carry with it the menace and jeopardy which technical violation of often medically impractical administrative demands may involve. If the honest physician is left no leeway for the exercise of medical judgment in the handling of widely differing cases of addiction-disease, or if his exercise of honest clinical judgment is to be constantly influenced by a necessity of worrying about its possible interpretation, in the light of unduly stringent laws and regulations, a condition is created in which the intelligent practice of medicine upon the sufferer from addiction-disease becomes impossible. A matter about which there has been a great deal of dispute is that of the prescribing or dispensing by the practitioner of medicine of opiate drugs to the narcotic addict in the handling of narcotic addiction, itself. The adherents of the older theory of addiction being merely habit or vicious indulgence, oppose as illegitimate practice the continued supply of the opiate to an addiction patient, unless in some cases the patient also suffers from some painful and incurable disease. They take the attitude that, if the addict did not want to keep on using opiate he would go somewhere and be cured, and that as long as he can get opiate drug he will not get “cured.” The possibilities of immediate so-called “cure” are discussed elsewhere in this volume. Sufficient for present statement is the fact that, as demonstrated by the testimony of the Whitney Committee Legislative Investigation hearings, one of the most complete and valuable pieces of public investigation work into addiction ever done, there exists at present practically no adequate or competent machinery for the successful so-called “cure” of the great numbers of narcotic addicts. This is discussed elsewhere. Those who talk casually of the enforced immediate cure of the narcotic addict would do well to investigate and realize the lack of possibilities of its immediate attainment on any large scale. This is a basic fact which has been too little taken into account by those who still hold to the appetite and habit theories.