THE DRINK CURSE | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 1, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 26.

THE DRINK CURSE.

The Medical Record, the foremost medical journal in this country, a journal of by no means prohibition or teetotal proclivities, notes with alarm the growing seriousness of the drink evil. In its issue of June 6 its leading editorial is upon this subject, and its relation to insanity. The general situation it outlines as follows:—

Almost every country of the world is taking up the drink question. The authorities in some lands have become seriously alarmed at the inroads which the unbridled consumption of alcohol has made and is making into the prosperity, health, and morals of their people.

In France the unrestricted sale of alcoholic beverages has already brought forth dire results. Prominent French physicians have begun a crusade against the drink habit. In Russia the excessive drinking among the peasantry has impelled the government to step in and take control of the sale of spirituous liquors. Altho in America drinking has never been so common nor carried to such an extent as in Europe, yet even here statistics tell us that there has been a decided increase in the consumption of alcohol. Great Britain has always had an unpleasant reputation as a country whose people were addicted to strong drink on a large scale, and it still, in this respect, retains its position in the front rank. The situation, too, is at the present time aggravated, in that adulteration of beverages containing spirits is the custom everywhere. Too much of the genuine article is bad enough, but when, in place of pure or comparatively pure spirituous beverages, vile concoctions are substituted, the evil is intensified in a corresponding degree.

And then a London authority (Dr. Robert Jones, medical superintendent of Claybury Lunatic Asylum) is quoted as showing that out of the 50,000 certified male lunatics in England and Wales alone 10,900 became insane through strong drink; and of the 60,000 female lunatics 5,700 are insane from the same cause. In the asylum over which Dr. Jones presides, in a period of nine years 3,773 male patients have been admitted, of which 500 were insane from drink, and 4,720 females, of which 594 were insane from alcoholism. For the whole of London during this same period there were received into asylums 2,662 men and 1,677 women “who owed their insanity to alcoholic intemperance.” The editorial thus closes:—

The relation between drink and insanity is far more intimate than it was at one time believed to be. Perhaps the assertion that drink is the most potent cause of mental disorders would now pass without cavil. Certainly the brain is the organ which is most disastrously affected by excessive indulgence in alcohol, for altho other organs may be seriously injured, the outcome of the habit is more frequently mental dissolution.

What a splendid argument is this for prohibition and teetotalism, tho not so intended. Alcohol is never needed as a beverage or a medicine, as thousands of instances—living examples—constantly demonstrate.