It was with the above conception of these addiction conditions that I began my work in the Alcoholic, Narcotic and Prison Service of Bellevue Hospital, attracted to the service not by hope of helping nor by interest in “jags” and “dope fiends” as I then considered them, but by the mass of clinical material available for surgical and medical diagnosis and study which was daily admitted to those wards. When I left the service after sixteen months of day and night observation, with personal oversight and attempt to care for in the neighborhood of a thousand admissions a month, my early and faulty conception of narcotic addicts was replaced by a settled conviction that these cases were primarily medical problems. I realized that these patients were people sick of a definite disease condition, and that until we recognized, understood and treated this condition, and removed the stigma of mental and moral taint from those cases in which it did not exist, we should make little headway towards solution of the problem of addiction. It is a fact that the narcotic drugs may afford pleasurable sensations to some of those not yet fully addicted to them, and that this effect has been sought by the mentally and morally inferior purely for its enjoyment for the same reasons and in the same spirit that individuals of this type tend to yield themselves to morbid impulses, curiosities, excesses and indulgences. Experience does not teach them intelligence in the management of opiate addiction and they tend to complicate it with cocaine and other indulgence, increasing their irresponsibility and conducing to their earlier self-elimination. Wide and varied experience, however, hospital and private, with careful analysis of history of development, and consideration of the individual case, demonstrates the fact that a majority of narcotic addicts do not belong to this last described type of individuals. It will be found upon careful examination that they are average individuals in their mental and moral fundamentals. Among them are many men and women of high ideals and worthy accomplishments, whose knowledge of narcotic administration was first gained by “withdrawal” agonies following cessation of medication, who have never experienced pleasure from narcotic drug, are normal mentally and morally, and unquestionably victims of a purely physical affliction.