Golden Age, August 20, 1930
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The Golden Age
A JOURNAL OF FACT HOPE AND COURAGE
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in this issiu.
THE DRUG TRAFFIC
Greatest single cause of crime Who is responsible for it? How did the World War affect it? Sufferings of drug addicts
WHEN THE WORLD WENT MAD
COLLECTIONS
JUDGMENT OF THE NATIONS
Complete text of second of a series of three addresses by Judge Rutherford, broadcast in watchtower national chain program
every other
WEDNESDAY
five cents a copy one dollar a, year Canada & Foreign 1.50
Volume Xi-No. 285
AUGUST 20, 1930
CONTENTS
LABOR AND ECONOMICS
Chicago 22-percent Idle . . . 752
Massachusetts Old Age Assistance 753 Office Girls in Moscow . . . . 753 $1 a .Week in Sparta .... 754 Hard Conditions in Australia . 755 Britain Worried over Un employ
ment ....... . . 755
Plenty Yet to Do .... . 755 Hew a Soldier Can Get a Pension 756
FINANCE—COMMERCE—TRANSPORTATION
Stock Crash Affects Diamond
Business ........ 753
How Insiders Clean Up . . . 756
Mr. Mellon and the World Bank 756
POLITICAL—DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN
Too Much Soothing Syrup . Blue Laws in Various States Tacoma’s Cheap Power . .
AGRICULTURE AND HUSBANDRY
SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL
Law Versus Justice ..... 751
Collections ........ 752
Special Arrangements for Cardiac
Pupils ........ 752
Two Aprils in Milwaukee . . . 753
Sixscore Thousand New Words 753
Where the Tourists Go . . . 753
Hebrew University in Palestine 753
Indians, Soldiers and Sailors . 754
Anderson Writes Up Bishop Cannon ........756
When the World Went Mad . . 757
MANUFACTURING AND MINING
Magnesium from Michigan . . 752
Forty Years More of Lumber . 754
SCIENCE AND INVENTION
Canadian Two-Way Train Telephone ......... 752
Doing Business at Fifty Miles an Hour.........753
HOME AND HEALTH
The Drug Traffic ..... 739
Health and Fear Campaigns . . 751
Medical Ethics in Los Angeles 755
Too Many Tonsils Removed . . 756
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
School of Magic for Ministers . 755
A Question and answer . . . . 760
Judgment of the Nations . . . 762
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Golden Age
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Volume XI Brooklyn, N. Y., Wednesday, August 20, 1930 Number 285
The Drug Traffic
THE traffic in habit-forming drugs has grown to enormous proportions all over the world. The use of heroin, a derivative of opium, began about 1917. At that time the offenses against the United States narcotic laws were about 1,000 a year; in 1919 they had reached a total of 2,000 a year; in 1921 they passed 4,000; in 1926 they had passed 10,000.
More than half of all the prisoners in the prisons of New York city are narcotic cases: 95 percent of these are youthful heroin addicts. In 1917 the number of persons in Federal prisons for violations of the law against narcotic drugs was 299; in 1927 it was 2,116, or more than seven times as large. Drug addicts in the United States are estimated at all the way from 100,000 (the government estimate) to 4,000,000, forty times as many.
The latter estimate was by Dr. I. C. Hollinger, of Newburg, Indiana, in a paper read at the Hotel Roosevelt, New York, before a committee of the World Conference on Narcotic Education, and the International Narcotic Education Association. Incidentally, in his address, Doctor Hollinger stated that the majority of dope users are far above the average in education and intelligence, and that the evil permeates the learned professions and lovely womanhood.
One of the dope rings in the one city of Chicago revealed 18,000 drug addicts among the customers, involving yearly payments of $39,000,000. On this and other evidence The Nation estimates that there are about 1,000,000 addicts in the United States. Mrs. Harry Harvey Thomas, president of the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs, makes the same estimate.
It is manifestly difficult to get any accurate figures on the subject. The government’s own figures differ. The experts in the Treasury Department estimate the number at 100,000; but Dr. W. P. Treadway, of the United States Public Health Service, in an address at Toronto, only last fall, estimated the number at 200,000. The government claims that the narcotic evil, from an underworld standpoint, and as a public menace, is very perceptibly decreasing.
Tons of Morphine Used
Alfredo Blanco, of Spain, authority on the international drug traffic, attached as an expert to the League of Nations, states that while the world .production of opium is now 8,600 tons annually, only 786 tons, or less than 10 percent, is needed for medical purposes.
We have seen the statement that one ton of opium would be sufficient for the medical needs of America from Alaska to Patagonia, yet in the first ten months of 1919 the United States imported 250 tons of crude opium, enough to produce 35 tons of morphine. This was ten times the amount imported by Germany, France and Italy combined.
Chemical discoveries add tons of narcotics to the world’s supply every year. At present all the big chemical factories are changing morphine into codeine, which circulates freely among all countries. Germany makes twenty tons of morphine a year and turns fourteen tons of it into codeine. Of the world production of sixty tons of morphine, half is turned into codeine, and goes everywhere, taking ruin wherever it goes. We understand that codeine and dionyl or dipropionyl morphine are one and the same thing, and that morphine in this form is now wrecking Egypt.
Progress in synthetic discovery is very rapid, since the World War, and is believed certain to result soon in the discovery of new habit-forming narcotic drugs more powerful and more menacing even than heroin. This places the human race in the midst of a new environment for which it is not adapted and in which it would surely perish without God’s help.
Drug Addicts Irresponsible
Drug addicts are irresponsible. The hold which habit-forming drugs have upon, their victims is such that they will stop at nothing to obtain the $5 to $8 a day which they must have in order to satisfy their cravings.
Of nineteen persons arrested in Boston at one time for violation of the narcotic law a careful oversight was kept for one year. During that time, one was convicted of murder in the second degree, one of robbery, and each of seven served six months in prison. At the end of the second year, all but two of the nineteen were serving prison sentences; and those two had just been released from a penal institution.
