DRIVEN MAO BY DRUGS.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 144310, 27 January 1914, Page 4

DRIVEN MAO BY DRUGS.

PARIS FAMILY’S TRAGIC FATE, An extraordinarily tragic story of morphinomania was revealed (says the Paris correspondent of the Standard) when detectives arrested a painfully emaciated young man named Marcel Leroy in the act of stealing a piece of silk valued at £'B from a shop in tho Rue Reaumur. As lie was arrested, Leroy, who was almost in a state of nervous prostration, produced a hypodermic syringe and implored his raptors to let him have another injection of morphine. “Only once,’’ he begged, “just once!’’ Ho continued his agonised appeals all tho way to the police station, where eventually the commissary managed to quiet him. Leroy then confessed that he was actuated only hy an irresistible craving for morphine, in order to procure money for the purchase of which he had had recourse to theft. He stated that ho had been addicted to morphine and cocaine since he was a boy of fourteen, and latterly had been making injections a hundred times a day, every ten minutes or less. Tho whole of his body from head to fool was simply ono mass of tiny scars. Not merely content with indulging in tho habit himself, lie had eventually implanted tho same terrible craving in his mother and sister, with whom he lived. For a long time tho women have been using drugs of every kind. Tho girl, who is only twenty-two years of age, is actually dying from too frequent indulgence; her only nurse is tho mother, whom tho fatal drug has already driven mad.