Charles Barnes Towns

“ I have been told that to require a consultation of physicians before the administration of a habit-forming drug would put upon the patient a financial burden which he should not be asked to bear. No fallacy could be more complete. There is in the United States to-day not one victim of the drug habit who, knowing as he does the intense suffering it entails, would not rather have given up ten years of his life and been forced to put a mortgage on his soul than to have had this habit fastened on him. Money? Money is nothing! ”

“ Thus the battle against alcohol will become, as the battle against tuberculosis has become, a campaign of education.
It is my belief that every community should have an institution in which hopeless inebriates may be kept away from their cups and away from sexual association. There they should be put at useful occupations; full advantage should be taken of whatever productive capacity alcohol may have left in them; and they should be maintained in a state as happy as their capabilities may permit until they mercifully die. ”

“ Arguments in favor of tobacco for any physical reason are baseless. It does not aid digestion, preserve the teeth, or disinfect, and it is not a remedy for anything. The good it does—and no habit can become general, of course, unless it does apparent good—can only be mental. Let me admit at once that smoking confers mental satisfaction. It seems to give one companionship when one has none, something to do when one is bored, keeps one from feeling hungry when one is hungry, and blunts the edge of hardship and worry. This sums up the agreeable results of tobacco. ”

“ The mere fact that a man has once been intoxicated should not justify his discharge from employment in which at normal times he is useful and efficient. Both for his sake and for his employer’s, efforts should be made toward reform; for it is not infrequently the case that the man who has lost control through drink is in normal conditions the best man in the office, factory, or workshop. That is one of the chief tragedies of the problem of alcohol. ”

“ The alcoholic who is punished by incarceration in a cell is harmed, not helped, by it; the man who, on the mythical chance of reform is shunted off to a state establishment, or who is sent by prosperous friends to board at some expensive sanatorium, stands to lose, not gain, by his experience. These methods merely beg the question. They recognize the drunkard as a liability and put him out of sight; they do nothing toward his real regeneration. The inebriates’ farm is based on the same utter misconception as the fashionable sanatorium to which the rich man’s son may be committed. ”

“ Addiction to a drug incapacitates the pharmacist for filling prescriptions. Often the slightest deviation from a precise formula in either quantity or ingredient is of the gravest consequence, and hence the utmost care should be used to insure the scrupulousness of one on whom such responsibility rests. As long as he is accountable to no one, or even accountable to the Government only on a business basis, there can be no safety for the public. If he may sell to any purchaser other than a physician, he may always supply his own wants. ”

“ If there is no length to which a drug victim will not go rather than find himself deprived of his drug, there is no length to which he will not go in order to obtain relief from a habit the existence of which fills him with horror. ”

“ Until legislation forced the victims of drug habits by hundreds into Bellevue Hospital in New York, this great institution rarely had one as a patient. The sufferer from tuberculosis would seek this hospital, feeling that there he might find measurable relief; the drug-user shunned it, for he was doubtful of receiving aid, and above all things he dreaded deprivation without relief. No man or woman will go to any institution for relief from the drug habit where the only treatment offered is that of enforced deprivation, for he or she knows perfectly well that deprivation means death. ”

“ He is likely to deny that he has developed a craving for alcohol, and emphatically and indignantly to assert that his drunkenness has been merely incidental to the social spirit, an accident, and in general a thing of no primary importance. The thought that without help there is even a possibility that he may drift from bad to worse is abhorrent to him, and is indignantly repudiated. He will cheerfully admit that many other men of his acquaintance have fallen victims to the effects of alcohol, but he will vehemently deny the possibility of a similar fall on his own part. ”

“ The fact that there are not more drug-taking doctors speaks volumes for the high character of the profession. The physician has such drugs constantly at hand. The more a man knows of their insidious action and the more he handles them, the more cautious he feels [Pg 31] himself to be, and the more confident that he can discontinue the use of them whenever he chooses. Any fear that the layman may have of them is due less to the dread of being personally overcome than to the mystery which surrounds them; but for the physician they have no such mystery. ”

“ In ninety families out of a hundred any one who looks can find such an excuse for his own weakness. In thousands of instances physicians have taken seriously such excuses offered by their patients, but the doctor who listens to his patient’s babble of heredity is sure to be misled, and the patient who believes this too commonly accepted theory robs himself of his strongest weapon against alcohol—his own conviction of his personal responsibility and power for self-help. ”

