Taken as a whole, in its original form, administered with understanding of addiction-disease facts, and with honest and intelligent scientific, educational and remedial activities coincidently pursued, it should be sufficient to control a rapidly growing menace. In its attitude towards the medical profession it wisely limited its restrictions to the broad statement that these drugs named must not be distributed other than in the “course of legitimate professional practice,” wisely making no attempt to define such “legitimate practice,” but apparently anticipating investigative activities of the scientific professions in the determination and dissemination of medical facts for the guidance of honest practitioners, and of those who should interpret and enforce the law. Unfortunately addiction as a disease was, at that time, not a matter of wide recognition, the public in general and the medical profession itself still almost universally holding to the old conceptions of it on the basis of supposed morbid indulgence and “habit.” It seems to the author that the failure of the Harrison Law to check or limit the illegitimate use of the drugs it describes, is not due to a defect in the law itself, but is due to the failure of the scientific professions to clarify the situation with a clean cut understanding of the condition legislated against. The reaction within the medical profession as a result of this law was unfortunate. Instead of stimulating scientific interest and investigation into the character of this disease, the result was that medical men in general having little or no conception of its disease basis, regarded the narcotic addict as a mental or correctional problem and left his consideration and handling to the lay officials and the special institutions whose activities had been along other lines than scientific research into physical disease. In the minds of most lay and of many medical workers the only consideration was the stopping of drug use _per se_, an attitude which to a less extent still persists. Uninformed as to the now established facts of addiction-disease, the administrators of the law, and to a large extent the medical profession, tended to regard supply of opiate to an addict as the prolongation of a habit, and not as medication indicated by the mechanism and symptomatology of a disease--and therefore as not being legitimate medical practice. This attitude had the effect of making the practitioner of medicine unwilling to receive the narcotic addict as a patient.