“Their multitude is conclusive proof of lack of conception and of understanding of addiction-disease in the past. They have been directed towards incidental and complicating manifestations. They have no more place in the treatment of the addict than they have in the treatment of any other disease condition. I know of no medication that can be called ‘specific’ in the arrest of the mechanism of narcotic drug addiction-disease. There is no more of a specific remedy for narcotic drug addiction than there is for typhoid or pneumonia. The wide advertisement of treatments based on supposed ‘specific’ action of the products of the belladonna and hyoscyamus and similar groups is unfortunate. They have in my opinion, no action as curative agents in narcotic drug addiction-disease which can entitle them to consideration as specific or special curative remedies. The drugs of this group are useful in many cases, intelligently applied to meet therapeutic indications. They exhibit wide variation of action and reaction in narcotic drug addicts at different clinical stages and under different clinical conditions, and their dosage presents an extremely wide range of individual measure. They are dangerous drugs in the hands of the inexpert or careless, or used in a routine manner or dosage. The status which they have acquired as specific medication in narcotic addiction disease I hold to be a medical fallacy which should be strongly opposed and early remedied.” The search for panaceas, specifics and routine treatments has constituted a stage in the therapeutic history of most disease conditions. It marks the effort to make wide and general application of a partial comprehension of facts and imperfect recognition of fundamentals and is successful only as an individual case is occasionally capable of responding, perhaps by clinical accident, to the specific routine employed. Undue insistence and publicity secured for or given to a procedure of this description, is a real obstacle to the development of clinical and scientific understanding of the condition treated. It distracts attention from broad clinical consideration of disease itself, from scientific investigation into pathology and disease mechanism, from determination and observation of fundamental facts, whose comprehension and analysis form the essential factor in the widespread successful handling of any condition, and from proper conception and appreciation of the addiction patient and the addiction problem as a whole with its many and varied aspects.