The Menace of Drugs

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 29, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 47.

The Menace of Drugs

ALCOHOL is not the only foe the true temperance reformer has to fight. It is a great one, it is true — one of the greatest; but it is only one of an ever increasing band of robbers and assassins of health, wealth, morals, character, life.

Great battles have been fought in politics against intoxicating liquors, and decided victories have been won in many states and communities; but it is a sad fact that the consumption of alcohol has been increasing in the civilized lands of earth. And it is a question, a serious question whether, if the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks, of distilled and malt liquors, were absolutely prohibited in this country, a far greater battle would not lie before the men and women who would save their fellows from physical, mental, and moral enslavement. First among the enemies which face us is the narcotic, opium, and its derivatives, morphin and laudanum. Its use is increasing. Prohibited tho it may be, seized tho many of the illegal shipments are, much of it gets through the customs by the cunning of the devotees of the drug or of those who fatten on its sale.

It is smuggled into the country in Bibles hollowed out, in baled hay, in seat cushions, in mattresses on which apparently lay a groaning, dying Chinaman, in the carcass of a hammerhead shark, in cabbage heads scooped out, in the sand of a flowerpot, in cavities in the oars of a row boat, in a dozen or a hundred other ways not yet discovered. Dr. P. Harvey Middleton is authority for the statement (Good Health, November, 1910) that on "a conservative estimate there are to-day from 3,000 to 5,000 Americans — male and female — who are incurably addicted to the smoking of opium." Apart from smoking opium, which is smuggled in, the use of the drug has doubled in this country in the last forty years.

Some Alluring Forms of "Dope"
(Photograph by the Bureau of Chemistry, U. S. Department of Agriculture)
Catarrh Cures Which Contain Cocain
(Photograph by the Bureau of Chemistry, U. S. Department of Agriculture) — Some Alluring Forms of "Dope" (Photograph by the Bureau of Chemistry, U. S. Department of Agriculture) Catarrh Cures Which Contain Cocain (Photograph by the Bureau of Chemistry, U. S. Department of Agriculture)

But he tells us that "this is only one item in a startling list, for irrefutable statistics prove that from New York to San Francisco, and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, there is a steady increase also in the consumption of acetanilid, acetphenetidin, antipyrin, phenacetin, caffein, codein, dionin, and heroin."

Another of the destructive narcotics, which "wrecks its victim more swiftly and surely than even opium," is cocaine, and of which "there is an enormous quantity used in this country." "It is estimated that over 50,000 ounces go to wreck the bodies, minds, and souls of its unhappy victims," while 125,000 ounces are used in legitimate ways. Its use as an intoxicant has spread alarmingly, and especially among Negroes, we are told. Dr. Middleton declares, "No home is safe, no business secure, against the ravages of some unsuspected cocaine fiend, whose irresponsibilities may be all unknown." In New Jersey it was discovered that wretched reprobates were selling it to school children, who were bribed by candy or coerced by threats to inhale the drug, and thus some of the children became cocaine fiends.

Five hundred dollars a day, we are told, is spent along Seventh Avenue, New York, for the destroying drug, despite the united effort of legislature, Board of Health, and police force. Its curse is over all grades of society.

"Headache powders" contain acetanilid, a dangerous drug; others, chloral hydrate, still more dangerous. A case is noted of a young woman, "a shining light in the temperance cause," who would not for a moment permit a drop of intoxicating liquor in her home, who was discovered frequently intoxicated from the use of a patent medicine "tonic" which she used to brace her up. Her cellar was replete with the empty tonic bottles.

Children are made neurotics or killed by poisonous drugs in soothing sirups, containing heroin and morphin. Some contain cocaine. Anodynes, "colic cures," "infants' friends," teething concoctions, etc., contain opium, heroin, codein, morphin, chloroform, cocaine, cannabis indica, chloral hydrate, or some other powerful, habit-forming drug, notwithstanding the lie, "Contains nothing injurious to the youngest babe."

Catarrh remedies are another channel through which these accursed agencies of the devil are spread abroad. The dreaded asthma sufferers are gulled in the same way. Dr. Middleton says: "America is the home of millions of drug victims. No man will ever know the exact extent of the evil, for the secret of most of the habitués dies with them, and the most common cases, that is, those using cocaine, morphin, and opium, are short-lived, most of them dying within ten years after they have contracted the habit."

"Mail order treatments" to the number of a score and a half are on the market to-day, most of them containing the very drug or drugs for which they are advertised as antidotes. "Some of them Dr. L. F. Kebler, a high authority, states contain sufficient poison to kill a dozen men."

Temperance reform should take on a broader basis. It ought to include every habit-forming drug, compound, decoction, weed, plant, etc., in the whole long list of stimulants and narcotics, from tea and tobacco to alcohol, absinthe, and cocaine.