The immediate result was the sudden deprivation of opiate to such addiction-disease sufferers as had not had financial means or foresight to purchase large reserves before the laws went into effect. The history of the drastic early enforcement of the various laws, reduplicated with more or less completeness by periodical legislative and administrative activities, without adequate arrangement for the relief of the narcotic-deprived addiction-disease sufferer, shows suicides and deaths, and a rapid development of exploitation of the needs of the addict at the hands of illicit commerce. For this illicit commerce the laws themselves, however, are not so much to be blamed as the influence of long-prevailing and widely-taught attitudes and conceptions which caused scientific and other forces to fail to recognize and meet the need for clinical handling of the situation, and for study and investigation of the condition. Legislators and administrators simply reflect prevailing theories. Early theories took scant if any account of the possibilities presented by the now rapidly-growing disease conception of addiction. The popular conception of an addict and even the description met in standard medical text-books was that of a “dope-fiend,” an irresponsible panderer to a morbid “habit,” bereft of will-power, honor and decency, a menace to himself and to society, and this conception has had unfortunate influence in the making, interpretation, and administration of laws. That it can be truthfully applied to some people who have developed addiction-disease is unquestioned, but that it fails to take into consideration a much larger number who are not irresponsible panderers to morbid habit, nor bereft of will-power, honor and decency, nor a menace to themselves or to society, but are honest and upright members of society and economic assets in the community, accounts in large part for the failure of laws and their administration to remedy the narcotic drug situation. Measures which might be very useful in the forcible control of those who can be justly characterized as “dope fiends” work great harm to those who are simply sick people. That these sick people have been commonly regarded and classed as “dope-fiends” was due to the fact that the points of view and special experiences of the psychologist or psychiatrist, sociologist or penologist and the exponents of special methods of treatment dominated the literature and teaching in which appeared practically nothing of essential pathology, symptomatology and broad principles of addiction-disease therapeutics and handling. The occasional voice of the clinical student or experimental laboratory worker was almost unheard, and the opposition accorded unorthodox views and announcements made him a brave man who would state them, and tended to cause him to be regarded as an academic theorist, or possessed of ulterior motives.