JEW'S DRUG HABIT

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 12

JEW'S DRUG HABIT

♦ i DUE TO INJURIES BY NAZIS A Jewish author who escaped from a German concentration camp was stated at.Marylebone recently to have taken drugs tc deaden the pain caused by his treatment in the camp, states the "Daily Telegraph." Heinz Max Liepman, of Hampstead, was summoned for attempting to obtain morphia from a Dr. Rau, and with being in the unlawful possession of 134 grains of morphine hydrochloride. After a doctor had stated that Liepman wa now nearly cured of the morphia habit, Mr. Ivan Snell postponed sent?' until January 5, allowing bail in £25. The Magistrate told Liepman that if in the meantime he gave up the habit, he would deal leniently with him. Mr. H. A. K. Morgan, prosecuting, said that Liepman came to this country in April, 1935. Apparently, by means of bogus letters frr a doctor, stating that, as he was suffering from kidney trouble, morphia was the treatment for it, he had imposed on a number of doctors. MOTHER STARVED TO DEATH. Mr. Wilfred Barnett, defending, said that Liepman's father was killed in the war, and his mother died of starvation soon afterwards. In July, 1933, as he was a Jew and an author, he was put into a cencentration camp, where he wa3 beaten and kicked. In August of that year he escaped and reached Paris, where for four months he was treated for twelve open wounds caused by the beating. He had also received- serious injuries to the kidneys as a result of kicks. Liepman went to England in September, 1934, with about thirty other authors '..'ho disagreed with the German regime, and his German citizenship was taken away. Later,,he went to the United States to lecture. There his health broke down and he spent two months in a New York hospital. He came back in 1935, having been told that there was no cure for his kidney complaint. Drugs were legitimately prescribed for him, said Mr. Barnett, because no humane doctor could withhold them from him having regard to the pain he suffered. After Liepman had been fined last year for contravening the Drugs Act, he found a doctor whom he consulted unwilling to give him drugs, and being in great pain he adopted a subterfuge to obtain them.