It is this class of youthful addicts that has so alarmingly increased since the enforcement of the various narcotic laws. I have previously called attention to this situation, and also to the fact that for this increase the laws themselves are not so much to be blamed as is the totally inadequate meeting of the clinical and therapeutic and educational needs of the narcotic drug situation. There has been practically no organized scientific, medical or public health activity, so far as I know, directed towards the clinical and laboratory investigation of this disease--towards a dispassionate review, analysis and testing out of the truths and errors of its literature--towards an investigation of the scientific and other qualifications and experience of those whose utterances or writings influence medical and lay opinion and action, towards the establishing of pathological and physical facts and reactions and of clinical symptomatology and phenomena as fundamental bases for its rational handling and therapeutics, and for practical education of the public as to its sufferings and dangers. The neglect of this education is largely indirectly responsible for illicit traffic in narcotic drugs. Illicit and underground traffic exists because it is profitable. This is the direct and immediate reason for its existence. Every new addict made of an adventurous youth means a new customer for the smugglers and vendors. If that adventurous youth had been taught the facts of the physical hell of the “withdrawal signs” of opiate addiction-disease--if he knew the sufferings attendant upon body-need for opiate drug--if he knew that any red-blooded animal will develop this physical body need if opiate drug is administered for a sufficiently prolonged period--that no living being is immune to the development of this disease--if he thought of addiction as he thinks of tuberculosis, and as he is now being taught to regard venereal-disease, instead of it as being something vague and surrounded by a halo of adventure and experience, he would not fall an easy victim to the agents of the trafficker. In other words, the most potent activity in the arrest of development of even the vicious and criminal aspects of the narcotic addiction situation lies in education. Laws and their enforcement in the control of the incorrigible and vicious will always be a necessity, but laws and their administration alone are not sufficient for the control of the many-sided addiction situation. Even in the control of smuggling and illicit traffic we need the application of every available influence capable of exertion, not only upon its end results but upon the machinery of its origin and development. As so much of it originates and develops through ignorance, the method of its remedy lies in education, education as to the facts of narcotic drug addiction-disease.