Addiction to narcotics may be justly termed “the monstrosity of our times.” True, this evil is not as widespread as the addiction to alcohol or tobacco; it is not as slow, insidious, and deadly; nor does it claim the large number of victims the other two do. It is swift and powerful in completely destroying its victim both physically and morally. What is most terrifying about this monster is that it wraps it tentacles around our youth destroying mainly children between the ages of eleven and twenty. This scourge presents the most important national problem of this age since it is one of the direct causes of our present wave of juvenile crimes. It proves to be one of the toughest foes to combat.
Addiction to narcotics is nothing new in itself. It has been in existence and continual application exclusively by adults for thousands of years. Chewing the leaves of the cola and poppy plants as stimulants was a practice employed in India, China, and other countries for many centuries. However, the use of narcotics on a large scale was always mainly confined to the poorest classes of people in the Orient and did not present much of a problem to Western civilization or to the United States, in particular. In the early nineties narcotics began to appear on counters of our drug stores. They were sold freely and indiscriminately until ten years later the Drug Act pronounced this practice illegal and forced it underground.
Of late, tremendous additional tracts of land were devoted to the cultivation of the poppy plant—the main source of cocaine, morphine, and other narcotics by the “Red” government of China under the direction of Soviet Russia with the express purpose of illegally selling the drugs in the democratic countries in order to demoralize their populations and thus make the latter easy targets for subversion and subjugation to the communist rule. At the same time these pirate governments enjoy a tremendous source of revenue by means of which they are able to subsidize the expensive tasks of armed aggression and subversive propaganda.
Greatly adding to this vicious undertaking is the recent introduction and indiscriminate selling of synthetic narcotics: benzedrine, Heroin, barbiturates, and a long line of other drugs—all of them easily and cheaply manufactured in this country. The profits made on selling any of the natural or synthetic narcotics are fabulously and unbelievably enormous. They vary anywhere from 300% to 10,000%! No wonder that selling narcotics has become one of the greatest international rackets; most of the underworld is directly or indirectly involved in it.
However, a great portion of the narcotics are also handled by our medical and pharmaceutical professions, while the food and drink manufacturers and the patent medicine industries are steadily employing both natural and synthetic narcotics as stimulants, preservatives and disguisers in medicines, various commercially prepared foods, and soft drinks.
Among adults, the addiction to narcotics prevails in persons who seek an artificial stimulant in order to cope with the strain of their fast living pace, in those who have built up a resistance to weaker poisons like alcohol and nicotine and crave still stronger stimulants, and in the disillusioned and the ignorant.
In children, the reasons for taking the initial step in the use of narcotics are either curiosity, showing off as big shots, or being victimized by older children who are dope addicts and peddlers of narcotics themselves. Most potential victims of addiction are children who have no parents, those having parents who indulge in various vices, children with no love or guidance in their homes, or those nagged or ridiculed by their parents or schoolmates.
The effects of narcotics are to stimulate or depress the user. Drug addicts use mostly the former type. For a short period after administration whether through smelling, inhaling, swallowing, or injection, the drugs produce a pleasant feeling of exhilaration, followed in stages by physical and mental depression, weakness, dizziness, headache, pains all over the body, stomach distress, vomiting, poor vision and double vision, misjudgment of distances, hallucinations, ringing in the ears, sweating in cold weather, and many other equally horrible reactions.
Additional harmful after-effects of narcotic addiction are the introduction into the blood of drugs mostly in an unsanitary and unsterile condition resulting in infections, ulcers, and unhealing wounds; also, the injection of drugs adulterated with other harmful chemicals. The narcotic habit is painful and next to impossible to get rid of without outside help. It develops tolerance to the drug in the user and requires constant increases in the doses. The addict becomes unable to work or study due to brain-fag and the wasting away of his body; his only concern is to satisfy the continued craving; his only thoughts are on how to obtain more of the drug. Since, by continual use, the body develops a resistance to the drug, more and more of it is needed to satisfy the craving. Drugs are outrageously expensive; the average addict is unable to provide for drugs with his own means. He consequently has to resort to stealing, robbing, and even killing in order to obtain his supply. Death results from overloading the body with poisons, the overdose never being the same with any two individuals.
The conventional treatment of addicts consists of quarantining them and administering reduced doses of the drug they use or other drugs, or else of totally withholding all drugs. In any case, the patient suffers terribly from pains in every muscle of his body and a craving for the drug which drives him crazy to the extent that he attacks the people around him, and sometimes even kills himself. Only about fifteen per cent of addicts conventionally treated in our federal narcotic hospitals recover completely, all the rest go back to using the drug again just as soon as they get out of the institution.
What can be done to prevent and overcome this dreadful situation and its consequences? We must admit this is by no means an easy problem to cope with. There are three stages of combating the narcotic plague — prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation.
In the line of prevention the first step is up to our government in trying to stop the illegal traffic of drugs into this country. Pressure should be applied in the United Nations to limit the production of narcotics in all countries to amounts necessary only for urgent medical purposes. Unfortunately, next to nothing can be accomplished by negotiating with or appealing to the governments of the communist-controlled countries. With them, narcotics are a powerful weapon in their relentless warfare against the free countries. The men at the head of Soviet Russia and its satellites are people who have no morals and will stop at nothing to achieve their ignoble ends. The reality of the matter is that up till today we have been able to accomplish nothing outside of the farfetched hope that some day the present communist governments will be supplanted by more humanitarian elements and the illicit narcotic traffic into the democratic countries will finally be abolished.
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