DRUG-MAD GIRLS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 123, 26 May 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

DRUG-MAD GIRLS.

BLOW AT "DOPE" TRAFFIC.

CLEAN-UP BY PARIS POLICE

The amazing trial or alleged dope traffickers, including eighteen Paris doctors, five chemists and twenty-two women drug takers, is the most remarkable move ever made by the police in their campaign with the object of cleaning up the "Gay City." It is the sole topic of conversation and the most-talked-of man in the capital is M. Jean Chiappe, the Prefect of Police, a little Corsican of Napoleonic activity, who has declared that he will rid the city of its undesirables, whatever their nationality. He is waging war, not only on cocaine and heroin dealers, but on the scores of night clubs and establishments wherein visitors are regaled with spectacles of nudity and abandon; on the thousands of guides who conduct tourists to shady places; and on the army of vendors and manufacturers of indecent postcards and novelties, which find such , a ready sale.

The police chief has actually closed 30 establishments, but others are springing up in the Montmartre district, while dope agents continually change their headquarters and employ scores of different methods to get the drugs to their victims.

There was a startling incident at the opening of the trial in the Tenth Correctional Court of Paris. Late in the previous evening two girls, aged 21 and 22, were caught trying to break into a chemist's shop and were arrested. They confessed that they were drug-takers and were nearly mad with the desire for heroin, which they could not do without. They explained that their supply had stopped since the arrest of one of the accused persons. The court has never presented a stranger apearance than it did on that first day of a long and dramatic case. After brief evidence it was adjourned for a week.

The police stated that they had been collecting evidence for four years and that originally 112 persons were on the list to be charged. Of that number nearly twenty had since died, others had fled abroad, and some charges had been dropped. The illegal sale and purchase of drugs by means of false prescriptions made out by doctors of established position, and presented to chemists by bogus invalids, represents the principal charge made against the prisoners. By this device, it is alleged, the doctors and chemists involved, with their accomplices, were able to make huge profits with little risk of detection, while "snow" dealers of every description were enabled to supply with drugs the secret dope markets here and abroad.

Twenty-eight of the accuscd persons are alleged to be drug-takers, the rest being the dealers who drew profits from their purchases. Doctors are stated to have written out prescriptions for dangerous drugs, in some cases for "patients" they had not seen for years. The police believe that the main source of supply of the principal agents is now cut off, and that thereby the widespread illicit dope commerce in Europe has been dealt a heavy blow. A procession of accused doctors entered the witness-box and pleaded in turn the impossibility of distinguishing between the genuine and the bogus "patient," the difficulty of refusing help to possibly authentic cases of neurasthenia, and the difference between a legitimate mistake and a conscious fraud. Their "clients" will be questioned at later stages of the proceedings.

Much of the illicit traffic, affirmed the presiding judge, probably arose from difficulties in which many Paris doctors found themselves as a result of professional competition. Even whilst not wishing to break the law, doctors in poor circumstances might conceivably, to make a little easy money, sign prescriptions without asking too many questions, and there were hundreds of expert rogues ready to take advantage of this. Similarly many chemists must frequently be tempted to take prescriptions of suspicious appearance.