The general adoption of this rule of procedure would mean that a class of unfortunates who have never had any protection from any source would be immediately provided with definite medical help. An accompanying provision would insist that patients who for physical reasons are found to be ineligible for treatment--unable, that is, to exist in comfort without regular doses of their drug--will be relieved of all sense of disgrace arising from this necessity, and will be preserved from victimization, and will find it possible to get the drug without difficulty and at reasonable prices, if necessary, from the boards of health themselves. If this plan accomplished nothing more than to prevent the operation of medical fraud against sufferers for a period longer than three weeks, it would even then have accomplished an extraordinary good. I have in my present hospital only fifty beds, and as a rule I receive and discharge about four patients a day. Were my institution operated along the colonization lines which are common in the United States, the volume of business which I handle in a year, running well above a thousand patients, would require not fifty, but at least five hundred beds, and rooms in proportion. This statement of the exact situation in my own institution may possibly explain existing conditions in some others. It must not be understood that I attribute all the efforts at colonizing drug-users to unworthy motives. Much of it has been due to the complete ignorance of the medical profession in regard to this form of affliction. Finding itself unable intelligently to cope with conditions, it seeks the line of least resistance and adopts the colonizing sanatorium, with all its evils, as the best plan that can be found. When I first took up this work I went for information and assistance not to the humble members of the medical profession, but to the most eminent men whom I could find. Even these men invariably admitted their ignorance of the nature of the drug habit and the means for its relief. I was told by some of the best-known neurologists in the world that out of thousands of patients whom they and their confrères had sent to the best-known and most conscientiously operated institutions in the country not one had really been helped. They assured me that if I had found something which would give actual and material aid in any degree to even five per cent. of the drug victims who were sent to me for treatment, I would be doing more than any man had ever done before. CHAPTER XI PREVENTIVE MEASURES FOR THE DRUG EVIL