Narcotism, the craving for narcotic or stimulant drugs, and its subvariety, alcoholism, has been found most often among the thymocentrics.  Any type of endocrine inferiority, interfering with success in life, may lead to the habit of drug addiction as one way out.  But the blood and tissues of the thymocentric appear to become habituated to the narcotic stimulant more easily than the other types, and so to demand it with a physical imperative comparable to the food or sex urge.  Among artists, philosophers and statesmen, on the other hand, actively productive and so contrasted with criminals and degenerates drug addiction has frequently been a mode of endocrine compensation.  That is, the drug produced temporarily the effects of the internal secretion lacking or insufficient.  Thus the effects of cocaine may be compared with the effects of thyroid.  But while there is a normal mechanism for thyroid detoxication, the cocaine or heroin derivatives mark the tissues permanently with their scars and deform the personality.

THE HYGIENE OF THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS

All these protean expressions of endocrine determination may now begin to be looked upon with the hopeful and optimistic attitude of him who understands cause and effect and can control.  The advances made in the last ten years in the practical manipulation of the ductless glands from without, the introduction of glandular extracts by feeding or injection, and the modification of their structure and function by surgery, the X-ray and radium, and other procedures, enable us to regard more confidently the problems hitherto accepted as the insoluble and intricate handiwork of Fate.  Fate may have woven the patterns of our being.  But as we commence to probe the machinery and to examine the looms more carefully, we begin to understand why the wheels creak, and why there are seconds and odd lots in the product as well as the rare and precious firsts.  Moreover, we are learning how to handle the machinery ourselves.  The abdication of Fate can therefore be confidently expected in due time.

However, we have yet to begin, and we can begin with prevention.  The theory of Adler, that some organ inferiority is responsible for much unhappiness in life has received much advertisement in conjunction with the doctrines of the Freudians.  It is a theory of little scope when applied to the eyes, ears, heart and so on because only a small minority of the cases are of that kind.  But as we have seen, a deficiency of an internal secretion, an endocrine inferiority, reverberates throughout all the cells.  Not only the mind, but all of the members of the organism must strain and co-operate to make up for the break in the balance.