HOW IT DESTROYS | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 3, 1887

HOW IT DESTROYS.

Speaking of the effects of alcohol, the New York Pharmaceutical Record says:—

"Alcohol does not destroy its victims, in most cases, suddenly, as in the dead sleep of profound intoxication or in the wild, maniacal ravings of delirium tremens. It is usually by slow and measured steps, by inducing cirrhosis of the liver, Bright's disease of the kidneys, ascites, rheumatism, rheumatic gout, defective vision, fatty degeneration of the heart, arteries, and muscular system, which finally end in paralysis, imbecility, and insanity, alcohol encircles its victims in irremediable and everlasting ruin. Without doubt alcohol occasions a vast amount of disease over the face of this mighty republic, and carries death, destruction, dishonor, and shame into thousands of happy homes. Alcohol is at the bottom of a large proportion of the crime committed in the United States. Alcohol dethrones reason and poisons the fountains of sentiment and morals, and is even more destructive upon the moral and intellectual nature than upon the physical nature of man."

THE Manufacturer's Gazette says that "the increasing use of opiates and other drugs intended to either allay or excite nervous activity is an evil in this country equal to, if not worse than, the excessive use of intoxicating liquors. Comparatively little is said of it in public journals, and there is no such crusade against it as there is against intemperance. The insidiousness of the drug habit makes it the more dangerous.

"The great majority of those who begin the use of opium, morphine, and chloral do it under prescription of physicians, and often without being allowed to know what they are taking until the habit is thoroughly fastened upon them. Such trifling with life and health by physicians should be made a criminal offense, and its victim or his friends should prosecute for malpractice to the full extent of the law.

"It is a safe rule to take no medicines from any except those known to be trustworthy; and no physician is trustworthy who refuses to inform patients of possible danger from the drugs he may prescribe. So many have been wrecked in this way that the old secrecy about the composition of medicines is out of place, at least to the extent of informing patients that they are taking nothing liable to bind them in the hopeless slavery of some drug habit."

DEPLORABLE STATISTICS.—Archdeacon Farrar, in an address at the Westminster town hall lately, said that much of the present distress in London, and much of the very bitterest and the most intolerable part of it, was caused by drink, not always by drunkenness, but by drinking habits. It was a remarkable fact that one person out of every five in London died either in the hospital or in the workhouse. One person in every three belonging to the poorer classes died either in the hospital or in the workhouse.—Philadelphia Press.