During the first two years of my work, after finding in various ways patients from the under-world to use as subjects for demonstration, I was finally able to treat any case of drug habit which came to me unless it was complicated by underlying physical disability. After a period of from three to four days these patients would not feel the slightest craving or desire for any form of opiate, whether their addiction had been cocaine, alcoholic stimulants, or tobacco.
When the efficacy of this treatment was assured, it began to attract the attention of some of the best-known medical men in the country--men who were interested in this line of study. They followed carefully the medical administration of the new treatment of these cases.
It was only a matter of time before the value of the work was thoroughly established and became a medical fact. After hundreds of definite clinical histories had been recorded, the formula was publicly announced, first, at the International Opium Conference at Shanghai in 1909, and a month later to the medical world. Since the complete information concerning my work has been given to the medical profession, and after all these years of study and investigation and medical comment, I have never yet had from any physician an entirely satisfactory explanation as to why or how we were able successfully to unpoison these cases in this short period. At present this treatment is, so far as I know, the only one known to medical science that will bring about this definite physiological change.
The intelligent beginning of help in these cases is to unpoison the patient, put him physically on his feet, where he does not want drugs or drink, and where he does not feel the slightest desire or craving for them, and has no dread of ever drifting into these habits again. When you have brought about this definite physical change, you are invariably able to get a definite mental change. You cannot hope to get the mental change until you have first cleared the system of poison, for in this state the patient is in a most responsive condition to deal with. If physical building up, change of environment, change of surroundings in any way whatever are necessary, they can then be taken up intelligently.