The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-09-28
WOMAN'S DOWNFALL IS
 LAID TO COCAINE CURSE
ANOTHER MILWAUKEE WOMAN'S RUIN IS DUE TO AMERICAS
 WORSE DOPE

RUIN IS DUE TO AMERICAS
 WORSE DOPE
 Iowa Report Shows Increase-Num-
 bers of Patients fin Asylums and
 Penitentiaries Indicate Rapid In-
 road of Drug Addictions in Rural
 Population.
 Chicago, Sept. 2S.-The discovery of a double for Mrs. Evelyn Romadka, now in the Joliet penitentiary, whose downfall was due to addiction to CO., caine, has been reported to the Cur rier. Commission tor the investigation of drug addictions, from Milwaukee which was also the former home of Mrs. Romadka. Mrs. Bessie Kloeger, the present alias of the unfortunate double of Mrs. Romadka, is the widow of once prominent physician of the west end. Cocaine writes her story also.
 This is another case that will be sub n1itted to Congress next winter when the bill comes up to put the regulation of habit forming drugs under the gov ernment's internal revenue officers.
 Beautiful, intellectual and refined,
  ged Mrs Kloeger down from her once high position. Promise after promise has Bessie Kloeger given the various Milwaukee judges, before whom she has been brought to trial, that she will reform. Her aged and respectable parents who are still living in Negau- nee, Mich., send their daughter money each week to pay her room rent It is to the home of this old fatheR and mother that Bessie Kloeger will re- turn.
 T don't dare let her go free now,' commented the judge at the close of the trial. "If she goes free now, she will doubtless be either drunk or crazed with the drug when more money arrives" a =@S
 Reports of the use of habit-forming drugs in the granger States are being rapidly filed with the Currferr Com mission, showing that in thrifty rural communities where the towns and vil- lages are not spaced too tar apart there is a comparatively small use of the drug. Few "coke fiends'' are seen there save the tramps and the vag- rants who drift in from the cities. Their pleadings for NJes one dose, Doc,' made before rural physicians is pitiable. and the feverish hysterical gratitude they pour out, and the avid ity with which they seize the drug, if they are able to procure any of it, is frightful
 Iowa is the latest State to report. The Independence State Hospital of Iowa shows that the insane inmates of that institution who were habitues of cocaine and whose present condition may be attributed to the drug, have doubled in number during the past twelve months. w. P. Crumbacker, superintendent of the institution, for merly headed a hospital for the insane in West Virginia, and also another in Ohio. In his report he remarks that undoubtedly more of the patients ad-l rnitted to those institutions were guilty of drug habits than stands confessed. Out of IA women inebriates, patients in the Mt. Pleasant State Hospital, three were cocaine fiends before their incarceration, two were addicted to both cocaine and morphine, three to morphine alone, one to morphine, CO.,. caine and alcohol, one to alcohol and narcotics, three to morphine and alco- hol, and only one to alcohol alone. This hospital is the only one in Iowa which receives inebriate women com mitted under the Iowa, law, which pro- vides for the involuntary commitment of inebriates for treatment in hos pitfalls, so the significance of this re- port is alarming by its very brev-
 Ten per cent. of the AS males con- fined in the State penitentiary at Ft. Madison August 31, by the statement of the prison physician, were addicted to the use of cocaine, 15 per cent, to opium and it's alkaloids, and eighty per cent. to intoxica ting liquors. Al so the majority of the dope" users drank.
 The comparatively small actual showing of insane patients confined in State institutions whose aflfction IS directly traceable to drug add1ct1ons is held by alienists and other expert authorities as inadequate and incom- This becanSR bV far the jority of drug habitues and persons afflicted with disorders arising from the constant abuse of the use of drugs are confined or sent for treatment to private sanatoria, when they are not kept at home by their relatives and friends, and cared for in the privacy of the home.
 Max E. witte, superintendent of the C1arinda Iowa State Hospital, with over thousand patients. reports that from his observations of over thirty years experience in handling such af- flicted people, no commensurate cal culation of the mentally diseased whose perversions have emanated from narcotics is possible because of this tendency to keep such disgrace shelter ed under the family wing.
 The rural districts defend themselves from the growth of the habit by stat ing that in those institutions where a large percentage of the patients come from large cities, the registers disclose a constantly increasing use of all mar ootic drugs and especially of CO., caine
 Cocaine debauchery is an expensive form or orgy compared to either alco- hoI or a morphine intoxication. More insidious, it's elemental danger lies in it's almost unbreakable tentacles, cou- pied with it's tendency to attract the middle classes and the masses rather than the more exclusive classes, which generally turn to the use of alcoholics or Of morphine.