Editorial May 16, 1908 Issue

A SERIOUS RESPONSIBILITY

John B. Willis

Every system of thought and practice is responsible not only for what it is, but for what it entails, the trend of its effects. The significance of this fact has been pressed upon public attention of late by the endeavor to secure repressive legislation in connection with the sale of not a few drugs, especially the numerous compounds of opium, cocaine, etc. Speaking of this last before a legislative committee, a prominent physician is reported to have declared recently that "it breaks down the will-power and the moral sense. It shatters manhood and makes the person addicted to it a reproach to his family and to his friends."

In the same line, the writer of a leading article in The World's Work has recently said that "every drug has a secondary effect as well as a primary one. The immediate effect is all a man thinks of when he takes it, but the secondary effect follows just as inevitably. It is of an entirely different nature, and is always bad." Writing in behalf of a projected asylum for the victims of the "drug habit," a Chicago physician says: "It is a stupendous fact that there exist, by careful computation, one quarter to half a million of drug-takers in the United States, and that this number is rapidly on the increase. Within a radius of twenty miles from the center of Chicago at least twenty-five thousand men and women, many of them most gifted and noble, are to-day bound hand and foot by this pitiless demon of drug addiction."

This concession to the power of evil is entirely opposed by the teaching of Christian Science, but from the human point of view it constitutes a terrible indictment of drug treatment. A kindred indictment is made with respect to the drink habit, which, as would be conceded by physicians, is in no small part the direct outcome of medical prescription and the use of patent medicines; and yet another is found in the ever-increasing protest against vaccination, a protest which is seconded by many physicians, and those who stand for drug medication cannot ignore or escape responsibility for those unnumbered ills which the system they champion entails in human belief.

Enjoy 1 free Sentinel article or audio program each month, including content from 1898 to today.

Send a comment to the editors
NEXT IN THIS ISSUE
Letters
LETTERS TO OUR LEADER
May 16, 1908
Contents

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit