The Narcotic Drug Problem

CHAPTER I. Introduction

INTRODUCTION

It is a fact becoming more and more obvious that too little study and effort to interpret their physical condition have been given to those unfortunates suffering from narcotic drug addiction.

We have neglected their disease in its origin and subsequent progress and formed our conception of its character from fully developed conditions and spectacular end-results. We have seen some of them during or after our fruitless efforts at treatment, their tortures and poor physical condition overcoming their resolutions, until they plead for and attempted to obtain more of their drug. We have seen others exhausted, starved, with locked-up elimination, toxic from self-made poisons of faulty metabolism, worn with the struggle of concealment and hopeless resistance, and for the time being more or less irresponsible beings, made so, not because of their addiction-disease itself, but because they were hopeless and discouraged and did not know which way to turn for relief.

What literature has appeared on the subject has usually pictured them as weak-minded, deteriorated wretches, mental and moral derelicts, pandering to morbid sensuality; taking a drug to soothe them into supposed dream states and give them languorous delight; held by most of us in dislike and disgust, and regarded as so depraved that their rescue was impossible and they unworthy of its attempt.

We have overlooked, ignored or misinterpreted intense physical agony and symptomatology, and regarded failure to abstain from narcotics as evidence of weak will-power or lack of desire to forego supposed morbid pleasure. We have prayed over our addicts, cajoled them, exhorted them, imprisoned them, treated them as insane and made them social outcasts; either refused them admission to our hospitals or turned them out after ineffective treatment with their addiction still fastened to them. To a great extent the above has been their experience and history.

In great numbers they have realized our failure to appreciate their condition and to remedy it, and have after desperate trials of quacks, charlatans and exploited “cures,” finally accepted their slavery and by regulation of their drug and life, their addiction unsuspected, maintained a socially and economically normal existence. Some failing in this, perhaps broken and impoverished, their addiction recognized, have become social and economic derelicts and often public charges.

From these last, together with the addicted individuals from the class of the fundamentally unfit, we have painted our addiction picture. Confined and observed by the custodial official and the doctor of the institution of correction and restraint, or concealed as family skeletons in many homes, descriptions of them have given to the narcotic addicts as a whole their popular status--cases of mental and moral disorder due to supposed drug action or habit deterioration, and based upon inherent lack of mental and moral stamina.

It was with the above conception of these addiction conditions that I began my work in the Alcoholic, Narcotic and Prison Service of Bellevue Hospital, attracted to the service not by hope of helping nor by interest in “jags” and “dope fiends” as I then considered them, but by the mass of clinical material available for surgical and medical diagnosis and study which was daily admitted to those wards. When I left the service after sixteen months of day and night observation, with personal oversight and attempt to care for in the neighborhood of a thousand admissions a month, my early and faulty conception of narcotic addicts was replaced by a settled conviction that these cases were primarily medical problems. I realized that these patients were people sick of a definite disease condition, and that until we recognized, understood and treated this condition, and removed the stigma of mental and moral taint from those cases in which it did not exist, we should make little headway towards solution of the problem of addiction.

It is a fact that the narcotic drugs may afford pleasurable sensations to some of those not yet fully addicted to them, and that this effect has been sought by the mentally and morally inferior purely for its enjoyment for the same reasons and in the same spirit that individuals of this type tend to yield themselves to morbid impulses, curiosities, excesses and indulgences. Experience does not teach them intelligence in the management of opiate addiction and they tend to complicate it with cocaine and other indulgence, increasing their irresponsibility and conducing to their earlier self-elimination.

Wide and varied experience, however, hospital and private, with careful analysis of history of development, and consideration of the individual case, demonstrates the fact that a majority of narcotic addicts do not belong to this last described type of individuals. It will be found upon careful examination that they are average individuals in their mental and moral fundamentals. Among them are many men and women of high ideals and worthy accomplishments, whose knowledge of narcotic administration was first gained by “withdrawal” agonies following cessation of medication, who have never experienced pleasure from narcotic drug, are normal mentally and morally, and unquestionably victims of a purely physical affliction.

The neurologist, the alienist, the psychologist, the law-maker, the moralist, the sociologist and the penologist have worked in the field of narcotic addiction in the lines of their special interests, and interpreted in the lights of their special experiences. Each has reported conditions and results as he saw them, and advised remedies in accordance with his understanding. With very few exceptions little has been heard from the domain of clinical medicine and from the internist. It is only here and there that the practitioner of internal medicine has been sufficiently inspired by scientific interest to seriously consider narcotic drug addiction and to make a clinical study of its actual physical manifestations and phenomena.

The idea that narcotic drug addiction should be accorded a basis of weakness of will--neurotic or otherwise, inherent or acquired--and should be classed as a morbid appetite, a vice, a depraved indulgence, a habit, has been generally unquestioned and the prevailing dogma for many years. It is very unfortunate that we have paid so little attention to material facts and have made so little effort to explain constant physical symptomatology on a basis of physical cause, and that there has not been a wider recognition and more general acceptation of scientific work that has been done.

Despite the years of effort that have been devoted to handling the narcotic addict on the basis of inferiority and neurotic tendencies, and of weakness of will and perverted appetite--in spite of exhortation, investigation, law-making and criminal prosecution--in spite of the various specific and special cures and treatments--narcotic addiction has increased and spread in our country until it has become a recognized menace calling forth stringent legislation and desperate attempts at administrative and police control. And though a large amount of money has been spent in custodial care and sociological investigation on the prevailing theories, and in various legislation, much of it necessary and much of it wisely planned, we have made but little progress in the real remedy of conditions.

It is becoming apparent that in spite of all the work which has been done--in spite of all the efforts which have been made--there has been practically no change in the general situation, and there has been no solution of the drug problem.

In analyzing results of efforts and arriving at causes for failure, it seems to me that it is always wise to begin at the beginning, and to ask ourselves whether we have not started out with an entirely erroneous conception of our basic problem. Is it not possible that instead of punishing a supposedly vicious man, instead of restraining and mentally training a supposedly inherent neuropath and psychopath, we should have been treating an actually sick man? Is it not possible that the addict did not want his drug because he enjoyed it but that he wanted it because his body required it? This is not only possible--it is fact--and the whole secret of our failure has been the misconception of our problem based on our lack of understanding of the average narcotic drug addict and his physical conditions.

In my own experience as a medical practitioner I know that non-appreciation of this fact was the cause of my early failures; and I further know that from the beginning of appreciation of this fact dates whatever progress I have made and whatever success I have attained. In my early efforts as Resident Physician to the Alcoholic and Prison Wards of Bellevue Hospital, devoid of previous experience in the treatment of narcotic addiction, directed by my available literature and by the teachings of those in my immediate reach, I followed the accepted methods. I tried the methods of the alienist; I tried the exhortations of the moralist; I tried sudden deprivation of the drug; I tried rapid withdrawal of the drug; I tried slow reduction of the drug; I tried well-known special “treatment.” In other words I exhausted the methods of handling narcotic drug addiction of which I knew. My results were, in these early efforts, one or two possible “cures,” but as a whole suffering and distress without relief; in a word failure.

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