Legislation restrictive of the sale and use of habit-forming drugs is in reality a dangerous experiment until other legislation that provides for the medical help of those who would thus be deprived has first been written upon our statute-books. I am inclined to think that many of the failures which strew the paths of experimentalists in anti-alcohol movements have been due to a lack of similar foresight. The man who is penalized for drunkenness will usually get drunk again the moment he finds himself at liberty to do so; and this will not be due to any natural depravity upon his part, but, rather, to an almost inevitable result of the bodily craving that thrills his every fiber and for the relief of which nothing whatever has been provided. We shall never make any serious progress in dealing with the most serious evils of alcoholism until we waken to the folly of treating the hard and habitual drinker as a criminal, exacting from him penalties and inflicting upon him disgrace. In every instance the passage of restrictive legislation should be accompanied by the passage of remedial legislation; for provision for the relief of suffering caused by prohibitory laws must be provided. The courts should carefully consider the facilities at the disposition of the communities in which they labor, and in imposing sentences they should be careful not to overtax them. It would be better for a community to keep a victim upon a steady diet of alcohol for weeks while he was waiting for a bed in a curative institution than to risk causing the man's death or insanity by depriving him of his alcohol until the means for relieving his system's acute demand for it were at hand. By following a similar plan, it will be found that the evil of habit-forming drugs can be exterminated in the United States. Whether alcoholism, which is a social vice, ever can be similarly exterminated by like methods I do not know; but I am convinced that an intelligent pursuit of such a policy would do more to accomplish the desired results than ever has been done by other means. HOW SOCIETY TREATS THE VICTIM OF ALCOHOL The care of the inebriate who already comes under the law, and who by his habits forces his way into the state and municipal hospitals, forms one of the great burdens upon society of the present day. It should be regarded as one of the most important problems of modern medicine. No other class of the sick includes so great a number of individual cases. We find, for example, the almost incredible fact staring us in the face that more than one third of all the patients admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York City are sent there by alcohol, while less than two per cent. are sent there by habit-forming drugs.