Drugs enervate and suppress. There are many very popular drug habits. Thousands daily take a purgative or a laxative to induce bowel action. Many thousands more employ drugs to aid digestion, or to brace up their nerves, or to tone up their system, or purify their blood. Many use patent medicines, others use proprietary remedies or their physicians' prescriptions. The patent medicines are almost, if not quite, as bad as those prescribed by the physician and should be avoided along with the rest.

There never was a drug or drug "remedy" that had any business in the human body. Speaking generally, drugs either destroy more or less of the tissues of the body or they occasion a needless and wasteful expenditure of its vital energies. Most of them do both these things. Their effects upon the system are not altered, because they are prescribed by a physician. It makes no difference, once the drug is in the system, who prescribed it; the effects are the same.

I shall pass over the opium, morphine, heroin and such debasing drug habits--not because they are unimportant, but because no one doubts their destructive offices--and shall pass to more common drug habits that are supposed by many to be beneficial. Among these is the use of headache remedies.

The habit of taking headache "remedies" is becoming a national pastime. The average person, apparently, suffers from frequent headaches, and, judging by the readiness with which they resort to the "remedies," they fear a few minutes of slight pain more than the deadly drugs they introduce into their system.

They do not realize what a terrible price they pay for this short respite from pain and for the restless stupor, miscalled sleep, which they secure through hypnotic or narcotic drugs. Deadening sensation does not cure "disease" ; pain is never cured by deadening the nerves. Cause is never corrected in such manner. The reader should know that there is no cure outside of correction of cause.

Every dose of such drugs lessens nerve force and thereby impairs the various functions of the body. When nerve force is lessened there is always and necessarily a checking of elimination resulting in a retention within the body of part of its waste products. And these produce "disease" and death. Every headache "remedy" interferes with elimination, and thus perpetuates the condition for which it is given. They are also habit forming, and many of them have a very deleterious influence upon the heart and other organs.

Anything that "relieves" pain without correcting its cause does so by diminishing the power of the nerves to feel. It is the part of wisdom to find out what is causing the trouble and correct this.

Tilden says: "The internal use of aconite and belladonna, as practiced in many homes as household remedies, forces many children into the use of glasses, and increases the diseases of the nervous system and bloodvessels and heart."

Yeast is an indirect cause of overstimulation; hence, a cause of enervation and its sequence, auto-toxemia.

It is the curse of all stimulants (irritants) that they enable one to work beyond his normal strength. This is, they enable him to keep working long after nature has called for rest. They do this, not by adding to the powers of the body, but by calling out the power held in reserve. They act in the same way a spur does on a tired horse. Slowly, but surely, the reserve powers of the body are consumed under the influence of "stimulants" and physical bankruptcy follows. Coffee, tea, coca-cola, cocoa and chocolate, because of their universal use, are great offenders in this respect. They produce enervation and sleeplessness in proportion to their use. Those who use them become coffee and tea or cocoa inebriates. They are addicts as truly as the opium user. The habitual user of tea or coffee is tired, listless, irritable and suffers with headache and other discomforts when deprived of his habitual cup. Nervous "diseases" result from the employment of such nervines.

Give a "stimulant" to a man of full-resistance and he reacts to it with increased activity and an increased feeling of well- being. When the period of increased activity ends there sets in, due to the excessive expenditure of energy and substance, a period of depression. Rest soon restores full health. All "stimulation" is followed by a period of depression equal in duration and intensity to the period of "stimulation." Keep up this "stimulation" by habitual repetition and renewal of nerve energy fags. A permanent depression--a profound enervation--which forms the foundation for the development of any "disease" of the nosology, follows. There is a slowing down of the functions of the body. The processes of nutrition and elimination fail to meet physiological needs.

"Stimulants" stand at the head of the many causes of excessive expenditure of nervous energy. The increased feeling of strength which follows their use is due to the expenditure of power which they occasion and not to any power which they add. We are conscious of power only in its expenditure. A pure or uncompensated "stimulant" is any agent or influence that occasions or induces an increase in the activities of the body or any of its organs without supplying any real need of the body. All such "stimulants" should be avoided.

The farther away from nature we stray the longer and harder is the road back. "Resist the beginnings, crush danger in the bud," is an ancient rule of wisdom which we all do well to observe. The coffee, tobacco, liquor, soft-drink and drug industries will perish when the people learn that toxemia and enervation go hand in hand; hence the enormous expenditures by the industries to convince us of the beneficience and healthfulness of their poisons and slops.

The doctor who tells a patient that he may smoke moderately, or drink temperately, or take tea or coffee in moderation is saying to such a patient: "It is all right to damage yourself a little, but don't damage yourself as much as you might." It should be noticed that no valid standard of moderation is ever supplied the user.

We tend to forget our early experiences with vices and abuses. We forget the time when tea was bitter, and alcohol a real "fire water," when tobacco produced nausea and vomiting. Our woes are not the penalty of our persistent blindness, but of our first open-eyed transgression. Nature's warnings, like her punishments, are proportional to the magnitude of each offense against her laws. Injurious substances are repulsive to our taste and are reacted against with violence; incipient exhaustion warns us by a feeling of weariness, every strain on our organism that threatens us with rupture or dislocation announces the danger with an unmistakable appeal (pain) to our sensorium.

How, then, can we say that any pathological condition is insidious, that it comes upon us unawares? How can we believe that Nature has failed to provide alarm-signals against such dangers; how reconcile with the immutable laws of life, her reported failure to warn against approaching dissolution? The truth is that none of her protests are more persistent or more pathetic than those she directs against habits that are fraught with such pernicious consequences to health and life.