The most horrible feature of the drug habit is the fascination that one drug addict finds in fastening the habit on another. In numerous instances mothers make addicts of their children. In one family, where both the father and mother were addicts and dope peddlers, four children, ranging in ages from a baby of two years to a child of twelve years, were all drug addicts. An Italian dope peddler in New York had taught his eight-year-old stepson to use heroin.
A case is on record of a girl addicted to the use of drugs who was made so by her chum, who could no longer procure the drug cheaply, and hoped, by making her roommate an addict, to procure the drug at a lower cost. The risks of selling the drug are so great that the dope peddlers raise the price as soon as they are convinced that the user has become a confirmed addict.
A policewoman of New York remarked that, in addition to the contamination of others so that assistance may be had in gaining even for a little time the benefit of a lower price, there is a moral lechery in the minds of addicts which makes them wish to ruin others. She said on this subject:
It is a marked peculiarity of the addict. Nearly every one of them, after reaching a certain stage, finds complete satisfaction only in fastening the habit on someone else. And oftentimes the victim is a friend or loved one.
So true is this that the dope peddlers have a habit of saying, “Every new hop-head is good for six more hops.” These men, mostly addicts themselves, display the igenuity of the Devil in creating drug users, so as to widen and increase their business. They deliberately tempt the victim, frequently some young girl or boy, offering a box of heroin to snuff, or passing it around at a party, in the certain knowledge that when the habit is acquired here is another human creature that will stop at no crime to get , -the daily supply of $5 to $8 worth of the drug.
Greatest Single Cause of Crime -
With more than eleven thousand murders a year in this country, and less than a hundred executions for them, it becomes a matter of moment to identify drugs as the greatest single cause of crime, yet that is the charge of Senator Wm. L. Love, M.D. -a
The first effects of the drug increase selfesteem in a superlative degree, along with destructiveness and combativeness, at the same time deadening the qualities of judgment, caution, pity and honesty, which exist in the upper part of the brain. Selfishness becomes the only ... god. It is a means by which people in the lower............
walks of life can become as cruel and mercenary and heartless as the apostles- of Big Business. Moreover, as in the game of Big Business, there are enormous profits to be made by those that .....
have no conscience and are vailing to plunder and ruin their fellow men. Are all the public utility magnates dope fiends? ......
A checkup at the federal penitentiary on McNeil’s Island showed 56 prisoners to be bootleggers, and 896 drug peddlers. Most of the boys and nearly all of the girls living in the underworld have come down by the drug route. Many first offenders become drug addicts while serving prison sentences and thereafter become habitual criminals.
Narcotics are soluble in fat and therefore readily find access to the delicate, highly organized gray matter of the brain and the equally delicate and carefully protected organs of reproduction, impairing the sexual power of the ’ male and causing the female to become sterile and conscienceless. The elements of virtue crumble in a few months. Last year, 75,000 girls disappeared, an increase of 50 percent in the......
estimate for the previous yearn. The economic burden of the drug addict is set at $5,000,000,- . ..... 000 annually.
Crime i s on the increase in Paris, the number of murders, thefts and other serious crimes last year having beaten all previous records. This increase is charged to the spread of the use of narcotics. During the year eleven opium dens were discovered and 223 kilos of opium, cocaine, morphine and hashish were collected by police inspectors.
Persons familiar with the drug habit declare that several airplane accidents which were charged to the weather were really due to the fact that the pilots, knowing that in going up in bad weather they were taking extra hazards, overdosed themselves with drugs and lost their usual good judgment.
Dr. Treadway, of the United States Health Service, heretofore quoted, attributes 70 percent of the narcotic cases to bad associations, the victim being led into the use of narcotics by other addicts or by example or by experiment; 20 percent acquire the habit to allay pain; 5 percent resort to drugs because of overwork and the search for thrills; 5 percent are unclassified.
The Course of Ruin
The most devilish of all the drugs seems to be heroin, the one that is specially used to lure girls from the path of virtue. It has the property of producing temporary sex insanity, which is later followed by complete sex atrophy, the pitiable condition of millions of British subjects in India, directly due to Britain’s policy of subjugating them by opium.
Heroin is the drug that was used some years ago in forming among schoolboys and schoolgirls a secret society, exposed at the time. Thousands of boys and girls were initiated into this society; and thereafter boys and girls displayed badges openly, pinned upon their breasts or coat lapels, thus signifying their right to approach others wearing similar badges, or to be approached by them, for sex purposes.
In one New England town 20,000 boys and girls, so a reputable Christian physician told us, were found wearing these badges before the police discovered their significance; and the badges were selling so rapidly that the makers could hardly keep pace with the orders.
Nor are the dainty cigarettes in their dainty cases as mild and innocent as the cigarettesmoking young ladies would have us believe. They have in their mixture a poison called furfural, the “kick” from which is equal to two ounces of whiskey to every cigarette. This not only increases the desire for cigarettes, but makes confirmed “dope” addicts of their users. Thousands of young girls in cities and small towns have the habit, and the menace among high school girls is an ever increasing problem.
With a brain-drugged consciousness at a time in life when the young maiden needs to have her mind exercised to the highest moral standards, with no sense of duty to God or man, and often free from the uplifting influence of home and parents, she becomes an easy victim for the downward path, the end whereof is in plain sight.
The Drugs Most Commonly Used
Of the habit-forming drugs, opium, morphine and heroin are all derived from the opium poppy ; hashish, or cannibus indica, is derived from hemp; cocaine is derived from the coca leaf. Besides these, there are the drugs chloral, ether, arsenic, trional, sulfonal, veronal, paraldehyde and aspirin.
“Pop, what is this white powder the kids are buying and selling? They say it is great jazz medicine,” was the first inkling that one citizen of New York had that the heroin curse was spreading among the school children. In a single year in New York nine children from twelve to fourteen years of age were arrested for selling heroin to other children.
