To what extent narcotic drug addiction-disease will prove to be a medical sequela of war and of necessary war-time medication may never be made a matter of accurate statistics. The popular and prevailing attitudes towards and conception of the condition and of its possessor tend to influence towards desperate concealment rather than to encourage self-revelation. As has been stated before addiction-disease followed the Civil War, occasional cases recently existing and possibly still existing among the few remaining veterans of that struggle, addiction dating back to Civil War medication. The Spanish War and necessary medication added to the list of war-time contracted addiction-disease. Of addiction among those participating in the last war, it is at present wise to simply recognize the condition, and to hope that as the addiction-disease sufferer, developed through necessary war-time medication becomes known, he will not have to carry the addiction stigma of past attitudes and conceptions, and that we shall be in a position to accord him intelligent and humane consideration and handling as a deserving sick man, whose disease was contracted in our defense. CHAPTER X GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SITUATION AND THE NEED OF THE HOUR From the foregoing it is easy to see that the sooner the established facts of the fundamental physical basis and reactions of the addiction-states become matters of medical, sociological, administrative, and lay knowledge, the earlier there will be a rational and practical consideration of the use as well as of the abuse of narcotic drugs, and a beginning of solution of the narcotic drug problem. Lack of knowledge of the fundamental and constant physical reactions and phenomena, and of the characteristic clinical manifestations of this disease, and of the physical suffering of drug deprivation is in a very large measure responsible for failure in its therapeutic handling in the past, and indirectly responsible for whatever is unjust and misdirected in the framing of the various laws, and also for a great part of whatever incompetency and lack of wisdom has appeared in their administration. Lack of knowledge of the disease facts of narcotic addiction is also responsible for the practical absence of widespread provision for humane and intelligent handling, for much of the jeopardy and fear on the part of the medical practitioner towards these cases, and for the existence of conditions resulting in the rapid growth and increase of the worst evils of the present situation.