order to continue to derive the apparent benefit obtained from them in the beginning, and because, when once the habit is set up, it cannot be terminated without such acute discomfort that virtually no one is ever cured without medical help. In drug addictions the condition of the patient is not mental, as is generally supposed, but physical. Definite medical treatment to remove the effects of the drug itself is imperative, whether the victim be suffering from the drug habit alone or from that habit in a body otherwise physically disordered. With regard to the cure of the habit, as in the case of the conditions which permit of its being acquired, it may justly be said that the victims have been unfairly treated. THE NEED OF CONTROL BY THE GOVERNMENT AND BY PHYSICIANS The prevalence of the drug habit, the magnitude of which is now startling the whole civilized and uncivilized world, can be checked only in one way--by controlling the distribution of habit-forming drugs. With the Government as the first distributor and a physician as the last, drug-taking merely as a habit would cease to be. If physicians were made accountable, they would use narcotics, hypnotics, and cocaine only when absolutely necessary. Nobody should be permitted to procure these drugs or the means of using them or any medicines containing them without a doctor's prescription. By such restriction the intense misery due to the drug habit would be decreased by nine tenths, indeed, by much more than this; for when a physician dares no longer to be content with the mere alleviation of pain, which is only nature's way of announcing the presence of some diseased condition, he will seek the more zealously to discover and remove its cause. CHAPTER II THE NEED OF ADEQUATE SPECIFIC TREATMENT FOR THE DRUG-TAKER The Internal Revenue Reports are the only index to the extent of the drug consumption in the United States. They show for years past an annual increase in the importation of opium and its derivatives and cocaine, and for last year a very marked increase over that of any preceding year. This is not due to the increase in population; our immigrants are not drug-takers. Among the thousands of drug-users that I have treated or known, I have never seen an Italian, a Hungarian, a Russian, or a Pole. Moreover, I have met with only four cases of drug-taking by Hebrews. Few Jews--except in the under-world--acquire the habit knowingly. It may become fastened upon them through the use of a medicine the danger of which they do not realize, but, once freed, they will not again come under its power. The practical sagacity of their race is their surest safeguard.