The three drugs in most general use are heroin, morphine and cocaine, in the order named, the first two coming from the opium P0PPy- Opium itself is a brownish substance, resembling hardened molasses. Hashish, an extract of hemp, is of about the consistency of syrup, dark green in color, bitter in taste, and sometimes sold in the form of cigarettes.
In Oklahoma a man gave a hashish cigarette to a police officer, putting the policeman to sleep and allowing soihe of the prisoners in the jail to escape. This is merely a sample of the cleverness that drug addicts exhibit in outmaneuver-ing the apostles of the law.
Morphine, after a few doses, produces loss of appetite, headaches and general dullness. Ideas of duty and right relations to others become obscure. The margin between truth and falsehood becomes more and more cloudy. The power of analysis disappears. The brain does not receive accurate information, and it can no longer discriminate and act wisely. It forgets to carry out promises; it is suspicious, credulous, full of intrigue and deception. Most users of morphine die in ten years, while others live on a little longer, if there are breaks in its use; but fifteen years is about the limit.
Cocaine is even more dangerous than morphine, and indeed is the most dangerous of all the habit-forming drugs. Once it has become a habit, permanent cures are almost unknown. A dose causes exhilaration, mental activity and a general sense of well-being. After the effects have worn off, depression follows. Then another dose is necessary, and another, and still another. When the syNem will stand no more the victim falls insensible or becomes hysterical. Cocaine acts upon the heart, and stimulates the brain; pain and distress disappear, and the cocainist is at rest.
When denied the drug the victim is excitable, melancholy, worried, unable to sleep, and generally miserable, and, if he is unable to procure the cocaine, will resort to any drug procurable for relief. But with cocainomaniacs there is no substitute for the drug. They are literally insane until they can procure it.
One-eighth of a grain of “dope” will put a normal person to sleep for many hours. An addict will use from fifteen to thirty grains a day, the average addict using about an ounce a month.
Pandemonium of the Mind
De Quincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater has long been a classic on the subject of the disordered condition of the opium user’s mind. De Quincy took no fewer than 340 grains of opium a day, an astounding dose, which accounts to some extent for the fact that not all of his experiences seem to have been duplicated by later victims. AVe quote a few sentences from his work:
The worst pandemonium which those who indulge in opium suffer, is that of the mind. Opium retains at all times its power of exciting the imagination, provided sufficient doses are taken; but when it has been continued so long as to bring disease upon the constitution, the pleasurable feelings wear away, and are succeeded by others of a very different kind. Instead of disposing the mind to be happy, it acts upon it like the spell of a demon, and calls up phantoms of horror and disgust. The fancy, still as powerful, changes its direction. Formerly it clothed all objects ■with the light of heaven; now it invests them ■with the attributes of hell. Goblins, spectres, and every kind of distempered vision haunt the mind, peopling it with dreary and revolting imagery. The sleep is no longer cheered with its former sights of happiness. Frightful dreams usurp their place, till at last the person becomes the victim of an almost perpetual misery.
The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations: he wishes and longs as earnestly ac
ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension ; of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not...........
of execution only, but even of proposing or willing. i
He lives under a world’s weight of incubus and night- i
mare: he lies in sight of all he would fain perform, i just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mor-tai languor of paralysis, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tender- \ est love; he would lay down his life if he might but rise and walk, but he is powerless as an infant, and ■ cannot so much as make an effort to move.
A more modern picture of a morphine user’s i mental condition was given in a tale which appeared in the New York Evening Journal. It is ' the story of a most unfortunate and unhappy woman. We will let her tell it in her own language:
Some years ago while suffering from a severe illness.....;....."•
I contracted the drug habit—morphine habit. No one -in the world could have been more horrified or . shocked than I was when I discovered that I was ad- ■ dieted to morphine. I am a widow with a little family : to care for. ... I had always looked upon people who ■ were the victims of habits as weak, unworthy, unsta-<- ' ble persons who enjoyed their habits, otherwise they ■ would not persist in the same. ........
The horror of it all dawned upon me one week-end : -when I had felt that I must cease taking the medicine, as I needed it no longer. I went to my home without my usual supply, and was far away from where I procured it. .And what was my great surprise to find that I was stricken almost helpless and suffering the tortures of hell, or worse, really, for want of my medicine. I could not believe it—that I, the strong-willed scoffer at other people’s habits, was myself the victim •
of a habit. What I suffered I never can tell you; or
how I lived through the week-end until I could get to
the source of my supply and fall in the door of the
drug store in a state of collapse more dead than alive.......-from the sudden deprivation of my usual dose of
medicine.
I went to the physician who had prescribed it, and : on my knees begged him to cure me. He honestly told.......T........
me that no cure had ever been found for morphine, f~ addiction, and that the only thing he could do was to ■ . . . keep me apparently normal by supplying my ■ needs physically for the drug. ;
I would not believe it. I was determined to find a :......
cure. I waited until my vacation, taking in the mean-
time just as little of the drug as would keep mo
mentally and physically balanced, For without it I ,.....
could do no work, was a nervous shaking wreck that
could not appear even decently before my employer and business companions.
So to keep in the semblance of normality I had to ____
take it until I could find help. At vacation time I ■ walked from one end of the city to the other, in and put of physicians’ offices, begging for a cure. I was laughed at, taunted, sneered at, called a ‘dope fiend’ and almost thrown out of reputable, high-class physicians’ offices who would not and could not help me. I made up my mind to cease of my own accord. I tried it. I went without it until I fell on the streets; I was taken to my home, nearly collapsed entirely with a heart attack from the sudden withdrawal of the drug, and the physician who was called by my family saw the situation and gave me morphine to steady me for the time being; and for many days I lay too weak to care what could happen to me, weak but glad to be normal again, as I could only be under the influence of the drug of my addiction.
Agonies of ike Drug Sufferers
Drug addicts do not suffer while they are contracting the habit. The suffering comes when they try to break away from it. The agonies of an addict when his supply is exhausted passes the power of human speech to describe. The pains are said to be like a sword thrust through the body.
