Where is the blame for their continued addiction? Certainly not because of lack of effort on their part. Addicted for years, they have tried one after another of the various and diverse treatments and so-called cures without success or benefit. Is the blame theirs for lack of success and cure, or has there been something wrong in our treatment and handling of them? Did we know enough about addiction-disease to treat them intelligently and to exercise upon their cases the same professional skill and technical ability that we have been educated and trained to apply to other diseases? In the light of present available clinical information and study, and in the light of recent and competent laboratory research, we are forced to admit that we have not treated our addiction sufferers with sympathetic understanding and clinical competency, and that the blame for past failure to control the narcotic drug problem rests largely upon the educational inadequacy of the past. We are in a stage of transition in our concepts of, attitude towards, and handling of the narcotic addict. Serious consideration of drug addiction as a problem of clinical and internal medicine, and of experimental laboratory research is a comparatively new thing to a majority of the medical profession, and of course also to legislators and administrators. We should all remember that no matter how strong we are in our beliefs and theories, there are many others whose experiences and results have caused them to hold just as strongly to opposite theories and beliefs, and that we are all on trial for the validity and extent of practical application of our beliefs and theories. Each new theory or belief that is brought forward should be taken simply for record and investigation. Much that we believe to-day we know to-morrow to be based upon misinterpretation and lack of complete information. Much that we believed in the past to apply to and solve conditions, we found later to have been merely based upon observations of distracting incidentals or non-basic aspects and phases. What we need is competent, disinterested, and honest effort to get together and evaluate all available material of whatever sort and from whatever source. If it were possible of accomplishment, it would be of advantage to get together in open and frequent discussion the various workers in the field. We are all partly wrong and partly right. There is no one of us who cannot learn from any one of the others. The real end of effort should be, not to prove one or another of us right, but to take each from the other whatever is of value and all to contribute in true scientific spirit of broad tolerance towards the ideas of others and of willingness to correct or modify ideas and theories of our own, searching for no panaceas or specifics, medical, legislative or administrative, simply hunting for truth wherever we may find it and applying it intelligently to meet the needs of the individual.