“ Nothing else at the present time is contributing so surely to the degeneration of mankind as tobacco, because, while its damage is less immediately acute than that done by alcohol or habit-forming drugs, it is, aside from its own evil effects, a tremendous contributory factor to the use of both. There is nothing to be said in its favor save that it gives pleasure, and this argument has no more force in the case of tobacco than in the case of opium. ”

“ A library might be filled with books, fictional and other, glorifying alcohol and the good-fellowship and conviviality that it is supposed to promote. [Pg 246] One might search a long time for a victim of any drug habit who would speak with affection of the material which has enthralled him. No poet has ever written any song glorifying morphine. There is no drug-user in the world who would not hail with joy any opportunity that might lead to his relief. The drug-victim investigates every hint of hope with eager interest, reading, intelligently questioning, experimenting. ”

“ Every one who has become addicted to a drug has started out with small occasional doses, and no one has expected to fall a victim to the habit; indeed, many have been totally unaware that the medicine they were taking contained any drug whatever. Thus, the danger being one that threatens us all, it is every man’s business to insist that the entire handling and sale of the drug be under as careful supervision as possible. It is not going too far to say that up to the present time most drug-takers have been unfairly treated by society. ”

“ It is difficult to make any lad believe that he need not be a fool because his father is one. Yet in most cases to save a boy from the demonstrable ills of tobacco-using entails just this course of reasoning. Orators and essayists from the beginning of time have found a stumbling-block in preaching to their followers virtues they admire and value, but do not themselves possess. The father who forbids his son to smoke because it is harmful and expensive, while his own person reeks with it, is not likely to impress the lad very vividly with either the force or the honesty of his argument. ”

“ I have often endeavored to imagine the thrill of horror which must chill a doctor’s soul when he finds that this has happened. His position is a dreadful one. He has lost control. He must tell no one, for if he tells, disgrace and the loss of his means of livelihood will be but matters of a short time. ”

“ It is inconceivable that the syringe should have gone so long without being considered the chief factor in the promotion of a habit which now alarms the world, and that as yet only one state legislature should have seen fit to regulate its sale. Restricting the sale of the syringe to physicians, or to buyers on a physician’s prescription, is the first step toward placing the grave responsibility for the drug habit on the shoulders of those to whom it belongs. ”

“ A man who has achieved nothing up to the point where he has become addicted to excessive alcoholism will rarely repay the trouble involved in an effort to preserve him from his folly, although of course his preservation from it might be of general social service as a means of saving the public money that otherwise might be expended in the reparation of the work of his destructive tendencies, besides the public expense involved in police, court, and prison economy that prevents him from the opportunity of indulgence. But thousands of decent men annually yield to alcohol, and are wrecked by it. ”

“ He shrinks from publicity with a horror that is backed by an acute consciousness of his condition, while the victim of alcohol becomes so mentally distorted or deadened that he takes no thought of consequences, cares nothing for publicity, and finds himself unable to avoid public exhibitions of a kind that put him into the hands of the police. Public hospitals do not tempt the drug-user for, having investigated them, he knows that they are not competent to give him real relief. ”

“ THE DRUG-TAKING PHYSICIAN, NURSE, AND PHARMACIST
Among the widely varying classes of drug-users, three in particular are a source of the [Pg 30] gravest danger: the drug-taking physician, nurse, and pharmacist. To realize this, one has merely to recall that the drug-taker is a confirmed evader of responsibility; and the physician, of all men, is in a responsible position. He must not forget or break his appointments; he must realize the effects of the medicines he is prescribing; if a surgeon, his work must never be below its best. ”

“ There are no circumstances in which it is advisable for a physician in private practice to attempt to handle a case of chronic alcoholism in the patient’s own environment. Efforts to do this are constantly made, with the result that many needlessly die from lack of alcohol, while an even more tragic result is the unnecessary entrance, first into the psychopathic wards of our hospitals and thence into our asylums for the insane, of innumerable cases which needed intelligent treatment only for alcoholism or drug addiction. ”

“ One detail of the peril to society which may accrue from a general cessation of the drug traffic without the provision of proper facilities for the care of those who have been its victims is that those who are accustomed to drugs, on being suddenly deprived of them, almost invariably turn to alcohol for stimulation and, without being the least relieved of the drug habit, with abnormal speed become alcoholics. Modern society presents few spectacles of suffering more acute than that endured by the drunken drug-fiend. Few persons, moreover, are so dangerous to its welfare. ”