Household furniture has been hastily sold at two cents on the dollar of valuation just before the expected visit of the dope peddler. Demons appear before the eyes. At a convention of the California Anti-Narcotic League held in Los Angeles two women, in tears, told of their horrible sufferings when they began to do without the drugs to which they were addicted; and another fell to the floor in a faint when she began to try to put it in words.
In another instance the mere thinking of what she had suffered caused one woman to faint and fall into a profound coma. In advanced cases the results of deprivation of the drug of addiction, called “withdrawal symptoms”, are considered the most acute tortures ever endured by man.
The drug of addiction will quickly relieve this torture, and hence the addict comes to feel that the getting of his supply of the drug is a matter of life and death. The mental sufferings and anguish are commensurate with the physical sufferings. The fear of having to endure the pains of “withdrawal symptoms” makes the addict a perfect slave to a perfectly heartless master.
A normal person cannot possibly appreciate the anguish of mind that comes to an addict as he sees his own helplessness and realizes that his morals and principles and even his body are disintegrating, causing untold suffering to his family and friends, and the scorn and hate of society.
There is no cure for drug addiction. Narcosan was given a thorough trial on 318 cases in Bellevue ^Hospital, but it was found that it did not alleviate the withdrawal symptoms, but aggravated some of them, and that following its use there was no obliteration of the craving for narcotics.
Abrupt withdrawal of the drug of addiction is dangerous to patients and has been known even to cause death. A gradual withdrawal over a period of fourteen days is considered the most efficacious and humane means of helping one to break the habit. Many cures supposed to have been effected have turned out to be not permanent. Men have several times asked magistrates to commit them to prison for a term of years, in order to free themselves from this embrace of a living death.
The Opinion of an Expert
When The Golden Age first took up this study, a visit was made to the office of Dr. Simon, head of the New York Narcotic Squad. The doctor showed pictures of men and women before and after their deterioration. Sad indeed were the changes revealed. The drugs had done their deadly work, and there was change enough wrought in some of the faces in a period of three years to mar the countenances so completely that they -were scarcely recognizable as the same individuals. Doctor Simon said:
In the user of morphine the pupils are contracted; in the user of cocaine and heroin the pupils are dilated. If one starts to question an addict a small bead-like perspiration will break out on the upper lip. When they have- the desire for the drug, the “yen”, they travel at a very rapid pace. After they have procured the drug they still travel at a very rapid pace, with, one hand in the coat pocket, holding the drug and ready to scatter it to the winds or into a pool if a detective happens along. A detective can tell from the appearance and movements of an addict when he is on the way for his drug.
There is nothing in criminal history more alienating, more socially deteriorating, more damning or more malignant than narcotic drugs. A man may take a drink of whisky daily for ten days and not emerge a drunkard. But a man who takes narcotics daily for ten days, unless he be suffering from a particular disease, will become a drug addict.
There is no man but will, through the slavery of drugs, slowly but surely, and ultimately, be in tire gutter. Narcotic drugs suck the soul into ths very depths of hell.
A drug like cocaine produces mental changes that will make a thief, or possibly a murderer. With varied hallucinations, delusions or mental aberrations, it is not remarkable that the arrant coward under its influence may become a desperado.
The cure of drug addicts is adequate, but not ideal. Colonies should be organized where drug addicts can be taken after they leave the institutional hospitals, The reason that many of them go back is that they are usually down to their last cent. They have used their last penny for drugs; they are without work, sometimes without clothes, except the few rags which are often insufficient to cover them. No provision being made for them after they leave the hospital, they are tempted to return to their old environment; and when they do, they are almost certain to return to the use of the drug.
An addict is medically cured in a week or ten days; that is, he has no further bodily need for the drug. But the mental craving for it persists. The drug addict must be spiritually built up. Their desire for cure must come from the heart. There is where the real cure must come; and there is where there is a great need for welfare bodies who will secure positions for addicts on farms or camps where they are away from the old environment until they can overcome the mental craving for the drug.
Most of the drug addicts have mentally and morally deteriorated. We have had bank presidents go to the gutter from the use of drugs. The addicts sacrifice food to such an extent in order to satisfy their cravings that when they take the drug cure they not infrequently gain thirty to eighty pounds of flesh in one week.
Dope Peddlers
A woman peddler hid in the collar of her dog, which always accompanied her on her walks, the drugs which she dispensed to her customers. Inmates of the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island were supplied with drugs by heroin and morphine pressed into letter paper with a hot iron. The prisoner chewed the paper, and thus obtained the drug.
An Italian gentleman, given a seven-year ride to Sing Sing for his proficiency, had an artificial left arm which was hollow from the wrist to the elbow. In the wrist was a small door with a spring, which. he could open for the removal of packages of cocaine. There were two compartments in the arm, one containing ten packages and the other twenty packages.
In the lower part of a platform scale in a Bowery restaurant $1,000 worth of the drugs was found by the police. $2,000,000 worth was seized as it was about to be put on board the Twentieth Century Limited in the Grand Central Terminal. A suspect arrested in New York boasted that he had a secret factory in New Jersey and could fill an order for $2,000,000 worth in twenty-four hours, and that he had no fear of the law "because he was too well protected’.
The fashionable summer resorts are favorite gathering places for dope peddlers and dope users. This is true of the Riviera, Marseilles and Toulon. One of the hotel proprietors in Atlantic City fitted up an entire floor of his hotel with pipes for opium smoking and eots for the addicts. He was sent to Atlanta penitentiary for fifteen months.
It is hard to catch the most intelligent of the peddlers. The police knew for months that Arnold Rothstein was at the head of a great dope ring, but as he was not an addict it was hard for them to definitely connect him with the traffic until after he was murdered and identifying documents were found.
Dope Routes
One of the peddlers discovered in New’ York had a route as definite as that of a milkman. Beginning at six every morning he made his rounds of fashionable apartment houses, leaving three decks of cocaine here, a phial ef morphine there, half a dozen decks of heroin at the next place. Sometimes, his books showed, he was called on to supply additional opium or heroin for a party, just as a caterer might supply dinners for a "wedding. On several occasions he supplied experts to cook opium for a patron who wanted to treat his guests to a smoke.
