THE DRUG-TAKER AND THE PHYSICIAN
The doctor who begins to take the drug in order to whip his flagging
energies into new effort finds the habit fastened on him before he
realizes what has occurred. His endeavors to reduce his daily dosage fail,
and he becomes thoroughly enmeshed. His acquired tolerance for the drug
has brought about so great a physical change that deprivation or even
reduction of dosage is intolerable. Hundreds of cases where physicians had
experimented with the drug with these disastrous results have been brought
to my attention.
No one shows less foresight, less appreciation of the danger of tampering
with drugs, than the physician himself. I am constantly amazed by the fact
that any doctor will take even the slightest risk of becoming a drug-user.
That many voluntarily incur the peril passes my understanding.
I have seen an astonishing number of physicians who for various physical
reasons other than exhaustion and the need of stimulant considered
themselves eligible to experiment with drugs. It is a curious thing that,
as a class, physicians and surgeons are themselves singularly averse to
submitting to surgical operation, even when symptomatic indications
strongly urge it. Why surgeons, in particular, should so generally dread
the application of the knife in their own cases is a puzzle, for of course
no class more thoroughly understands the need of surgery. I could mention
many cases of this sort, but one in particular recurs to my memory. He was
one of the most careful and best-informed doctors in the country, and he
was not without a certain special knowledge of the peril involved in
habit-forming drugs; but he suffered from a painful rectal trouble, and
although he considered himself too intelligent a man to go too far with a
dangerous substance, he did go too far. He had thought that he could leave
drugs off whenever he desired; he found that he could not.
THE PHYSICIAN WHO TAKES DRUGS
It is impossible to make even an approximately accurate guess at the
proportion of physicians who are drug-users. Everywhere except in New
York State physicians can obtain as many drugs as they desire without
publicity and without laying themselves open to any penalty whatsoever,
even if their purchases are brought to official attention. No medical
organization takes any cognizance of drug-taking physicians or provides
any medical help for them. It is highly probable that the New York State
legislation may uncover some of the drug-taking doctors in that
commonwealth, though this is by no means certain, since legislation in
force in only one State cannot effectively put a stop to the illegal
importation of habit-forming drugs from other States and countries. Proper
restrictive legislation of sufficiently wide scope would very quickly
disclose every drug-taking doctor in the nation, and either force him to
correct his physical condition or drive him from the profession. Proper
general regulation of the traffic and consumption of habit-forming drugs
will aid tremendously in freeing the medical profession from drug-takers.
Until this general regulation exists no general reform will be possible.
An exact accounting for every grain of habit-forming drugs which he
purchases, possesses, or administers, must be demanded of every physician
in the United States before this evil can be entirely abated; and this
accounting among physicians will be impossible until a similar accounting
is demanded of every grain imported, manufactured, and dispensed by
wholesale and retail druggists.
Concerning the extent of the hold which the drug habit has upon physicians
I have had a rare opportunity to judge. Not only has my dealing with the
drug habit been as exclusively as possible through the physician rather
than through the patient, but the brevity of my treatment and the privacy
that my patients are assured make it possible for many physicians who have
become afflicted to come to me for relief without arousing in the mind of
any one a suspicion of the real cause for their brief absence. I therefore
feel that I have a firm basis for accuracy.
It is the fear of disgrace which has driven hundreds of physicians from
bad to worse with the drug habit: they have become apprehensive that any
effort tending to their relief will uncover their position to their
families, associates, or patients, and thus bring ruin; so they have
drifted on from bad to worse. Many who have not taken steps in time have
reached the irresponsible and hopeless stage. To the medical profession
in general, as well as to the public, these men are a dreadful menace.
ATTITUDE OF THE PROFESSION
I, a layman, have been greatly surprised that the medical world shows so
little sympathy for these unfortunates. This seems to me to be specially
reprehensible, since by this neglect they imperil the public. No greater
service could be rendered to mankind by the medical profession than a
concerted movement of the medical organizations toward the care and relief
of those among their drug-taking members who are still susceptible to
help, and the exclusion from medical practice of those who have already
gone too far to be reclaimed. Physicians of this class who are without
means are specially entitled to sympathy and help, and this service will
be of double value, for it will not only give them necessary aid, but will
notably safeguard the public. No physician should be permitted to practise
who is addicted to the use of habit-forming drugs or who uses alcoholic
stimulants to excess; but whatever is done in regard to these men should
be accomplished without publicity and without any loss of pride or
standing. A doctor who has used either drugs or alcohol is much more to be
pitied than blamed.
