Narcosan Rejected

Two years ago Alexander Lambert, expert physician, endorsed narcosan (TIME, Dec. 27, 1926). He believed it a merited, specific cure for drug addiction. That was after it had been given a thorough tryout in Manhattan's correctional hospital.

Last week Dr. Lambert was obliged, and cheerfully so, to admit that he had erred two years ago. As head of the checking-up committee he had discerned that sly drug fiends had pretended cure to escape detention and get their dope in full freedom. But by prying, during the past few months, into their skulking solitudes, his committeemen found the narcosan-injected, drug-deprived addicts secretly twitching, gritting teeth, rolling eyes, gripping griped abdomens-- all in the usual torments of deprivation. Narcosan did them no good. It was too bad, for curing a dope fiend by standard methods is hell for him. He is given nourishing food while his supply of drug is gradually tapered off. Many a fiend, however, goes through the ordeal. He knows, until he is too poisoned, too besotted, that treatment is fairly quickly over. Its temporary sweaty terrors are preferable to the life-long degradation before him.

One man, however, disputed Dr. Lambert's re-findings. He was Alexander S. Horovitz, Manhattan biochemist, who had compounded narcosan out of lipoids (fat-like substances), proteins and vitamins. Narcosan is efficacious, he declared, angrily. English, French, German and Australian doctors were using it. Dr. Lambert's committee did not give it fair trial. But the committee's decision was undisputed in the minds of more U. S. doctors. It was made up of some of the best men in the profession: Menas S. Gregory, neurological director of the psychopathic department of Bellevue Hospital; Stanley R. Benedict of the Cornell University Medical School; Thomas McGoldrick, medical director of Saint Peters Hospital, Brooklyn; Israel Strauss, president of the Jewish Mental Health Society; George B. Wallace, assistant physician, Bellevue Hospital and Linsly R. Williams, director of the New York Academy of Medicine.