At examination time the peddlers hang around high schools, where nervous children are unstrung by the fear of failure in the arduous and useless examinations. Just at the time when, the tension is at the maximum the peddler comes along with his heroin and cocaine in a closed automobile; and the children buy, even though the dope peddlers know in advance that the sure end is a horrible death within about ten years.
Boys are often hired as watchers for dope peddlers, and later become addicts and peddlers themselves. Soothing syrups for babies constitute a common form by which the habit is inculcated without the victim’s being aware. Rich and poor, sages and knaves, from every walk of life they come, and from every grade of mentality, to become slaves, to be ruined.
Doctor Simon’s lieutenant, Mr. Donoghue, describing the difficulty attendant upon the apprehension of a dope peddler, said:
Someone will call up here and tell us that they are peddling such and such a drug at such and such a corner, and ask us why we do not arrest them. Why? Because we have to buy the drug from a peddler before we can convict him. for the reason that no court will take the word of an addict who might be called as a witness. So the. members of the police force are compelled to act as addicts and actually purchase the drug themselves.
The detective makes up as an addict. [The writer saw a photograph of one of these makeups that was perfect, and turning around he beheld the detective himself. No one would have recognized him for the same individual, I am sure.] He hangs around with a gang of addicts until he can learn from them where to purchase the drug. Often the addict is suspicious; but when he is reassured, he will tell where to get the drug. The peddler is approached and asked for a “deck of C” or a “deck of II,” or whatever drug he wants. The dope peddler, too, is skeptical and often holds out for several days before he will sell the drug. Finally he asks to see the money. He takes enough to cover the cost of the amount to be purchased and then tells the detective, disguised as an addict, to meet him at a point several blocks beyond where the sale was contracted. While the ‘addict’ is waiting, someone, often nof the person who made the sale, will come along, slip something into his hand, and is off.
The Drug Boosters
Drug boosters are used to help inform drug addicts where to get the drugs, and drug vendors where they can find markets. The drug booster thus receives a double commission, one from the vendor and one from the purchaser. This makes his business highly profitable and very safe, as it is difficult to convict the drug booster. How the drug booster makes new addicts was told by a writer in the New York Times:
The narcotic division finds the “drug booster” in all sorts of places, but recently he or she has been frequenting the white light district.- In Broadway restaurants and dance places, from “ham-and” joints to the most expensive lobster palaces, this agent is doing a profitable business. Often he is found at a table, and sometimes through introductions, sometimes through girls who are working for him, suggests to his intended customer a midnight party somewhere, promising something unusual or “bohemian” in this party. A promise of some bootleg whiskey is often the bait; a place where sure tips on the races can be obtained is another glittering attraction offered. Sometimes when the booster feels it is safe he promises his new-found friend a real “dope” party, at which they will be merely witnesses, not touching the drug themselves at ail.
Then from the restaurant the party, with two or three prospective and unwitting customers, goes to a room somewhere in the vicinity. If the party is supposed to be “bohemian” the room may be on the lower East Side, and the new crowd is introduced to those who have the stuff. They are treated to an exhibition of “hop” smoking, and watch the effect.
Then the time is ripe to get them. They are asked to “try it once just to see what it is like”, and often they do. Perhaps the effects are not as wonderful as they are anticipated to be: but generally on another night they allow themselves to be persuaded to try another pipe to see if the second may not go better than the first, and then the curious pleasure-seeker is almost surely hooked. Before he knows it drugtaking is a pleasure to him, and then a necessity: and another drug addict is made.
In another issue the Times said:
In the form of a powder heroin is sprinkled upon the wrist, and young persons are invited, sometimes dared, to sniff it. In that manner the dangerous drug is supplied at “snow parties” and soon boys and girls become hopeless addicts. Usually the victims are picked from the higher strata of society because it is the ultimate aim of the illicit drug peddlers to enslave youth who arc able to pay dearly for the drug. At first it is supplied gratis. Then the peddlers raise their prices for the dose as the craving and capacity of the addict are increased from a fifteenth of a grain sometimes to as much as 100 grains.
The New York American said further of the drug booster:
Sometimes he distributes free samples, sometimes he enslaves a number of girls and spreads the habit through them all over a factory or store. He and his assistants work on a commission basis. He is the successor to the cadet or procurer of the white-slave traffic: for he finds he can use girls more profitably in peddling drugs than in other forms of vice. Dance hall habitues number many drug boosters: others pose as chorus girls. If their customers are of the higher planes of society they seldom fall within the clutches of the police, because there is enough money available to buy the drug without resorting to crime.
One of the Curses of the War
There has been circulated widely the theory that the increased use of drugs in the United States since the World War is clue to prohibition. This theory may contain a measure of truth, but it is discounted by the fact that the increase in consumption of drugs and narcotics is just as great in European countries, where there is no limitation on beverages, and by the further fact that the majority of drug addicts were not previously users of alcohol. A statement of the Treasury Department, denying that prohibition is the cause, said:
The. truth is that victims of the drug habit practically in every instance are young men and women, often in their teens. Rarely are they alcoholics. The difference between a drug addict and an alcoholic is that the alcoholic, after a “spree”, usually is sorry and, repenting, experiences a period of reform. The drug addict has no such experience. Once a victim, there is rarely any cessation. The disease is rarely curable, and even when the body is cured the mental craving continues.
But the World War itself wrought immeasurable havoc. Suffering from cold, hunger, rain-soaked trenches, homesickness, and many other causes, or lingering on beds of pain in hospitals where physicians and attendants were too scarce to give them proper attention and relief, many of the boys sought relief from their ills through narcotic drugs. They were relieved by the hypodermic needle day after day and week after week until, instead of forgetfulness and cure, they were the slaves of a habit a thousandfold worse than the disease or even death itself could have been.
