BRITISH & FOREIGN ITEMS.

Hokitika Guardian, 17 April 1923, Page 2

BRITISH & FOREIGN ITEMS.

AUSTItAUAN AND N.Z. CABLE ASSOCIATION. HUGE AVAR-TIME FRAUDS. PARIS, April IG. The medical frauds at. Marseilles (cabled April 12) will prove one of the greatest post-war scandals. The investigations show tho ever-widening extent of the frauds. The high professional standing of tho accused medical men is adding to the public excitement. It is now estimated that the State was defrauded of at least 22,000,000 francs. The affair was discovered through the trifling clerical error of a clerk, who received from a body claiming to represent the disabled soldiers a requesttor a medical coupon book In the name of one of its members. Instead of

sending coupons to the society, however, the clerk sent a hook to a soldier's private address, with a request that he would acknowledge its receipt. The soldier replied tlint lie had never asked lor coupons, and that he had never been ill. It was then found that many members of the society had been receiving medical attention when they had been dead some time, while the living members had ail abnormal record of ill-health. Many members, when V questioned, denied that they had ever been ill, or that they even knew of the existence of the society, which apparently recruited members by merely putting their names on the register. Its agents accosted ex-soldiers at veterans’ meetings, and thus got enough information to fill up tin' Government papers. It has now been 1 omul that three societies have been working this plan and sharing the profits with certain doctors and chemists. Often the ex-soldiers were given tubes of tooth paste andi boxes ol soap in exchange, when applying for proscriptions containing 70 and 80 francs’ worth of drugs. A FRENCH. TRAGEDY. PARIS, April Hi. ’I Ik nflra.v at La Ferte-Sous-Jouarre '"as due to three de.-erters arranging tc. roll a well-to-do passenger, in order to get money to go to America. A sleeping officer was the victim. FRENCH DOPE TRAFFIC-. PARIS. April 16. At the Correctional Court there was a scene at tho trial of 78 persons concerned in the dope traffic, vherof 31 were women, nine doctors, and six chemists. One of them is Rat Raol. as “the Cocaine King of Montmartre.’’ It. would need the pen of a Maupassant to rh scribe the horrors of the life which their stories revealed. Every degree of dope tyranny was represented. There were men and women who seemed tillconscious of the degradation they had t reached. Others were intellectuals, - evidently engaged iu a ceaseless ’ struggle against, temptation. Some of the women were mere girls. This mass prosecution is the result of inquiries commencing in 1921. These showed that certain doctors and chemists had been selling cocaine without making entries in the poison register, and deliberately overlooking the evidence of fraud on the part of the dopers.