Hi Folks,
It was a pleasant surprise to receive the Saturday Evening Post article on
Narcotics Anonymous authored by Jerome Ellison, whom we called Jerry. Jerry
wrote a very nice spiritual biography called "Report to the Creator" which
detailed his own drinking life and recovery. I visited him once in his home
in Guilford, Connecticut. He was also the author of "Twelve Steps and the
Older Member," a Grapevine series which he later published privately as a
book.
He passed away many years ago, but did stay sober all his life.
Mel Barger
~~~~~~~~ Mel Barger melb@accesst ~~~~~~~~ Mel Barger melb@...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Blair" <jblair@...>
To: <AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 4:34 PM
Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] NA History -Saturday Evening Post, August 7, 1954


>
> These Drug Addicts
>
> Cure One Another
>
>
>
> By Jerome Ellison
>
>
> A new approach to a tragic social problem - drug addiction -
> has been found by the ex-addicts of Narcotics Anonymous. Here's how they
> help users out of their horrible habit - as in the case of the mining
> engineer, the hot musician, the minister and the movie actor.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Tom, a young musician just out of a job on a big-name dance
> band, was pouring out the story of his heroin addiction to a small
> gathering in a New York City Y.M.C.A. He told how he started three years
> ago, "fooling around for thrills, never dreaming to get a habit." His band
> went on the road. One night in Philadelphia he ran out of his drug and
> became so shaky he couldn't play. It was the first time the band
> management knew of his habit. He was promptly sent home.
>
> "Music business is getting tough with junkies," Tom said.
>
> His audience was sympathetic. It was composed of former drug
> addicts who had found freedom from addiction. They met twice weekly to
> make this freedom secure, and worked to help other addicts achieve it. The
> New York group, founded in 1950 and called Narcotics Anonymous, is one of
> several which have been piling up evidence that the methods of Alcoholics
> Anonymous can help release people from other drugs than alcohol - drugs
> such as opium, heroin, morphine and the barbiturates.
>
> The groups enter a field where patients are many and cures few.
> The population addicted to opiates has been placed by competent but
> incompatible authorities at 60,000 and at 180,000. The Federal Bureau of
> Narcotics estimates that the traffic in illegal opium derivatives grosses
> $275,000,000 a year. About 1000 people a month are arrested for violation
> of Federal, state or local laws regulating the opiates. Addiction to the
> barbiturates, it is believed, involves more people. There are some 1500
> known compounds of barbituric acid, some of them having pharmaceutical
> names and others street names such as yellow jacket, red devil and
> goofball.
>
> Addicts work up to doses sufficient to kill a non-addicted
> person or an addict with a lesser tolerance. In New York recently, three
> young addicts met and took equal portions of heroin. Two felt no unusual
> reactions; the third went into convulsions and in a few hours was dead.
> Many barbiturate users daily consume quantities, which would be lethal to
> a normal person. Others have demonstrated an ability to use barbiturates
> for years, under medical supervision, without raising their consumption to
> dangerous levels.
>
> The drug addict, like the alcoholic, has long been an enigma to
> those who want to help him. Real contact is most likely to be made, on a
> principle demonstrated with phenomenal success by Alcoholics Anonymous, by
> another addict. Does the prospect, writhing with shame, confess to
> pilfering from his wife's purse to buy drugs? His sponsor once took his
> children's lunch money. Did he steal the black bag of a loyal family
> doctor? As a ruse to flimflam druggists, his new friend once impersonated
> a doctor for several months. The N.A. member first shares his shame with
> the newcomer. Then he shares his hope and finally, sometimes, his
> recovery.
>
> To date, the A.A. type of group therapy has been an effective
> ingredient of "cures" - the word as used here means no drugs for a year or
> more and an intent of permanent abstinence. - in at least 200 cases. Some
> of these, including Dan, the founder of the New York group, had been
> pronounced medically hopeless. The "Narco" Group in the United States
> Public Health Service Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, has a transient
> membership of about eighty men and women patients. The group mails a
> monthly newsletter, The Key, free to those who want it, currently a list
> of 500 names. Many of these are interested but nonaddicted
> friends. Most are "mail-order members" of the group-addicts who have left
> the hospital and been without drugs for periods ranging from a few weeks
> to several years. The H.F.D. (Habit Forming Drug) Group is a loosely
> affiliated fellowship of California ex-addicts who keep "clean" - the
> addicts term for a state of abstinence- by attending Alcoholics Anonymous
> meetings with volunteer A.A. sponsors. The Federal prison at Lorton,
> Virginia, has a prisoner group which attracts thirty men to its weekly
> meetings. Narcotics Anonymous in New York is the sole "free world"-outside
> of institution-group which conducts its own weekly open-to-the-public
> meetings in the A.A. tradition.
