The Drug Habit and Medical Treatment
One million “morphine fiends” in the United States! Such is the startling announcement made by the interdenominational committee for the suppression of drug addiction, in a report which they have just issued. Speaking of this report, the Chicago Tribune says:— It is asserted that there are more than one million morphine “fiends” in the United States, and that one person in every hundred is addicted to drugs. The vice is most prevalent among the wealthy classes and among physicians. Many of the latter who have become victims of drugs, have become outcasts. Numbers of them have been reclaimed by the committee, and put on their feet again. And what is the cause of this alarming condition of things? “Doctors,” says the Tribune, “are blamed for the spread of the drug habit for prescribing drugs to alleviate pain, their victims often becoming ‘fiends.’” What a fearful indictment is this of the drug system of treating disease, which is so generally followed by the medical fraternity! A method of treating disease which tends to make the patient a slave to the craving for a deadly drug and to plunge him into physical, mental, and moral ruin, must in the very nature of things be wrong. On the face of it, it is apparent that it was never instituted by the Creator. His work is to save men, not to spread the influences that lead them downward. Such terrible results help us to understand how greatly the world was and is now in need of that part of the message of present truth relating to healthful living and the treatment of the sick by hydrotherapy. Not only does the use of drugs impose upon the patient’s system an additional burden, in the shape of a poison which must be thrown off, thus robbing the patient of the strength needed to combat the disease from which he is suffering, working him far more injury than good, and often being the real cause of death, but as this report announces, it leads its victims unawares into the gulf of the deepest slavery, from which there is but little hope of escape. One million victims of the morphine habit, or the cocaine habit, all because of the use of these insidious, deadly drugs as “medicine”! Verily, it is time to proclaim in trumpet tones the warning against the system which gives such opportunity to this foe of human welfare, and the truth which shows the better system of treating disease upon rational hygienic principles. “Christian Science” and “faith healing” would flourish far less than they do if it were not for a widespread distrust of the use of drugs.