Habits that Handicap

MP3 Audio CD. Habits That Handicap, by Charles B. Towns, is subtitled The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy - and the book is that, indeed: an account of how these substances and various others take their toll on the human body, of how addictions develop and how they can be treated, written by one of the experts in the subject, a man who founded a hospital to treat substance addictions and who drafted drug control laws at the beginning of the 20th century in the U.S. Habits that Handicap by Charles B. Towns was published in 1915 and it brought the author instant fame and appreciation. The book is, indeed, one of the most insightful works ever published about the topic and also a piece that offers the reader a glimpse of how addictions were viewed in the first decades of the last century, a few years before Prohibition was implemented.

What made the views of Charles Towns revolutionary at the time was his consideration for the responsibility of the doctor in the treatment of substance addictions ? before Towns, no one ever considered the importance of the medical professional involved in the process of rehabilitation, Towns being the first to propagate treatment methods that put the doctor in absolute charge of the process. Towns also believed in the individual treatment of addicts that he took to be the only way to address the special and individual needs of each patient. He considered substance addictions to be the result of poisoning, therefore his principle method involved detox with the help of belladonna, the substance he used for purifying the body as well as the soul.

As another interesting piece of information, Towns had no medical training, but was the founder of an establishment in New York that treated addicts, so the arguments he presented in his book came from practice, rather than from formal education.