>
> Today's groups of former addicts mark the convergence of two
> historic narratives, one having to do with alcohol, the other with opium.
> References to the drug of the poppies go back to 4000 B.C. According to
> Homer, Helen of Troy used it in a beverage guaranteed to abolish care.
> Opium was employed to quiet noisy children as early as 1552 B.C. De Quincy
> and Coleridge are among the famous men to whom it brought disaster. In its
> dual role it appears today, through its derivatives, as the friend of man
> in surgery and his enemy in addiction.
>
> The alcoholic strand of the story may be taken up in the Zurich
> office of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, one day late in 1933. At that
> time the eminent doctor was obliged to impart an unpleasant bit of news to
> one of his patients, an American businessman who had come for help with a
> desperate drinking problem. After months of effort and repeated relapses,
> the doctor admitted that his treatment had been a failure.
>
> "Is there, then," the patient asked, "no hope?" Only if a
> profound religious experience were undergone, he was told. How, he wanted
> to know, could such an experience be had? It could not be obtained on
> order, the doctor said, but if one associated with religious-minded people
> for a while _______
>
>
>
> Narcotics Anonymous - A.A.'s Young Brother
>
>
>
> The American interested himself in Frank Buchman's Oxford
> Group, found sobriety, and told an inebriate friend of his experience. The
> friend sobered up and took the message to a former drinking partner, a New
> York stockbroker named Bill. Though he was an agnostic who had never had
> much use for religion, Bill sobered up. Late in 1935, while on a business
> trip to Akron, Ohio, he was struck by the thought that he wouldn't be able
> to keep his sobriety unless he passed on the message. He sought out a
> heavy drinking local surgeon named Bob and told him the story to date.
> They sat down and formulated a program for staying sober-a program
> featuring twelve Suggested Steps and called Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill
> devoted full time to carrying the A.A. message, and the news spread. The
> now-famous article by Jack Alexander in The Saturday Evening Post of March
> 1, 1941, made it nationally known, and by 1944 there were A.A. groups in
> the major cities.
>
> In June of that year an inebriate mining engineer whom we'll
> call Houston "hit bottom" with his drinking in Montgomery, Alabama, and
> the local A.A.'s dried him up. Houston gobbled the A.A. program and began
> helping other alcoholics. One of the drunks he worked with-a sales
> executive who can be called Harry-was involved not only with alcohol but
> also morphine. A.A. took care of the alcoholic factor, but left Harry's
> drug habit unchanged. Interested and baffled, Houston watched his new
> friend struggle in his strange self-constructed trap.
>
> The opiate theme of the narrative now reappears. Harry's
> pattern had been to get roaring drunk, take morphine to avoid a hang-over,
> get drunk again and take morphine again. Thus he became "hooked"-addicted.
> He drove through a red light one day and was stopped by a policeman. The
> officer found morphine and turned him over to Federal jurisdiction, with
> the result that Harry spent twenty-seven months at Lexington, where both
> voluntary and involuntary patients are accommodated, as a prisoner. After
> his discharge he met Houston and, through A.A., found relief from the
> booze issue. The drug problem continued to plague him.
>
> During this period, Houston, through one of those coincidences
> which A.A.'s like to attribute to a Higher Power, was transferred by his
> employers to Frankfort, Kentucky, just a few miles from Lexington.
> "Harry's troubles kept jumping through my brain," Houston says. "I was
> convinced that the twelve Suggested Steps would work as well for drugs as
> for alcohol if conscientiously applied. One day I called on Dr. V.H.
> Vogel, the medical officer then in charge at Lexington. I told him of our
> work with Harry and offered to assist in starting a group in the hospital.
> Doctor Vogel accepted the offer and on Feb. 16, 1947, the first meeting
> was held. Weekly meetings have been going on ever since."
>
>
>
> The Phenomenon of "Physical Dependence"
>
>
>
> Some months later, in a strangely woven web of coincidence,
> Harry reappeared at "Narco" as a voluntary patient and began attending
> meetings. He was discharged, relapsed, and in short time was back again.
