“To intelligently discuss the reason for the prevalence of drug addictions in this country would necessitate an exhaustive study of national psychology. “Patent medicines containing small quantities of habit-forming drugs have wrought great havoc with us, for any medicine, containing any quantity of any habit-forming drug, contains it in habit-forming quantity if the dosage is regular. It is not the quantity, but the regularity of dosage which produces drug habits. “A lack of understanding of this fact upon the part of the medical profession and the public has been responsible for many drug addictions. “The cocaine habit had its start in patent medicine, mostly socalled catarrh cures, and will find its end in a national degeneration if it is not checked by drastic legislation. “Heroin was first advertised about fifteen years ago, and accepted by the medical world as a non-habit-forming substance, having all the useful qualities of the dangerous habit forming drugs. “Having been thus started, and innocently promoted by physicians and druggists, the progress of the habit, which has become a sanitary, criminal, and social problem of real moment, can be halted only by the passage of some law including such provisions as those I have included in the bill now pending in Albany. “My plan is not accidental. I went to the Orient in 1908-1909 and spent a year there, studying the opium curse as it has there developed. Returning to this country I have since been thrown into the closest contact with the various drug addictions, passing several hundred cases in minute review each year. Last Summer I toured Europe and found that drugs have gained comparatively slight foothold there, and that no European nation has produced restrictive legislation worthy of consideration. “Our own internal revenue reports show us to be consuming as many of these drugs as all of Europe put together uses. “Of course, the fact that the drug traffic has continually increased in this and every other State despite the presence on the statute books of laws thought to be stringent, can mean but one thing--that in these laws are loopholes. “The same laws which require that these drugs must be dispensed only upon presentation to the druggist of a physician’s prescription fail to forbid a layman from posing as a physician in making out prescriptions; no obligation of investigation is imposed upon the druggist. “The drug trade is practically without legal regulation, although across the drug store counter are dispensed substances at least as dangerous to individuals and public welfare as those which are dispensed across saloon bars--and saloons are regulated very rigidly.