AN ABODE OF “MANIACS”

Hokitika Guardian, 21 November 1922, Page 1

AN ABODE OF “MANIACS”

FHiUViIIvI.PHIA MOURNS HER LOST SO FIS. ! According to the Philadelphia “Public Ledger,” eighty drug addicts and traffickers were, arrested in that city in two days —August 31. and September 1 of this year. “The shrieks of the drug-craving prisoners made the rcom sound like an abode of maniacs” says the report. Addicts and traffickers were of both sexes, and the accommodation ol four police stations was so greatly overtaxed that many prisoners lin'd to be accommodated in the sheriff’s room on the seventh Hoot of the central station. This is just one of the things that Prohibition has done fbr America. That a two-day police drive in one city could lie responsible for the arrest of eighty drug-fiemls points to a state of affairs appalling to contemplate. It is a medical truism that of all human failings the drug habit is the most soul-killing, the most debasing, the hardest to eradicate. Yet it is the very habit to which the efforts of wellmeaning but misguided fanatics have impelled the people of the United States. The advent of Prohibition marked the beginning ot a period of national ■ demoralisation which is at present ' giving pause even to the most enthusiastic supporters of the “dry” lav's, l They find themselves enmeshed in a. ’coil of their own unconscious weaving; they have conjured into being a hydraheaded monster which is eating: the national soul alive. : Supposing, for a moment, that the I police of this country instituted a campaign to-morrow for the arrest of I drug addicts and traffickers. What would be the probable result? Mould it lead to the apprehension of eighty __or eight—or even one offender? No New Zealander believes in such a possibility. knowing that we are naturally sound and healthy. Wo are sound and healthy because we have a regulated liquor trade, by the operations of • which wo may obtain healthy stimulants in reasonable quantities. Let us not hear “shrieks of drugcraving prisoners” echoing through this sane healthy Dominion. Vote Continuance and keep the drug habit and other unnatural perversions out of the country. 86