Clinical familiarity with the symptoms and signs of beginning and developing addiction should be the possession of every physician and surgeon. It would save from the physical sufferings, and mental tortures and fears of narcotic addiction many human beings. It has been my experience when called in as a medical consultant upon medical and surgical cases whose progress towards recovery seems unaccountably tedious and unsatisfactory, to detect as the basis for the lack of function and recuperative power, unsuspected developing opiate addiction in time to prevent its further progress. Unwisely prolonged opiate medication makes more opiate addicts than we have realized. The addict in whom it is most profitable to study addiction origin and development and handling, if we are to get a clean-cut picture of addiction-disease, is the individual who is primarily normal, mentally, morally and physically, whose addiction condition is a result of ignorant, misguided or unavoidable medication, either professionally or self-administered. Their number is far greater than is yet generally appreciated. Many if not most of them are unsuspected and unknown and they include eminent people in all walks of life. They are social, and economic assets whose interests and welfare we cannot ignore when we are considering the disposition and handling of the narcotic addict. Many of them have gone from one institution to another, and have attempted, in desperate effort to be cured, each newly-discovered and announced specific or theory of treatment. They have never derived any pleasure from narcotic use. For them the narcotic drug has been only necessary medication to relieve physical suffering and to maintain economic existence and the support of themselves and their families. They should be classed as innocent or accidental addicts--normal and worthy sick people. They earnestly desire treatment and help, and once their addiction process is completely arrested do not tend to return to narcotic drug use. Whatever associations they may have had with the unworthy or unfit of the so-called “underworld” and with illicit and illegitimate traffic has been the result of desperate necessity, in their best judgment, in the obtaining of opiate supply when it has seemed to them to be otherwise denied them, and which was necessary to them for the relief and avoidance of suffering and for the maintaining of a condition making possible self-support and the avoidance of revelation and disgrace.