Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1915 — Drugs and Prohibition. [ARTICLE]

Drugs and Prohibition.

II the federal “antidope" law succeeds in wiping out or greatly lessening the drug evil, it will abolish at the same time one of the chief objections which thoughtful men have urged against prohibition—the argument that when liquor goes out, “dope” come in. This has been the case in many places, notably in the south. Prohibition in that section has been followed by an enormous increase in drug habits. Liquor is bulky and hard to conceal, while a month’s supply of “coke” or heroin can be carried in a card case. Moreover, drugs are more dangerous both to; society and the individual than is liquor. To take only the social aspect of the case, a drunken man oftimes wants to kill, but he must get up close to do it. Whisky has set his muscles twitching; and he cannot hit a billboard at 20 yards. Fill him to the murder point with cocaine, and his hand is steady as a rock, his bullets find their mark with almost alsolute precision, and his sensitiveness to shock is so slight that he can carry lead enough to stop a Bengal tiger, and yet kill, and kill. Two negroes on a cocaine “jag” in a Mississippi town killed 11 persons and were fairly riddled with bullets before they fell. If the federal government can stop the traffic in this and other drugs, the fear of “dope” habits to follow prohibition will be gone, and with it will go one of the few remaining barriers to the anti-alcohol campaign. Perhaps this is why every good prohibitionist is praying for the success of the Harrison drug law.—Chicago Journal.