Reference to the previous enumerations of the physical manifestations of body-need for opiate, or “withdrawal signs,” should be sufficient for the comprehension of its tortures and easily explains the suicides which have attended sudden deprivation. Any one who has watched a well-developed case of addiction-disease in the agonies of opiate deprivation should hesitate to prolong them if possibly avoidable. While under some conditions, and in some cases, it may be argued that “the ends will justify any means,” as a routine procedure of wide application, it must be stated that both in its immediate torment and in its end results, mere forcible sudden withdrawal is not a procedure of election. Some of its supporters still cling to and quote the old fallacy that after seventy-two hours without opiate a narcotic addict no longer physically requires it. This fallacy is probably based upon the estimated maximum time of opiate elimination in normal human beings and experimental animals. It is most decidedly false doctrine as applied to the well-developed case of addiction-disease in whom the mechanism of disease, and not the mere administration or elimination of opiate has become what should be the dominating consideration. As stated before, the mere withdrawal of opiate drug does not arrest the activity of addiction-disease, nor prevent the endurance of the exhausting and incapacitating and protracted low-grade manifestations before referred to. Its potentialities of permanent damage, moreover, are attested by and displayed by many who show for years shattered nerves, premature old age, etc. It is perhaps wise to state again in this place that in this book the consideration of narcotic or opiate addiction, its mechanism symptomatology and handling, is not to be applied to cocaine and alcohol use nor to the various other drugs often loosely grouped with opiates as “habit-forming.” Until a distinct physical disease mechanism, attended by analogous characteristic and constant physical phenomena, can be demonstrated as resulting from the action of one of these drugs or substances, its continued use should not be classed with opiate addiction-disease. The third general method of procedure is that in which effort is made to utilize other drugs than opiates, or other measures than mere reduction or withdrawal or deprivation to secure cessation of opiate medication. The efforts have been, in a general plan, either to oppose or replace the action of opiate by substance or substances seemingly to have physiologically antagonistic or substitution properties--or to combat, offset or benumb the sufferings of what is described as the “withdrawal period.” Such agents have been employed in this disease for very many years, and in their variety include most of the known analgesic, sedative, antispasmodic, hypnotic or anesthetic agents and measures.