" Drugs are supposed to be a mystic diabolical
class of substance, remote from and contrasting in their nature with all
other things. So they banish a tonic from the house and stuff their
children with manufactured cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken
helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian Scientist who
denies healing only to those who have studied pathology, and declares
that anything whatever put into a bottle and labelled with directions
for its use by a doctor is thereby damnable and damned. But indeed all
drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there
is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness
in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless
artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are
matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is
stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely
to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become
painful to check or control. The moral rule of my standards is
irregularity.
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