Backbone. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn. ;) 1897-1906, 1899-10-01
The Curse of Drugs.

IACy nave COiuS uOWu W us LuIOuSu
all ages, adding intensity to their in
gradients of destruction and DEATH
Flavius Josephus touching upon this
subject, in his early day, says: "The
chaldron of herbs and the mixing of
fats and minerals has for all time
made death easily attainable." Egypt,
at one time, was SO cursed by the pro-
ficiency of drugs and their universal
administration, by her people, that the
laws of the realm prohibited, by both
fine and Imprisonment, the preserv-
ing, giving or offering for sale any
drugs, one to another, and it took
seven decades of time to stamp drugs
out of Egypt, so we are told. But this
is not the only country that has
Wrestled with this evil of the hour;
there are other lands. The more be-
nighted the greater the drug curse
Henry M. Stanley, the noted African
explorer, writing upon the customs of
the various tribes of that country,
speaks at length upon their universal
use of drugs, in every conceivable
form. But of all the drug cursed
lands under the sun, China is the
worst. Nowhere else has drugs at
tanned so many graded stages; no
where else are they so universally
used; nowhere else have they so
broadened the breach between life and
death or marked their destruction
with tombstones, unless right here in
our own America. The medicine
Men" of the North America Indians
were not held in greater awe by the
members of their respective tribes,
than are our Medical Doctors" by
the cultured and refined Americans, in
this advanced century. In point of
intelligence, there is no comparison,
yet in credulity and superstition there
is a striking similarity on the part of
both people and of the vendors of
drugs. But the drugs are the same,
changed perhaps in form, but not in
substance. The poison extracted from
under the wing of the Egyptian Beetle
bug, or the contents of the gall blad-
der of the Chinese dragon, or the
poison from the root of the rattle
snakes fang in the hand of the North
American Indian, is not more deadly
than the aconite or belladonna in the
visiting drug case of the most cult
ured American doctor-all serve the
one and the same purpose. Then by
what standard shall we measure in
telligence or culture? Surely not by
the advancement of medicine, for there
is no advancement in drugs. Their
forms may be changed, but the sub
stance remains, by whatever school
nursed. The aIlopath differs not from
the homeopath, eclectic, physeometic
or any other member, only in name.
The degree of intelligence, one above
another, offers no sign of reformation,
save and except the holding of each
other in bitter contempt and profess
sional jealousy, which grows by day
and wakes by night. The same drug
that the allopath would give to move
the bowel, the homeopath would pre-
scribe to check it's action, while the
eclectic would combine theirs with an
other drug or two to meet either of the
requirements, and the physeometic
would give them all together in either
case, and wait for results. So you
can take your choice, select the one
you really want. There is but little
difference in the cost of either, and
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