> "This time," he says, "it clicked." He has now been free from both alcohol
> and drugs for more than five years. Twice he has returned to tell his
> story at meetings, in the A.A. tradition of passing on the good word.
>
> In the fall of 1948 there arrived at Lexington an addict named
> Dan who had been there before. It was, in fact, his seventh trip; the
> doctors assumed that he'd continue his periodic visits until he died. This
> same Dan later founded the small but significant Narcotics Anonymous group
> in New York. Dan's personal history is the story of an apparently
> incurable addict apparently cured.
>
> An emotionally unsettled childhood is the rule among addicts,
> and Dan's childhood follows the pattern. His mother died when he was three
> years old, his father when he was four. He was adopted by a spinster
> physician and spent his boyhood with his foster mother, a resident doctor
> in a Kansas City hospital, and with her relatives in Missouri and
> Illinois. When he was sixteen he developed an ear ailment and was given
> opiates to relieve the pain. During and after an operation to correct the
> condition he received frequent morphine injections. Enjoying the mood of
> easy, floating forgetfulness they induced, he malingered.
>
> Living in a large hospital gave Dan opportunities to pilfer
> drugs, and for six months he managed keep himself regularly supplied. An
> addict at the hospital taught him how to inject himself, so for a time he
> was able to recapture the mood at will. He was embarrassing his foster
> mother professionally, however, and though not yet acknowledging the fact
> to himself, was becoming known locally as an addict. Sources of drugs
> began to close up, and one day there was no morphine to be had. He went
> into an uncontrollable panic which grew worse each hour.
>
> There followed muscular cramps, diarrhea, a freely running nose, tears
> gushing from his eyes, and two sleepless, terror-filled days and nights.
> It was Dan's first experience with the mysterious withdrawal sickness
> which is experienced sooner or later by every addict.
>
> In one of the strangest phenomena known to medicine, the body
> adjusts to the invasion of certain drugs, altering its chemistry in a few
> weeks to a basis-called "physical dependence"-on which it can no longer
> function properly without the drug. How physical dependence differs from
> habit may be illustrated by imagining a habitual gum chewer deprived of
> gum. His unease would be due to the denial of habit. If he were denied gum
> and also water, on which he is physically dependent, he'd feel an
> increasingly painful craving called thirst. The drug addict's craving is
> called the "abstinence syndrome," or withdrawal sickness. In extreme cases
> it includes everything Dan experienced, plus hallucinations and
> convulsions. Withdrawal of opiates rarely causes the death of a healthy
> person; sudden cessation of barbiturates has been known to. The violent
> phase, which is usually over in two to three days, may under expert care
> be largely avoided. Physical dependence gradually diminishes and ordinary
> habit, of the gum-chewing type, asserts itself.
>
> This is the interval of greatest vulner-ability, N.A. members
> say, to the addict's inevitable good resolutions. He has formed the habit
> of using his drugs when he feels low. If he breaks off medical supervision
> before he is physically and medically back to par, the temptation to
> relapse may be overwhelming. It is in this period, Dan says, that the
> addict most needs the kind of understanding he finds in N.A. If he yields
> to the call of habit, physical dependence is quickly reestablished and his
> body calls for ever greater doses as the price of peace.
>
> Dan went through the cycle dozens of times. Besides the half
> dozen withdrawals at Lexington, there were several at city and state
> institutions, and numerous attempts at self-withdrawal. He tried sudden
> and complete abstinence, the "cold-turkey" method. He tried relieving the
> withdrawal pangs with alcohol, and found it only cancelled out his ability
> to think, so he automatically returned to drugs. When he attempted
> withdrawal with barbiturates he "just about went goofy."
>
> All this, however, was to come later; in his early twenties he
> had no intention of giving up the use of drugs. Having been spotted as an
> addict in the Kansas City area, he sought fresh fields. He found a job as
> a salesman and traveled several Midwest states. The demands of his habit
> and his scrapes with the law made it hard to hold a job long. Drifting
> from one employment to another, he found himself, in the early 1930's in
> Brooklyn.