The worthy practitioners--and there are many--who must resort to the use
of drugs in order to enable them to practise despite some physical
disability which cannot be eliminated, are no less numerous in proportion
to the total number of physicians than similar cases are in relation to
the total number of lawyers, merchants, or journalists, but because of the
nature of their work, they are far more dangerous to the general public.
It seems to me that there is in this fact--the existent, non-elimination
of such perilous characters from the practice of medicine, and the
obvious, very real necessity for such an elimination--a suggestion for
some person of philanthropic mind. If the medical profession will not care
for its own, then some one else must care for them. It occurs to me that
among the people whose naturally fine impulses are leading them toward the
endowment of institutions for the care of the aged maiden lady, or
superannuated teachers, or others to whom fate has been unkind, there are
many who might well consider this great need for the establishment of a
comfortable institution in this country for the care of physicians who
through no fault of their own have become unable to practise their
profession with profit and efficiency.
HOW THE DOCTOR BECOMES A DRUG-TAKER
The doctor's yielding to the drug habit is a simple process, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred unaccompanied by any unworthy tendency
toward dissipation. In another part of this book I make extensive
reference to the fact that nowhere in the text-books by means of which the
medical students of the world receive their education is any proper
attention paid to the psychology of the drug habit. We may assume that a
doctor, having lost sleep because of a difficult case, is confronted on
his return to his office by another that demands immediate and skilful
attention. He is tired and very likely he himself is ill. He cannot yield
to his worries or illness, as he would demand one of his patients to
yield. He must "brace up." He knows that in the stock of habit-forming
drugs that he uses in his profession lies the material which will brace
him up. He tries it; it succeeds.
This doctor has begun to nibble at the habit, and he does not know his
danger. He himself does not believe that one or two or a few doses will
fasten that habit upon him. He finds that a certain dosage produces the
necessary desired result upon the first day; he is stimulated to new
efforts in behalf of his patients, and because those new efforts are the
result of stimulation, they produce abnormal weariness. This exhaustion
must be overcome, and the result is another dosage of the drug; and this
time the dosage must be larger than the first, for both his toleration for
the drug and his weariness have increased. Only a few days of such
experiences are necessary to fasten the habit upon him.
I have often endeavored to imagine the thrill of horror which must chill a
doctor's soul when he finds that this has happened. His position is a
dreadful one. He has lost control. He must tell no one, for if he tells,
disgrace and the loss of his means of livelihood will be but matters of a
short time. He knows nothing of any means of real relief; he cannot help
himself; he is familiar with the dangers attendant on the fake cures which
are widely advertised. He is confronted by a stone wall. He must either
continue his dosage, thus enabling him to keep on with his practice, or
he must accept ruin and defeat; and to continue his dosage is the easiest
thing imaginable, for the drug has been by law intrusted to his keeping
and is close at hand.
Another doctor who is specially susceptible to drug addictions is the one
who has been accustomed to alcoholic stimulation. Any doctor who drinks
alcohol, when he finds himself beset by arduous labor involving loss of
sleep, or is confronted by cases of such a complex nature that they
involve a great deal of mental worry on his part, is likely to drink more
than usual. Thus work and worry, the two things which make him most liable
to the evil effects of any stimulation, are likely to drive him directly
into over-stimulation.
Over-stimulation results in super-nervous excitation. The victim finds
himself unable to sleep, he finds his hand tremulous, he finds his
thoughts wool-gathering when they should be concentrating with intensity
upon his work. In his pocket case there is his little morphine bottle; he
knows its action, and when called to see a patient while under the
influence of alcoholic stimulants he attempts to steady himself by the
administration of a small dosage. The result is virtually instantaneous
and at first marvelously effective. He finds himself enabled to do better
work than he has done for years, and more of it. The remedy seems magical;
he tries it again and again. The man is lost.
Such instances as these have produced the most utterly hopeless of the
many cases of drug addictions among physicians with which I have come into
contact.
