Sanitariums, Hospitals, and the Belladonna Cure

Book excerpt: This book covers the history of for-profit institutions for the treatment of drug and alcohol habits which were established prior to the Repeal of Prohibition, as well as a number of miscellaneous entities such as mail-order opium cures. These include the famous Charles B. Towns Hospital and its notorious belladonna cure. Although many people know that Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson was treated with the belladonna cure at the Charles B. Towns Hospital, few are aware that Towns was an insurance salesman with an eighth grade education and no medical training who lied about inventing an addiction cure that he got from someone else, that Towns had also been a stockbroker who was convicted of grand larceny after embezzling money for his clients, and that Towns only decided to make a buck in the addiction cure business after being banned from stock trading. Furthermore, in the 1910s, Towns proposed that state government should force drug addicts to take his cure against their wills, and that death camps should be built to exterminate anyone who relapsed after taking his cure. This book also tells the story of Harry Hubbell Kane, who founded the De Quincey Home for the cure of drug addicts in 1881. After the De Quincey Home failed in 1883, Kane invented and marketed a notorious patent medicine named Scotch Oats Essence. Scotch Oats Essence was comprised of one third alcohol and each ounce contained about a half a grain of morphine. It seems that Kane had decided that if he couldn't make money by curing drug addicts, he could make a lot of money by creating them. These are only two of hundreds of addiction treatment facilities which existed prior to the founding of AA: some good, some bad, and some indifferent. These stories and many more can be found in this book.