St. Paul daily globe., 1891-12-28
DRUNKENNESS AS A DISEASE.
If the Jail Is Abolished the Hos
pital Should Take Its Place.


pital Should Take Its Place.
Portland Oregonian.
The latest freak of the New England
sentimentalists is to treat drunkenness
as disease, involving no legal or moral
responsibility to the state. This theory
may have sound germ in it, but the
practical legislation that has issued
from it i'll Massachusetts produces
absurd consequences. Reports of
police boards of cities are be-
ginning to yield results from
the operation of the new probation
law, which abolished the old punish
ment of fine and Imprisonment, except
after repeated convictions. OF this law,
as tested in Springfield, the Republi-
can of that city, says it is working
about as those who look upon drunken
ness as disease akin to insanity eX-
pected it would. 1t seems that these
victims of dipsOmania are in many in
stances affected as though certain re-
straint upon their appetite mad been
taken away by this removal of the COM
parative certainty of punishment, so
that the same individual has not
infrequently been discharged by
the court III the morning
only to be locked up again drunk before
night. Under the old law, where the
convicted drunkard was fined or i'm
prisoned. such cases were occasional,
but not by any means so frequent as
they promise to become under the new
law. 1t is, of course, too early to draw
general conclusions, and the experience
in other cities may be contrary to what
has 50 far been noted here, but if DIR.
Hammond, DR.. CrOtherS and other eX-
peTtS in dipSOmania are correct in their
| diagnosis, what seems to be happening
here is likely to be the general eX-
perence." The trouble with the
law is that it proceeds exactly
contrary to the theory upon
which it is based. If alcoholism be a
disease, its victim should be restrained
from his liberty and treated with a vie v
to his cure, like the victim of epilepsy,
by drophobia. smallpox, homicidal
mania. or any other disease which
makes the patient dangerous to society.
! Instead of releasing the alcoholic sub
| ject from ali restraint, he should be sub
| iected to closer and more constant, not
as punishment for legal crime or moral
delinquency, but for protection of So
ciety from the consequences of his NOR
bid impulses and Irresponsible acts.
This is the view of the medical
experts referred TO by the Re-
|
of his moral Responsibility and
liability to be punished for his offense
against society to one side, they hold
that for its protection the state must
guard and control its citizens vino can
not control themselves, and whose in.
ability to do so is a source of probable
danger. Not only should the state make
it impossible, so far as it can by re-
straining him, for a man to wreck his
health, waste his substance or his earn
ings and generally demoralIze himself;
but ii should treat such one as it treats
irrespOnsibles of all kinds, by holding
them within strictly defined
bounds. The difference in the opin-
ion of this school of theor-
lists, between the habitual drunkard
and the insane person is one of degree
rather than kind; both are sadly dis
eased in the nerve centers; the drunk
ard is more easily durable, but IN his
periods of excitement fully as danger
Gus. The degree of the hold which the
drinking habit has measures the extent
| of the disease and f the loss of respon-
| sibiity, and accordingly of the neces-
sity for external restraint. The primitive
restraint Of the old law was wrong in