>
> His attempts at withdrawal resulted in several extended periods
> of abstinence, the longest of which was three years. When off drugs Dan
> was an able sales executive and a good provider. He married a Staten
> Island girl. They had a son. Dan continued to have short relapses,
> however. Each new one put a further strain on the family tie. For a time,
> to save money for drugs, he used slugs in the subway turnstiles going to
> and from work. He was spotted by a subway detective and spent two days in
> jail. A month later he was caught passing a forged morphine prescription.
> As a result, he was among the first prisoner patients at the new United
> States Public Health Service Hospital for addicts at Lexington, when it
> was opened on May 28, 1935.
>
> After a year there, he made a supreme effort to be rid of drugs
> for good. To keep away from the temptations offered by New York drug
> pushers he found a job with a large Midwest dairy. He worked hard, saved
> his money and sent for his family. By this time, however, it was too late;
> his wife refused to come, and a divorce action was begun. "Her rebuff gave
> me what I thought was a good excuse to go back on drugs," Dan reports.
> After that, his deterioration accelerated. On his seventh trip to
> Lexington, in 1948, he was in a profound depression.
>
> After a month of sullen silence, he began attending the group
> meetings, which were a new feature at the hospital since his last trip. "I
> still wouldn't talk," he reports, "But I did some listening. I was
> impressed by what Houston had to say. Harry came back one time and told us
> his story. For the first time, I began to pray. I was only praying that I
> would die, but at least it was a prayer," He did not die, nor did he
> recover. Within six months of his discharge he was found in possession of
> drugs and sent back to Lexington for a year-his eighth and, as it turned
> out, final trip.
>
> "This time things were different," he says. "Everything Houston
> and Harry had been saying suddenly made sense. There was a lawyer from a
> Southern city there at the time, and a Midwestern surgeon. They were in
> the same mood I was-disgusted with themselves and really ready to change.
> The three of us used to have long talks with Houston every Saturday
> morning, besides the regular meetings." All three recently celebrated the
> fifth anniversary of their emancipation from the drug habit.
>
> Dan, conscious of what seemed to him a miraculous change of
> attitude, returned to New York full of enthusiasm and hope. The twelfth of
> the Suggested Steps was to pass on the message to others who needed help.
> He proposed to form the first outside-of-institution group and call it
> Narcotics Anonymous-N.A. He contacted other Lexington alumni and suggested
> they start weekly meetings.
>
> There were certain difficulties. Addicts are not outstandingly
> gregarious, and when all the excuses were in only three-a house painter
> named Charlie, a barber named Henry and a waiter we'll call George-were on
> hand for the first meeting. There was uncertainty about where this would
> be; nobody it seemed wanted the addicts around. Besides, missionary, or
> "twelfth step," work of the new group would be hampered by the law. When
> the A.A. member is on an errand of mercy he can, if occasion warrants,
> administer appropriate "medicine" to stave off shakes or delirium long
> enough to talk a little sense into the prospect. If the N.A. member did
> so, he'd risk a long term in jail. Drug peddlers were not enthusiastic
> about the new venture. Rumors were circulating discrediting the group.
>
> Out of the gloom, however, came unexpected rays of friendliness
> and help. The Salvation Army made room for meetings at its 46th Street
> cafeteria. Later the McBurney Y.M.C.A., on 23rd Street, offered a meeting
> room. Two doctors backed their oral support by sending patients to
> meetings. Two other doctors agreed to serve on an advisory board.
>
> There were slips and backslidings. Meetings were sometimes
> marred by obstinacy and temper. But three of the original four remained
> faithful and the group slowly grew. Difficult matters of policy were
> worked out by trial and error. Some members once thought that a
> satisfactory withdrawal could be made at home. Some hard nights were
> endured and it was concluded that the doctors were right-for a proper drug
> withdrawal institutional care is necessary. Addicts are not admitted to
> meetings while using drugs. Newcomers are advised to make their withdrawal
> first, then come to N.A. to learn to live successfully without drugs.
>
> Group statisticians estimate that 5000 inquiries have been
> answered, constituting a heavy drain on the group's treasury. Some 600
> addicts have attended one or more meetings, 90 have attained effective
> living without drugs. One of these is a motion picture celebrity, now
> doing well on his own. One relapse after the first exposure to N.A.
> principles seems to have been about par, though a number have not found
> this necessary. "A key fact of which few addicts are aware," Dan says, "is
> that once he's been addicted, a person can never again take even one dose
> of any habit-forming drug, including alcohol and the barbiturates, without
> running into trouble."
