THE taking of drugs and medicines to cure sickness seems a harmless thing. If it is right it should be harmless. Right can harm no one. But the firmest believer in the use of drugs and medicines, even the best physician, admits that drugs improperly administered are always harmful, and when carefully and skilfully administered, are often so; that at best drugging is a precarious and uncertain means of cure; that many of the most potent drugs taken in overdoses, kill; that a remedy administered to cure one ailment often produces a more serious one, and so on. Indeed,the deleterious effects of drugs is so generally admitted that none have the hardihood to assert to the contrary.
If this be true, may we not, even at this stage of the inquiry, safely say that drug-taking is not harmless? If we go farther and assert that only that which is of God is harmless, where shall we place those alleged remedies which will kill or cure according as they are properly or improperly administered? Can that which is of God,— the Good, the Perfect,— under any circumstances, be harmful? Only by admitting that God is the author and approver of both good and evil, can we say that anything which is susceptible of producing harm can, in any sense, come from Him.
The only warrant for the assumption that drugs are intended to cure disease is the fact that the minerals, vegetables or animals from which they are compounded exist. Because they existed, and because people became sick, and men in the darkness of mortal understanding, looked for healing means in the earthy or material, instead of the spiritual, the experimentations began, away back in heathen times, under heathen conditions, and by heathen philosophers, which ultimated in the system of materia medica, as in modified forms, it exists to-day. As one of our contributors has well said; "The fact of the matter is everything in the vegetable, mineral, and animal kingdom has been doled out to man as medicine for sickness, and lie has swallowed it all. If it is admitted that the fact that men have taken all these things as medicine is evidence that God created them for this purpose, we are forced to the irresistible conclusion that God created man to be sick after having created the earth as medicine for him."
