The one great point to be kept in mind is that narcotic addicts are sick; sick of a definite and now demonstrable disease. This disease is variously complicated and widely variable as it occurs in individual patients. Although some individuals, afflicted with this disease, may require custodial or correctional handling--the fundamental physical disease cannot be properly arrested nor handled successfully by mental, moral, sociological or penological methods only. Any toxic, worried, fear-ridden or suffering sick man may show psychological or even psychiatrical manifestations or complications, but observing and attempting to control complications only will not cure basic disease. Even if it should some day develop that a serum can be produced against the underlying toxins of addiction-disease; and this is not beyond the bounds of possibility; its usefulness and application must remain for the present matters of academic speculation. Other than this possibility, there seems practically no hope of a properly called “specific medication” in narcotic drug addiction-disease. Even with its discovery, it is highly improbable that a routine treatment applicable to all cases could ever be successfully adopted. In the very few disease conditions in which we can properly be said to have “specific” medication, routine handling and treatment of all cases is inadvisable and unsatisfactory. There is not and probably never will be any specific routine treatment successfully applicable to all cases of any complex and variable disease condition. We shall save much public money, and personal effort and time, and shall save the narcotic addict much suffering and discouragement, and shall add much to human health, competency and happiness when we realize these facts as applied to addiction-disease, and proceed upon them in a spirit of broad humanity and of rational clinical study and remedy of obvious disease symptomatology. Narcotic drug addiction-disease is a definite, and in most cases arrestable disease. It should be widely so regarded and studied and treated. CHAPTER VI THE RATIONAL HANDLING OF NARCOTIC DRUG ADDICTION-DISEASE If anything has been demonstrated conclusively concerning narcotics it is that the methods of the past, legal, administrative, and medical, have not solved the narcotic drug problem, nor controlled the narcotic drug situation, nor been successful in the handling of the narcotic drug addict.