Nothing can be much more pitiful than the spectacle of a youngster led into an alcoholic addiction through the influence of older men. I am by no means accepting the theory of hereditary drunkenness when I say that many young drunkards are only faithfully following their fathers' footsteps, and cannot be justly blamed for their error. Too often it is true that they literally find themselves unable to catch up with their fathers in alcoholic exploits, because their constitutions, depleted by vicious parental habits, prove too weak to stand the pace.
Even where boys are not unfortunately influenced by vicious examples offered by their parents, there are circumstances of our modern life that are likely to work havoc with the rising generation. The youth who up to his twenty-first birthday has been permitted to "have his own way" is not likely to have formed the habit of traveling in a very good way; nor will he be likely to change it for a better one when it is proved to him and to his friends and to society that it is bad; for habits form early. Association with thousands of those who have gone wrong has proved many social facts to me, one of which I mention here despite its apparent irrelevance. The boy who has never known the value of money, on whom the responsibilities of life have never been impressed, is as seriously uneducated as he would be if lack of common schooling had left him illiterate.
RELATION OF DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TO INSANITY
The habitual drug-taker and the confirmed alcoholic are puzzles that baffle the alienist. The man with the "wet brain" is a contradiction of all the rules of normality. In many criminal trials men have been adjudged insane who were merely in abnormal states due to the habitual use of drugs or alcohol, of which, without proper treatment, they have been suddenly deprived.
In one of the largest hospitals in the United States I once ran across an old woman crooning while she rocked an imaginary baby. She had been formally and legally adjudged insane by the State's experts. As a matter of fact, she was suffering only from an hallucination due to alcoholic deprivation. I suggested definite medical treatment for this case when I discovered that she was about to be transferred from the alcoholic ward to the insane pavilion. In two days after the administration of this treatment she had lost all her hallucinations, and on the third day was dismissed from the institution. Not long ago I observed a similar case in a foreign hospital.