Page:The Great American Fraud (Adams).djvu/43

 from 140 to 116 pounds, and was finally brought to Philadelphia in a state of stupor. His pulse was barely perceptible, his skin dusky and his blood of a deep chocolate color. On reviving he was questioned as to whether he had been taking headache powders. He had, for several years. What kind? Antikamnia; sometimes in the plain tablets, at other times Antikamnia with codein. How many? About twelve a day. He was greatly surprised to learn that this habit was responsible for his condition.

"My doctor gave it to me for insomnia," he said, and it appeared that the patient had never even been warned of the dangerous character of the drug.

Were it obtainable, I would print here the full name and address of that attending physician, as one unfit, either through ignorance or carelessness, to practice his profession. And there would be other physicians all over the country who would, under that description, suffer the same indictment within their own minds for starting innocent patients on a destructive and sometimes fatal course. For it is the careless or conscienceless physician who gets the customer for the "ethical" headache remedies, and the customer, once secured, pays a profit, very literally, with his own blood. Once having taken Antikamnia, the laymen, unless informed as to its true nature, will often return to the drug store and purchase it with the impression that it is a specific drug, like quinin or potassium chlorate, instead of a disguised poison, exploited and sold under patent rights by a private concern. The United States Postoffice, in its broad tolerance, permits the Antikamnia company to send through the mails little sample boxes containing tablets enough to kill an ordinary man, and these sample boxes are sent not only to physicians, as is the rule with ethical remedies, but to lawyers, business men, "brain workers," and other prospective purchasing classes. The box bears the lying statement: "No drug habit - no heart effect."

Just as this is going to press the following significant case comes in from Iowa:

", Oct. 6. - (Special to the Constitution-Democrat.) - Mrs. Hattie Kick, one of the best and most prominent ladies of Farmington, died rather suddenly Wednesday morning at 10 o'clock from an overdose of Antikamnia, which she took for a severe headache from which she was suffering. Mrs. Kick was subject to severe headaches and was a frequent user of Antikamnia, her favorite remedy for this ailment."

There is but one safeguard in the use of these remedies; to regard them as one would regard opium, and to employ them only with the consent of a physician who understands their true nature. Acetanilid has its uses, but not as a generic painkiller. Pain is a symptom; you can drug it away temporarily, but it will return, clamoring for more payment, until the final price is hopeless enslavement. Were the skull and bones on every box of this class of poison the danger would be greatly minimized.

With opium and cocain the case is different. The very words are danger signals. Legal restrictions safeguard the public, to a greater or less degree, from their indiscriminate use. Normal people do not knowingly take opium or its derivatives except with the sanction of a physician, and there is even spreading abroad a belief (surely an expression of the primal law of self-preservation) that the licensed practitioner leans too readily toward the convenient narcotics.

But this perilous stuff is the ideal basis for a patent medicine because its results are immediate (though never permanent), and it is its own best advertisement in that one dose imperatively calls for another. Therefore it behooves the manufacturer of opiates to disguise the use of the drug. This he does in varying forms, and he has found his greatest success in the "cough and consumption cures" and the soothing syrup class. The former of these will be considered in another article. As to the "soothing syrups,"