We have neglected their disease in its origin and subsequent progress and formed our conception of its character from fully developed conditions and spectacular end-results. We have seen some of them during or after our fruitless efforts at treatment, their tortures and poor physical condition overcoming their resolutions, until they plead for and attempted to obtain more of their drug. We have seen others exhausted, starved, with locked-up elimination, toxic from self-made poisons of faulty metabolism, worn with the struggle of concealment and hopeless resistance, and for the time being more or less irresponsible beings, made so, not because of their addiction-disease itself, but because they were hopeless and discouraged and did not know which way to turn for relief. What literature has appeared on the subject has usually pictured them as weak-minded, deteriorated wretches, mental and moral derelicts, pandering to morbid sensuality; taking a drug to soothe them into supposed dream states and give them languorous delight; held by most of us in dislike and disgust, and regarded as so depraved that their rescue was impossible and they unworthy of its attempt. We have overlooked, ignored or misinterpreted intense physical agony and symptomatology, and regarded failure to abstain from narcotics as evidence of weak will-power or lack of desire to forego supposed morbid pleasure. We have prayed over our addicts, cajoled them, exhorted them, imprisoned them, treated them as insane and made them social outcasts; either refused them admission to our hospitals or turned them out after ineffective treatment with their addiction still fastened to them. To a great extent the above has been their experience and history. In great numbers they have realized our failure to appreciate their condition and to remedy it, and have after desperate trials of quacks, charlatans and exploited “cures,” finally accepted their slavery and by regulation of their drug and life, their addiction unsuspected, maintained a socially and economically normal existence. Some failing in this, perhaps broken and impoverished, their addiction recognized, have become social and economic derelicts and often public charges. From these last, together with the addicted individuals from the class of the fundamentally unfit, we have painted our addiction picture. Confined and observed by the custodial official and the doctor of the institution of correction and restraint, or concealed as family skeletons in many homes, descriptions of them have given to the narcotic addicts as a whole their popular status--cases of mental and moral disorder due to supposed drug action or habit deterioration, and based upon inherent lack of mental and moral stamina.