TYPES OF DRUG-USERS
Specially numerous among drug victims are physicians in nose and throat
work, where they make daily employment of cocaine solution. Some of the
most desperate cases of drug habit that I have ever seen among physicians
have come from this class, made familiar with the constant use of the drug
by the necessity for continually administering it to their patients.
Another physician who is specially liable is the man who suffers severe
pain from a physical cause that he knows can be removed only by resorting
to surgery. The average doctor will postpone a surgical operation upon
himself until his condition has long passed the stage that he would
consider perilous to any of his patients. While he postpones it he is
suffering, and while he suffers he may be more than likely to continue his
practice through reliance upon the stimulation and pain-deadening
qualities of habit-forming drugs, concerning the true and insidious nature
of which he usually knows no more than the average layman.
There have been a few cases of physicians who have yielded unworthily to
drugs and opiates as a means of dissipation. I have known some physicians,
for example, who have been opium-smokers. In the United States the
opium-smoker is invariably unworthy. Not long ago the New York police
raided the apartment of a physician where were found thirty or forty
opium-pipes and more than a hundred pounds of opium, either crude or
prepared for smoking. I have known fewer than half a dozen physicians
whose drug vice was purely social, however. The victims of drag habit who
achieved it through a tendency toward dissipation are almost invariably
denizens of the under-world; and if it were not for the fact that the
contagion of their vice may spread, they might well be permitted by
society to drug themselves to death as speedily as possible.
We shall entirely disregard the physician who becomes addicted to the use
of drugs through unworthy tendencies, and consider only the dangers to the
profession and the public latent in the case of the physician who becomes
addicted in the less reprehensible, but more dangerous, manner that I have
indicated. Not only will such a drug addiction injure the doctor's
practice and threaten his career, but it will surely constitute a threat
against the welfare of his patients not included in the possibility that
through it he may miss engagements, write improper prescriptions, and make
mistakes of many kinds.
THE DRUG-TAKING PHYSICIAN A MENACE
A very serious danger lies in the psychology of drug addictions. The
person who has taken a habit-forming drug for the purpose of relieving his
own pain, and through it has found that relief which he sought, is almost
certain to become abnormally sympathetic to the suffering of others. It is
a curious fact that this doctor will be more than likely to administer the
drug he uses to his patients, not with malicious, but with probably
friendly, intent, and that he will feel no scruples whatsoever in acting
as a go-between for drug-users in general who find themselves unable to
obtain supplies easily. He will do what he can to help confirmed users to
obtain their drugs, even if he makes no profit out of it. He will write
prescriptions for them in evasion, if not in violation, of the law. It is
a curious and tragic fact that the drug-taking doctor will spread the
habit in his own family.
There have been many instances in my hospital when I have had a physician
and his wife as patients at the same time and on the same floor. In every
one of these instances the drug addiction of a wife has been the direct
result of constant association with the drug-addicted husband. No more
dangerous detail exists in the psychology of drug-users than their almost
invariable tolerance for the habit in others and their sympathetic
willingness to promote its spread among those who suffer pain. In the
under-world the drug habit never travels alone. Through it the woman who
is a drug-user holds the man whom she desires; through it the male
drug-taker holds the woman whose companionship he finds agreeable. It is a
curious fact that while in the under-world the drug habit has become a
social vice, especially in the case of cocaine, and is frequently a proof
of mixed sex-relations, in the upper-world it is accompanied by a secrecy
of method and sequestration of administration that characterizes no other
form of vice.
The difference between the psychology of the doctor's relation to the drug
habit and that of the layman to it may be summed up in the statement that
while the layman does not at all know what he is getting, the doctor knows
what he is taking, but thinks that he can stop taking it whenever he feels
ready. It is probable, therefore, that the doctor's primary danger is as
great as the layman's, and it is certainly true that his secondary
danger--that growing out of the fact that he has drugs and the instrument
for their administration always ready to his hand--is very much greater.
The unnecessary administration of habit-forming drugs to the sick must be
legally prevented as far as possible. No affliction which can be added to
an already existing physical trouble can compare in horror with that of a
drug habit. Numbers of cases have come under my observation in which
physicians have accomplished exactly this addition to the ruin of their
patients' health, to the incalculable distress of the sufferers'
families, and to the vast loss of society. In the recent legislation
written upon the statute-books of New York State the first definite effort
is made to provide against this catastrophe.