DIPSOMANIA.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume II, Issue 46, 15 May 1862, Page 5 (Supplement)

DIPSOMANIA.

To the Editor of the Smoke's Bay Times. Sm, —In the columns of your contemporary of Saturday last appears a paragraph extracted from the Times. The argument of the writer would be good if there no means of preventing the disease, for disease it is, as is admitted on all hands, but it does seem most absurd to legalise nurseries for the disease and establish asylums for the patients. Our cousins in America have already discovered the means of effectually preventing the dipsomania, as surely as vaccination prevents the small pox, and this by the prohibitory law of Maine now so extensively and successfully adopted there. To reach the root of the disease we must go deeper than the surface ; the drunkard is but the victim of the pernicious traffic in alcoholic poisons. The sole cause of the mania is this traffic ; let this be prohibited, there would be at once an end to this disease as well as to the other evils—and their name is legion—which flow from the (mis)use of these pernicious beverages and overwhelm our adopted land. Sir, I have known many of these dipsomaniacs, and can aver that they are such simply from the fact that there are licensed houses for the distribution of the poison that maddens them in their way ; they are unable to pass the door of a public-house, and are only safe beyond its neighborhood. There rests a fearful amount of responsibility on the Government which sanctions the deadly traffic by its licenses, and derives so great a portion of its revenues irom “ the rich result of all this riot.” Yours, &c., T^mperaxce.