>
> The weekly "open"-to the public-meetings are attended by ten to
> thirty persons-addicts, their friends and families and concerned
> outsiders. The room is small and, on Friday evenings when more than
> twenty-five turn up, crowded.
>
> There is an interval of chitchat and visiting, and then, about
> nine o'clock, the secretary, a Brooklyn housewife, mother and
> department -store cashier, opens the meeting. In this ceremony all repeat
> the well-known prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I
> cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to
> know the difference." The secretary then introduces a leader-a member who
> presents the speakers and renders interlocutor's comments from his own
> experience with a drugless life. The speakers-traditionally two in an
> evening-describe their adventures with drugs and with N.A. In two months
> of meetings I heard a score of these case histories. I also charted the
> progress of a newcomer, the young musician named Tom, whose first N.A.
> meeting coincided with my own first reportorial visit.
>
> Within the undeviating certainties of addiction, individual
> histories reveal a wide assortment of personal variations. Harold, an
> optometrist, is a "medical" addict; he got his habit from the prescription
> pad of a doctor who was treating him for osteomyelitis. An outspoken
> advocate of psychotherapy for all, Harold absorbs a certain amount of
> ribbing as the groups "psychiatric salesman." Florence, the
> housewife-cashier-secretary, recently celebrated her first anniversary of
> freedom from morphine, which she first received twenty-five years ago in a
> prescription for the relief of menstrual cramps. Carl, an electrician,
> became interested in the effects of opium smoke thirty years ago, and
> reached a point where he could not function without his daily pipe. He
> eventually switched to heroin and his troubles multiplied.
>
> Manny, an executive in a high-pressure advertising agency, and
> Marian, a registered nurse with heavy administrative responsibilities
> began using morphine to relieve fatigue. Don, Marian's husband, regards
> alcohol as his main addictive drug, but had a bad brush with
> self-prescribed barbiturates before he came to A.A. and then, with Marian,
> to N.A. Pat, another young advertising man, nearly died of poisoning from
> the barbiturates to which he had become heavily addicted. Harold and Carl
> have now been four years without drugs; Manny, three; Marian, Don and Pat,
> one.
>
> Perhaps a third of the membership are graduates of the teen-age
> heroin fad which swept our larger cities a few years ago, and which still
> enjoys as much of a vogue as dope peddlers can promote among the present
> teen-age population. Rita, an attractive daughter of Spanish-American
> Harlem, was one of the group's first members. Along with a number of her
> classmates, she began by smoking marihuana cigarettes-a typical
> introduction to drugs-then took heroin "for thrills." She used the drug
> four years, became desperately ill, went to Lexington and has now been
> free of the habit four years. Fred, a war hero, became a heroin addict
> because he wanted friends. In the teen-age gang to which he aspired, being
> hooked was a badge of distinction. He sought out the pusher who frequented
> the vicinity of his high school and got hooked. There followed seven
> miserable and dangerous years, two of them in combat and one in a
> veteran's hospital. In December of 1953 he came to N.A. and, he says,
> "really found friends."
>
> Lawrence's story is the happiest of all. He came to N.A. early
> in his first addiction, just out of high school, just married, thoroughly
> alarmed at discovering he was addicted, and desperately seeking a way out.
> N.A. friends recommended that he get "blue-grassed," an arrangement by
> which a patient may commit himself under a local statute to remain at
> Lexington 135 days for what the doctors consider a really adequate
> treatment. He attended meetings in the hospital and more meetings when he
> got home. Now happy and grateful, he thanks N.A. His boss recently
> presented him with a promotion; his wife recently presented him with a
> son.
>
> Besides the Friday open meeting there is a Tuesday closed
> meeting at the Y for addicts only. As a special dispensation I was
> permitted to attend a closed meeting, the purpose of which is to discuss
> the daily application of the twelve steps.
>
> The step under discussion the night I was there was No.4:"Make
> a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves." The point was
> raised as to whether this step might degenerate into self-recrimination
> and do more harm than good. Old-timers asserted that this was not the
> proper application. A life of drug addiction, they said, often built up an
> abnormal load of guilt and fear, which could become so oppressive as to
> threaten a relapse unless dealt with. When the addict used step 4 honestly
> to face up to his past, guilt and fear diminished and he could make
> constructive plans for his future.
>
> The Narco meetings at Lexington have borne other fruit. There
> was Charlie, the young GI from Washington, D.C., who once looted first-aid
> kits in the gun tubs of a Navy transport en route to the Philippines and
> took his first morphine out of sheer curiosity. After his Army discharge
> his curiosity led him to heroin and several bad years; then to Lexington,
> where the Narco Group struck a spark. He heard about Dan's work, went to
> New York to see him, and on his return to Washington looked around to see
> what he could do. He discovered that there was a concentration of addicts
> in the Federal penitentiary at Lorton, Virginia. Working with Alcoholics
> Anonymous, which already had meetings in the prison, he obtained
> permission to start a group like the one at Lexington. Now a year old,
> these meetings, called the Notrol Group- Lorton backward-attract the
> regular attendance of about thirty addicts. Washington has no free-world
> group, but Charlie helps a lot of addicts on an individual basis, steering
> them to A.A. meetings for doctrine.
>
> Friendliness of ex-drug addicts with former devotees of alcohol
> sometimes occurs, though Bill, the same who figured so prominently in
> A.A.'s founding, says a fraternal attitude cannot be depended upon. The
> average A.A., he says, would merely look blank if asked about drug
> addiction, and rightly reply that this specialty is outside his
> understanding. There are, however, a few A.A.'s who have been addicted
> both to alcohol and drugs, and these sometimes function as "bridge
> members."
>
> "If the addict substitutes the word 'drugs' whenever he hears
> 'alcohol' in the A.A. program, he'll be helped," Houston says. Many
> ex-addicts, in the larger population centers where meetings run to
> attendances of hundreds, attend A.A. meetings. The H.F.D. (Habit-Forming
> Drug) Group, which is activated by an energetic ex-addict and ex-alcoholic
> of the Los Angeles area named Betty, has dozens of members, but no meeting
> of its own. Individual ex-addicts who are "making it" the A.A. way include
> a minister in a South-eastern state, a politician in the deep South, a
> motion-picture mogul in California and an eminent surgeon of an Eastern
> city. The role call of ex-addict groups is small. There is the parent
> Narco Group, Addicts Anonymous, P.O. Box 2000, Lexington, KY; Narcotics
> Anonymous, P.O. Box 3, Village Station, New York 14, N.Y.; Notrol Group,
> c/o U.S. Penitentiary, Lorton, Va.; H.D.F. Group, c/o Secretary, Bay Area
> Rehabilitation Center, 1458 26th St., Santa Monica, Calif.
>
> A frequent and relevant question asked by the casually
> interested is, "But I thought habit-forming drugs were illegal-where do
> they get the stuff?" The answer involves an interesting bit of history
> explaining how opiates come to be illegal. In the early 1800's doctors
> used them freely to treat the innumerable ills then lumped under the
> heading, "nervousness." Hypodermic injection of morphine was introduced in
> 1856. By 1880, opium and morphine preparations were common drugstore
> items. An 1882 survey estimated that 1 per cent of the population was
> addicted, and the public became alarmed. A wave of legislation swept the
> country, beginning in 1885 with an Ohio statute and culminating in the
> Federal Harrison Narcotic Law of 1914. Immediately after the passage of
> this prohibitory law, prices of opium, morphine and heroin soared. A
> fantastically profitable black market developed. Today, $3000 worth of
> heroin purchased abroad brings $300,000 when finally cut, packaged and
> sold in America.
>
> Among the judges, social workers and doctors with whom I talked
> there is a growing feeling that the Harrison Act needs to be re-examined.
> Dr. Hubert S. Howe, a former Columbia professor of neurology and authority
> on narcotics, says the statute, like the Volstead Act, "removed the
> traffic in narcotic drugs from lawful hands and gave it to criminals." In
> an address before the New York State Medical Society he asserted that the
> financial props could be knocked from the illegal industry by minor
> revisions of present laws and rulings, with no risk of addiction becoming
> more widespread. Doctor Howe proposes a system of regulation similar to
> that of the United Kingdom, which reports only 364 addicts.
>
> Meanwhile the lot of those who become involved with what our
> British cousins rightly call "dangerous drugs" is grim. It is just
> slightly less grim than it might have been five years ago. Since then a
> few addicts have found a way back from the nightmare alleys of addiction
> to a normal life which may seem humdrum enough at times, but which when
> lost, then regained, is found to be a glory.
>
>
>
>
>
> Source: The Saturday Evening Post, August 7, 1954
>
>
>
>
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