All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they leave the body no better, and with a craving for a repetition of the relief. When you are tired, it is because your muscles and nerves are storing up fatigue poisons more rapidly than your blood-stream can get rid of them. You need to know about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you are as unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut off the head of the messenger who brought bad tidings. If, when you have a headache, you go into a drug store and let the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy drinks, what you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your blood-stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so as to keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching blood vessels and nerves. You may try that trick with your heart a number of times, but sooner or later you will try it once too often--your heart will stop a little bit quicker than you meant it to! Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their poisoning some particular portion of the body, and temporarily paralyzing it. And bear this in mind, they are none the less poisonous because they are "natural" products. You can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which comes out of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the contents of the venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning yourself none the less certainly if you use alcohol, which is made from the juices of beautiful fruits, and has had hosts of famous poets writing songs about it; or you can poison yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown bean which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and delicious to the taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee for a hundred years, and have your picture published in the newspapers as a proof that these habits conduce to health; but nothing will be said about the large number of people who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long, and about how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these habits. I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged to a generation which had grown up in war time. For this reason many of the men both drank and smoked to excess, and in my boyhood I lived among them and watched them, and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I conceived a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets could not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the hospitals. I had seen one man after another, beautiful and kindly and gracious men, dragged down into a pit of torment and shame.