AN ABODE OF “MANIACS.”

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4495, 22 November 1922, Page 4

AN ABODE OF “MANIACS.”

PHILADELPHIA MOURNS HER LOST SOULS.

According to the Philadelphia “Public Ledger” eighty drug addicts and traffickers were arrested in tnat city in two days—August 31 .and September 1 of this year. “The shrieks of the drug-craving prisoners made the z room sound like an abode of maniacs,” says the report. Addicts and traffickers were of both sexes, and the accommodation of four police stations was so greatly overtaxed that many prisoners had to be accommodated in the sheriff’s room on the seventh floor of the central station. This is just one of t’he tniings that Prohibition has done for America. That a two-day police drive in one city could be responsible for the arrest of eighty drug-fiends points to a state of affairs appalling to‘contemplate. It is a medical truism that of. all human failings the drug habit is' tjhe pjost saul-killing, the most debasing, the hardest to eradicate. Yet it is the very habit to which the efforts •of well-meaning but misguided fanatics have impelled the people of the United- States. The event of Prohibition marked the beginning of a period of national demoralisation which is at present giving pause even to the most enthusiastic supporters of the "dry.” laws. They find themselves enmeshed in a coil, of their own unconscious .weaving; they have conjured into being a hydra-headed monster which is eating the national soul alive.

Supposing, fpr a moment, that the police of this country instituted a campaign to-morrow for the arrest of drug addicts and traffickers. What would be the probable result ? Would 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. We are sound and healthy because we have a regulated liquor trade, by the operations of which we may obtain healthy stimulants in reasonable quantities’. Let us not hepr "shrieks of drugcraving prisoners” echoing through this sane healthy Dominion. Vote Restoration and National Continuance and keep the drug habit and other unnatural perversions out of the country.* •