As a surgeon once stated “These addicts have no resistance, and they go right out.” Swayed by the old conception of addiction, this more than ordinarily humane and generous-hearted man had not the slightest suspicion as to why the addicts that he had operated upon had displayed no resistance and had tended to “go right out.” He had in his mind simply the then prevailing and practically unquestioned conception of the narcotic addict, and he had not the slightest suspicion that a definite physical disease, whose mechanism should have received intelligent clinical handling and control was complicating the surgical cases of the addicts who went right out. He had based, as all of us once did, his opiate medication on his materia medica conception of therapeutic dosage instead of on the demands of an addiction-disease mechanism. It is rumored that more than one illustrious life, full of past accomplishment and potential future benefit to humanity and society, has ended in this way. The above statements do not apply to surgery alone. They are equally true of medical conditions. Dominated by their teachings as to opiate dosage in ordinary therapeutics, and by the older “habit” conception of addiction, with little or no instruction as to the dosage indications of addiction-disease, most practitioners, institutional and private, do not adequately conceive and have no basis for determination of opiate dosage in this disease. They do not believe that the addict physically needs nor do many of them realize that the addict can physically tolerate what seems to them such dangerous and lethal amounts, and they tend to ascribe his statements of usual dosage to mental “cravings” to which they refuse to pander. Many appreciate that such patients have often to be very carefully watched to prevent their suicide and that many of them die, but fail to comprehend that these events may be ascribed to inability to longer endure the suffering and physical incompetency of body-need for opiate medication. The recent epidemic of influenza and pneumonia furnishes examples of the importance of recognizing addiction-disease mechanism in intercurrent diseases. A number of instances have come to my attention. One of them is of particular interest because of the graphic picture presented by a series of sphygmographic tracings showing the physical organic dependence upon opiate in the circulation of an addict. It may be said in passing that these tracings and others made upon addicts in partial or complete opiate withdrawal parallel similar tracings by other clinical observers, and also those made by experimental laboratory workers upon addicted dogs.