It is ignorance also that has stamped the honest and innocent, worthy and intelligent, and often illustrious sufferer from narcotic addiction-disease with the attributes and characteristics of the inherently irresponsible or otherwise incapable of self-guidance and self-restraint. The ignorance of the facts of addiction-disease has taken from these people even their ordinary legal and public rights in any issue which involved the possible revelation of their addiction. It has placed them in a position where any procedure which might reveal their narcotic medication would expose them to public gaze as members of a popularly despised and unworthy class of individuals. Until very recently the testimony of a known narcotic addict has been almost as a rule of no value in a court of law. Irrespective of a life-time of honesty and accomplishment, the revelation of a minute might destroy the reputation and standing of many years. Whatever the injustices or grievances suffered by an addict, he could not hope to evoke the protection or rights accorded an ordinary individual under statute law without the practical certainty, if his addiction became revealed, of personal, social and economic detriment far in excess of the legal rights to which he was entitled. The continuation of whatever is spurious or unworthy in methods of handling, advertised or otherwise, lies partly in the fact that the former patient cannot afford, however great his physical or other damage, to make public the existence of addiction-disease by the instituting of a suit for malpractice or other civil or criminal procedure. This alone has been one of the factors in lack of progress and in the persistence of narrow vision or false conception. He is in effect, however high his personal, moral and other status, deprived of some of his constitutional rights, simply because he has developed addiction-disease.