We get further light on the damage wrought by drugs during the World War from the following report by Miss Rujaro, for three years •with the California State Committee on Readjustment :
It was part of my duties to meet and help the returning boys who had gone to Siberia to wage the so-called “war” on Russia. At first I thought my work would be to aid them in getting back into their old jobs, in straightening out their allotment tangles, and in helping them in a hundred other little ways; but I soon found out there was a more serious help to be offered.
Sane, patriotic American citizens will scarcely believe it possible—at first I could scarcely believe it myself—that this more serious help was to be the care of narcotic addicts—boys who had gone “over there” to the frozen land “clean” and who had come back not maimed by shot and shell from Bolshevik guns, but torn in nerves, with health shattered, with hope almost gone, because they had fallen victims to an iniquitous “drug ring”, the directing heads of which are Americans—I should say American traitors—and whose field “workers” in Siberia were their Jap agents, whose chief employment is to receive “exported drugs” for the purpose of smuggling them back into the United States.
From many of the boys I learned that it was no uncommon experience to have American manufactured morphine, cocaine, and heroin daily offered to them while on duty in Vladivostok and the Russian hinterland.
Suffering from homesickness, fighting a “war” of which they knew neither the aim nor the reason, or idle in camps in the limitless snow wastes, some of the brave lads yielded to the temptation that promised them “freedom from worry and care”.
Those lads came back slaves. There were numbers of them.
Dope-selling Doctors
The mere fact that the pharmaceutical companies obtain, through the offices of the United States and British governments, many times as much opium as America could possibly legitimately consume proves that the medical frater-_____________
nities which these pharmaceutical companies---------------
control have a large responsibility in this matter. ■
Many times doctors allow their sympathies to get the better of their sense when dealing with patients who are suffering from painful diseases, and by dealing out dope of one kind or f another it is an easy matter to fasten a habit upon an innocent victim before either the doctor or the victim is aware of what is taking place. Dr. Blair, writing in the New York Survey, makes the following charges:
After thirty years of medical practice, it comes as a distinct shock to be obliged to admit that the narcotic evil must be largely laid at the feet of my own profession.
The writer has figured the matter up and down, across and back again; he has estimated available supplies and where they go in regular trade; he is in a . position to know with fair accuracy how much narcotic drugs are used in professional channels; he has investigated intimately the industrial situation, and he lias visited the large proprietary medicine plants throughout the Union. The result is that he is, with infinite regret, compelled to admit that the dope-selling professional man is the main narcotic menace in this country. . ■
There are peddlers of narcotic in all of our large cities and in some of the smaller ones; but there are dope-selling professional men in nearly every community, and in the aggregate they vastly outnumber .... the peddlers.
The narcotic laws must be enforced in the full recognition of the fact that professional people are responsible for a large proportion of drug addiction. The great body of ethical and capable professional people must join in the crusade against the phygi- . cian, dentist, or druggist who is catering to narcotic addiction. They owe it to the public to do so, and they owe it to the professions of which they are members to run to earth the degenerates therein who are trafficking in human weakness and vicious habits.
There are several classes of medical dope-sellers. The most troublesome and the most hopeless one is the medical man or woman who is addicted to the personal use of large quantities of narcotics and who is gradually going down the slope. There are many, many such, and they are found among the high and the low in professional circles.
Then there is the obsessed, ignorant, and often very sympathetic dope doctor who can’t say “No” to the patients who want narcotics constantly prescribed. . . . He reports every case of addiction as one of disease other than addiction. The last class of medical dope-seller or commercial dope-doctor is frankly vicious. He is rarely a narcotic addict himself, and is in the game for the money he can make out of it.
Doctors Under Indictment
Dispatches report that thirty-five physicians of Chicago were under indictment at one time for furnishing ‘snow’ and other drugs to victims, and that some of them have grown rich in the business in a very brief time. One of these men had 600 "patients’ visiting him two or three times a week, netting him about $6,000 a week clear profit.
It is not only in Chicago that such things have happened. The mere ability to write “M.D.” after one’s name does not carry with it a guaranty of principle. We clip the following from the New York American covering conditions which prevailed some years back in and about Boston:
Assistant District Attorney Charles W. Blood is engaged in assembling an amazing mass of startling information of orgies and immoralities involving the names of many prominent young physicians and business men of Woburn, Medford, Malden, Everett, and other towns near Boston.
Women whose lives have been ruined, and who have been induced with satanic campaigning to indulge in narcotics, have fairly tumbled into the prosecutor’s office to narrate the sordid details of the diabolic manner in which they -were enslaved to the unscrupulous doctors who turned their professional knowledge to corrupt purposes.
Enough has already been disclosed to justify the authorities in their charge that a certain group of professional men have been engaged in a nefarious Society of Indulgence that preyed on moral girls and enervated them through drugs so that morality would succumb to immorality. Girls in their teens, others just attaining womanhood, matrons "with unblemished records, have been snared into the iniquitous net on their visits to doctors as patients; have been induced through infatuation for some member of the ring to indulge in their gay parties, and have with carefully planned cunning been led from one surreptitious step to another until they have entirely forsaken the upright teachings of their homes and have entered with full vehemence into the orgiastic sordidness planned for them.
Dr. T. D. Crothers, professor of mental and nervous diseases in the New York School of Clinical Medicine, in his book Morphinism, writing to his brother physicians, said:
Institutions which claim to be hospitals or sanitariums in many instances depend largely on the secret, or open use of this drug for all forms of diseases under their care. There can be no doubt that in this way much of the morphinism comes from its surreptitious use by dishonest, unprincipled persons. Careful study of morphinism shows that one-fourth of the cases have contracted morphine addiction from curiosity or association. Of the remainder a large percentage are undoubtedly first due to its reckless use by ignorant and unskilled persons, as well as by physicians. This is clearly evidenced from the fact that a large number of physicians, and many others, do not understand the danger from the use of morphine by the needle. As physicians, they are taught to prescribe it for transitory and other pains, with little thought of any possible dangers from its continuous use.
No doubt irresponsible and irregular doctors contribute very largely to the spread of this addiction. The custom a few years ago of teaching patients to use the needle and furnishing them with the drug to relieve states of neuralgia and unexpected pain paroxysms was very dangerous. This practice undoubtedly made many morphine victims. Foolish physicians who thought the whole province of medicine was to relieve pain under all circumstances, and who used morphine in a routine way, have made many victims of this class. Many quack medicines for the relief of pain contain morphine; and when this is discovered the purchaser buys the drug direct, and its use is continued.
At one time an effort was made in New York to assist the so-called medical addicts, who acquired the habit innocently because of some painful disease, such as gallstones or cancer. This was done by providing them with certificates so that they could daily procure the drug, in ever decreasing doses.
These prescription certificates were provided for their own protection, so that if found with the drug on their person they would not be subject to arrest. But it was found that the effects of the drugs so lowered their moral sensibilities that they used the certificates to protect themselves while they procured the drugs from dope peddlers in much larger quantities than the certificates called for.
British Responsibility for This Deviltry
We are indebted to a Boston district attorney for the following:
The fact seems to be that the British government is responsible for the large quantity of opium flooding the world today. The cultivation of the poppy is fostered by the government: manufactured into opium in the government factory at Ghazipur, and into morphine by British firms in London and Edinburgh; and sent out into the world through trade channels, illegal and otherwise.
When manufactured, the opium is disposed of in three ways, as follows: a certain amount is reserved for Indian consumption and handed over to the Excise Department; another portion, styled “medical opium”, is sent to London; and the remainder is sold at monthly sales at Calcutta. Most of this Calcutta-sold opium finds its way to China eventually. The revenue to the government for the year 1905-6 was nearly $22,000,000 net from this “monopoly”, as the blue book referred to calls it. After the opium is thus auctioned, England as a government is no longer concerned.
A study of England’s colonies and dependencies and foreign concessions shows that the opium trade is the source of very great colonial revenue, often reaching the proportion of one-half the entire amount. The Straits Settlements in 1917 had a total revenue of $19,672,104, of which $9,182,000 came from opium traffic.'Hong Kong in 1917 derived one-third of its revenue from opium. India, the source and fount of the opium trade, derives its revenue from many sources; but two of them, opium and excise, concern us. Excise duties arc collected exclusively on spirits, beer, opium and intoxicating drugs. For 1916-1917 the total revenue was 118,799,968 pounds sterling, and the revenue from opium and excise amounted to 12,375,904 pounds sterling. During ten years, ending 1916-1917 the net receipts from excise duties increased 47 percent and opium receipts 44 percent. The revenue from other drugs (excluding opium) increased 67 percent. The total revenue of India for the year 1919-20 was £135,570,000, and of this, the amount from opium and liquor was £15,743,100. In the year 1920-21, the total revenue decreased to £134,825,900, but the revenue from opium and liquor increased to £16,616,000.
At the various opium conferences at Geneva British delegates have always refused to limit the growth of opium to the medicinal needs of the world. They have done this because in India they have 600,000 acres under opium and have a revenue from it running into the millions of pounds. They have, however, agreed to a yearly curtailment of production of 10 percent, effective since 1927.
Meantime it is claimed that Chinese homegrown opium has largely increased, especially in the provinces under the control of the so-called “Christian” Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang, though the central government at Nanking has passed an act prohibiting the production and use of opium except for medicinal purposes. Whether the act will be enforced is another matter.
China’s military overlords have been paying their soldiers and maintaining themselves in power by openly forcing the farmers in their provinces to plant poppy seed. A reason why in some areas food products are scarce is because so many fields have thus been given over to opium growing.
If reports are to be believed, the year after the opium conferees at Geneva agreed to decrease their acreage 10 percent a year, Turkey increased her acreage from three square miles to three thousand square miles, making her now one of the world’s largest producers of the drug. Turkey does not permit her own people to become drug addicts. Virtually all the Turkish opium is exported.
What a problem is this! Here is something in which there is a mint of money, an unlimited and rapidly grooving market, and it seems necessary all at once to make and enforce a worldwide agreement to limit production, inasmuch as all that is produced will most certainly be sold.
Where Big Business Comes In
Big Business knows that there is money in illicit drugs. When a group of narcotic smugglers was broken up in Germany in 1926 the German government made the claim to the League of Nations that in their confessions the guilty men had insisted that they Avere backed up by ten American banks and had accomplices on the New York police force.
A single concern in central Europe, Roessler Fils, in the one year of 1928 manufactured two and a half times as much heroin as would be required for the legitimate needs of the whole world for that year, and that concern is merely one of several at Basle, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
It is not likely that Koessler Fils will need any financial assistance, as the profit on this accursed stuff is 700 to 800 percent, but if they did need a loan, and a large one, at their home bank, is there any doubt whatever that they would be accommodated? Money lenders do not concern themselves with anything except the safety of the principal and the certainty of the payment of the interest, One of these big concerns recently tried to ship four tong of heroin to Egypt, through France, but the French government, to their credit, refused to permit the goods to enter their country, even for transshipment.
At one of the opium conferences an Italian, Signor Cavazzoni, brought forward a plan that would have enabled the tracing of each kilo to its ultimate destination, but as soon as it was seen that this would ruin the drug trade it was killed iiistanter by a new set of model rules similar to those already in existence and under which the illicit trade is "doing splendidly”.
Every country that has drug manufacturing corporations is jealous of every other country that has drug manufacturing corporations. It wants nothing done that will interfere with the growth of its own corporations. Hence the resistance against restrictions that would really restrict.
The chemists have a new trick, that is, the making of morphine-esters. An ester can be exported and imported freely. A ‘pharmaceutical company^ can take a ton of one of these esters, remove the acid, and at once be in possession of several hundred pounds of morphine which is not accounted for or recorded against it in any way. Japan is the only country that has forbidden the manufacture or importation of these esters.
