No mother, wife, employer, or magistrate can effectively reason with a man whose brain is befogged by alcohol, for that man cannot reason with himself. Tears, threats of imprisonment, and loss of position do not have upon him their normal reaction. He is a sick man whose mental and physical condition is abnormal; it must be made normal before anything real can be done toward his assistance. There is but one way out of the sad muddle in which alcohol has plunged certain branches of our judiciary. In every city must be established emergency hospital wards to which committing magistrates may send persons with excessive alcoholic or drug histories. Treatment in these emergency wards will be neither difficult nor costly. Once this has been done, the patient may be returned to court, where his clarified brain will greatly assist the magistrate in deciding upon the proper course for his assistance and the protection of society. The commitment of the alcoholic to an ordinary penal institution is a perilous expedient. The experiences which various authorities connected with the Department of Correction in the City of New York have had with drug and alcohol smugglers indicate a condition that exists more or less generally in penal institutions throughout the country. The drug-user or alcoholic who has been locked up in a prison is in no way relieved of his craving for the substance which is harming him, and his efforts to obtain it will be desperate. The class of men who surround him as prison guards is not of a high type. If he has money, they will get it from him if they can; and if he has friends outside, especially if they themselves be drug or liquor addicts, they will attempt to smuggle to him what he craves. Inasmuch as it is much easier to smuggle drugs into a prison than it is alcohol, many alcoholics have been changed in prison to drug-takers, and after this change the metamorphosis for the mere drunkard into an actual criminal has often occurred. The administration of a definite medical treatment should therefore be regarded as imperative in all cases of drug addiction, and in most cases of alcoholic addiction that appear in our prisons. In the cases of alcoholic addictions, imprisonment should end, in the case of first offenders, with the completion of the treatment and the restoration of the subject's mind to normal. I cannot too strongly or too frequently reiterate the statement that there is no more desperate illness than chronic alcoholism. Purification from the physical demand for alcohol at the place of commitment of men taken before the courts upon the charge of intoxication might save the public from a greater burden than any other available medical process. Drunkenness cannot rightfully be considered as a crime as long as society sanctions the sale of alcohol and profits by it; therefore the punishment of alcoholics as criminals is an intolerable injustice. That it is also an economic waste is as clearly apparent.