or new
victims. It is too lucrative a trade to be confined to only a few
countries. Markets must not only be created and legalized in subject
states, but new ones added in outside countries, through smuggling. All
too fatally easy of accomplishment, and so profitable, financially, as
to be worth any risk and effort. The prediction as to our own danger,
made in 1882, seems to be abundantly realized.

The number of drug addicts in America to-day are fairly startling. The
number is variously estimated in New York City alone as from ten
thousand to one hundred thousand. It is said that there may be a
million in the country. Yet these figures are the merest guesswork, by
no means substantiated. Certain it is that the campaign of the New York
Health Department has uncovered thousands of them, and any other city
that chose to do so, could produce facts equally startling.

The laws on our statute books concerning the prescription of narcotic
drugs are powerless to deal with the situation. It is shooting into the
air to try to "regulate" this condition. It is as thoroughly well
"regulated" as it can ever be by the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, a
Federal Law whose enforcement is in the hands of the Internal Revenue
Department. By the provisions of this Act, every pound of opium or its
derivatives that comes into this country, legitimately, is accounted
for, and its distribution, both wholesale and retail, made a matter of
record. Thus, the Board of Trade returns show the amount imported by
the big wholesale drug houses. These must account for their sales to
the retail drug stores, and the amounts must tally. The drug stores can
only sell narcotic drugs on a physician's prescription, and the
prescriptions are kept on file, and the quantity sold must correspond
to the quantity called for by these prescriptions, as well as to the
amount obtained from the wholesale drug house. In prescribing
narcotics, the physician is obliged to write his prescription in
triplicate--one copy for his own protection, one copy for the local
druggist, and one copy to be filed with the health department. Nor is
he allowed to prescribe narcotics for an addict without decreasing the
dosage. His prescription cannot call for thirty grains of morphia day
after day--it must show, in a chronic case of this kind, a daily
diminution of the amount prescribed, thus indicating a desire to get
the patient off the drug, eventually. All these records are kept on
file,