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.