Hqw the United States Gels Its Opium
Some years ago the United States Public Health Service furnished the secretary of state with a statement of the amount of opium desired by the pharmaceutical companies. The secretary of state then sent a statement of this desired amount to England, and England delivered the goods. This is probably still the procedure,
A few years ago the United States was thus importing 640,000 pounds of crude opium annually, which amounts to 50 grains for each person in the United States. No other civilized country imports more than three grains per capita.
During 1930 'American drug manufacturers may import only 128,000 pounds of opium and 201,000 pounds of coca leaves, which shows some progress in the right direction, but the United States still has a higher per capita consumption of medical drugs than is reported by any other of the big powers.
The profits of dope smugglers are enormous, very much more than when their goods are obtained through the usual pharmaceutical channels; for Big Business does not readily let go of large profits in any business where large profits are to be made.
A smuggler can buy narcotics in Europe for $3 an ounce and sell them in the United States for $12 an ounce; and by adulterating the drugs, as is often done, these immense profits can be increased from 300 percent to 1,000 percent. But morphine, sold in New York at $12 an ounce, when it reaches the addict is quoted at around a dollar a grain, or more than $400 an ounce.
Ingenious methods have been contrived by these agents of Beelzebub for smuggling dope into the country. Revenue agents confiscated two teddy bears, and found them filled with "dope” worth hundreds of dollars.
Metal capsules of drugs have been fed to dogs, donkeys and cattle, and they have been driven across the line and slaughtered to obtain the narcotics. Similar capsules have been attached to the legs of pigeons. A San Antonio pigeon fancier had a pigeon he once owned return home to him with a capsule attached to each leg containing $5 or $10 worth of narcotics in each capsule.
A supply was found hidden in a bird cage which was taken from off a vessel in Brooklyn. Seamen and others aboard freighters coming from China, Germany, and Italy have been detected bringing in quantities.
Some Somali seamen, when they came ashore, had their ordinary sets of false teeth in their pockets, but in their mouths they had magnificent sets, with every one of the thirty-two teeth packed full of cocaine. Girls came ashore carrying a fortune in their earrings and necklaces. Some men who are rumrunners by night are narcotic dealers by day.
A ton of illicit opium was found in a New York warehouse, as a result of a friendly tip by the truckman who hauled it. At a carpet plant in Connecticut $200,000 worth was found in a bale of wool. The opium, in small canvas sacks arranged on a belt somewhat like a cartridge belt, was found by workmen when they were opening the bale. Somebody must have missed connections at the pier in New York!
An unsuspecting baggage clerk asked an innocent question of a drug smuggler who came in on the He de France and he fled from the pier leaving $300,000 worth of morphine and heroin, the largest seizure ever made at a pier.
There is much smuggling of dope from China into San Francisco by the Chinese crews of boats engaged in the transpacific trade. Only a few months ago a diplomat’s wife tried to bring in a trunkful from the Orient, but was caught and sent back to China to be tried.
On twenty-three important seizures of narcotics at San Francisco port last year the official fines were fixed at $608,210, but this amount was reduced to $15,183, which is a considerable reduction, to say the least. The value of drugs unlawfully imported is supposed to be between $50,000,000 and $80,000,000 a year. Officials of the Narcotic Division of the Treasury Department estimated that in 1928 the smuggling operations were triple what they were in 1927.
Uncle Sam’s Bad Showing
Though there has evidently been some improvement in recent years, yet the foregoing facts seem to establish the conclusion that Uncle Sam is properly chargeable with indifference and inertia on this narcotic problem, as claimed by Mrs. H. Wright, delegate to the opium conference in the year 1925. China has awarded Mrs. Wright a medal in recognition of her services to the cause of prohibiting the use of opium except for scientific purposes in China.
The government policy of the United States has always been to discourage the opium trade in China; yet it permits a vast quantity of morphine and heroin manufactured by our esteemed “pharmaceutical companies” to be shipped to 'Japan, knowing that it will be transshipped to China and sold in the foreign settlements of Shanghai and other Chinese cities in which the sale of opiates is strictly forbidden in the native city, but cannot be prevented in the foreign quarters. All the Chinese addicts have to do is to cross the line into the foreign section to obtain all they wish; for there was enough of the accursed stuff shipped by our “pharmaceutical companies” from Seattle in five months to give a dose to every one of the 400,000.000 men, women and children of China.
As a consequence the Chinese people are seeing through the whole heathenish, hypocritical performance, and are seriously doubting the dictum of our Supreme Court to the effect that the United States is a Christian nation. Japan itself, heathen nation as we know it to be, while it is a large buyer in Calcutta of crude opium and a large buyer' in America of manufactured opium, FOR THE CHINESE WHOM IT IS IN PROCESS of subjugating, has no opium shops of its own and protects its people from the dangers of opium by strict laws.
Information obtained from the files of the murdered gambler Arnold Rothstein were sufficient to convince United States Attorney J. M. Blake that the three American drug rings involve important persons in public life, including attorneys, politicians and others.
By a bill rushed through the Congress ‘without a record vote or any discussion’ officials in charge of the Virgin Islands (part of United States possessions near Porto Rico) were expressly relieved from the duty of reporting on shipments of drugs either in or out, thus leaving the door wide open for smuggling. This bill was listed as Virgin Islands legislation and not under the subject of narcotics, and for that reason attracted no attention.
In New York city when eight agents had surrounded a sale which they knew was to take place, involving about $500 worth of illegal narcotics, the principal seller was allowed to make his escape through the ring and only a small abettor of the sale was arrested. Eleven mem- -bers of the narcotic squad of the New York police, in the fall of 1928, were charged with illegally having narcotics in their possession.
The United States is about to have two narcotic farms, each of 1,000 acres, and equipped to care for 1,000 inmates where drug addicts will receive special treatment. Arrangements have also been made with twelve other governments for the direct exchange of information respecting illicit trade in narcotics and the enforcement of narcotic legislation.
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