THE COCAINE HABIT.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIV, Issue 25, 29 January 1913, Page 2

THE COCAINE HABIT.

GROWING EVIL IN PARIS.

She gets dowu from the taxi, and If yon notice yon will see her hand gold to the chauffeur, and she receives no change. That is because for hours she has been driven wildly across Paris, anywhere, everywhere, so lone as the epeed be great. Now she is back at the Bntte again, in the early hours of the morning.

Approach a little more closely and yon will see that every now and again she gives a peculiar kind of snuffle, as if she were the victim of a chronic catarrh. Sne goes down a by-street and stops beneath a lighted window. Against this she throws a handful of little stones. In response the window opens and a little basket attached to a cord descends. She puts a coin in the basket, and it is pulled up out of sight again. Then it redescends, and she plucks nr a packet which has come down with it. With this she hurries away into the night.

She is a "cocoainomane," a victim of the cocoaine habit. Alcohol does not interest her; it is not easy for her to gale the nirvana of opium, and morphia means ttip trouble of injection. So she took to cocaine, and now it has her in thrall. She is one of a class that grows more numerous in Montmartre every year. You have only to ask the physicians of the Maison d'Alienes Sainte Anne to know that this is so. Under the influence of the drug the "cocainomanes' commit offences, on account of which they go to St. Anne instead of prison. The pictnre I have drawn Is no mote than the giving of concrete form to the results of the investigation of one of the house surgeons there, Dr. Vinchon, who made a special Inquiry into the spread of the habit. Only the "cocainomane" does not. as a rule, make her purchase in, person so dramatically. Tbe "chasseur" of a restaurant—that grown-up pageboy of Paris, who executes a hundred and one commissions out of doors—or some other employee of the place, finds it for her, and charges her three or four shillings a Sramme for it and for his trouble.

As for the causes of tbe spread of the habit. Dr. Vinchon declares that is an affair of fashion, a sort of 'snobisme." There are many little journals on the Bntte which gossip about the doings of that feverish qnarter. "La Belle Louise" reads In one of these that "La Blanche Irene" or some other strange flower of the Butte, abandoned by her lover, has taken to cocaine instead of to drink, to ether, or to morphine. She, Louise, too, has a little "affaire" which has gone badly. In any case she decides

;o follow Irene's example. She recounts

to her circle the joys and raptures of the new drug, and they also enter upon the war of madness and death. It is difficult, it seems, for the police to stem the epidemic, which got the length of being seriously cussed at the proceedings of two different medical societies. Someone must make a formal complaint before the law can intervene. And in France that Is a step not many people care often to undertake. "Daily Telegraph" correspondent.