--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Middleton, George W. collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 20 number: 2 published: 1916-12 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'George W. Middleton, "Leave No Loopholes," *Improvement Era* 20, no. 2 (December 1916): 122–123.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2002unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera2002unse start_page: 122 end_page: 123 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1916-12) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2002unse publication_year: 1916 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1916, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Leave No Loopholes Leave no Loopholes By George W. Middleton, M. D. I believe in prohibition, because I am convinced that alcohol is a poison to the human body, more insidious and farreaching than any other poison known to the world of chemistry. Its appalling effects are manifest, not only in the physical, mental and moral disintegration entailed upon the drunkard, but in the epilepsy, insanity, and race extinction handed on to the generations forward. Hereditary disease means cell-poisoning somewhere along the ancestral line. We are all familiar with the diseases which seem to run in families. We are wont to explain them by some mysterious, intangible, biological process which falls like a blight from some unknown source upon certain selected racial strains, and gives no clue to its origin. This is entirely erroneous. When an individual exposes himself to the inclemencies of the weather, and the other conditions which develop rheumatic poisoning in his system, a real cellular change is produced by that poison in the synovial membranes of his joints, and the lining membrane of his heart, and the other tissues susceptible to that poison. It is this real cellular change which he transmits to his offspring, and not some mysterious, unexplained, biological influence. It is no wonder, then, that family predisposition to rheumatism should follow such changes in the vital tissues. The poison alcohol has an affinity for the highest, most specially organized type of the human tissue, the brain cells: When used habitually it imbibes the water from the brain and causes it to shrink in size and degenerate in cpiality. This is the reason of the mental and moral decay so manifest in the life of the drunkard. If the result of his vice ended with him, we might regard it as a just retribution for his sins, but when we see degenerated brain cells handed down to the generations for-, ward, entailing as they do epilepsy, insanity and moral turpitude, we may well ask ourselves why individuals should be permitted, without challenge, to deteriorate the race. The habitual drinker in each debauch is issuing checks against the mentality and morality of the next generation. I think I saw away down in the ruins of Pompeii the explanation of the instabilitv of character manifest everywhere in the Latin LEAVE NO LOOPHOLE 123 races, but more apparent to us in the volatile mentality of the Latin American. About every tenth house in Pompeii was a wine shop, and the Roman populace then, as their modern descendants, used wine as a daily beverage. The accumulated deterioration of brain cells which has resulted from centuries of poisoning shows itself in the lack of moral restraint and mental stability so manifest in these southern races. I once visited a great asylum in Chatham, England, where there were confined eight or nine hundred insane people. There was every phase and degree of the terrible mental malady covered by the generic term insanity; the wild maniac, shrieking and butting his head against the wall, the sullen melancholiac, brooding in mental pain, and seeking continually for an opportunity to destroy himself. When we came forth from these chambers of horrors, I said to the medical director: Now what is the cause of this, why are all these people insane? And his answer was, "Directly and indirectly more than fifty per cent of it is due to alcohol." This insidious poison saps out the vitality of brain cells and leaves them with a perverted function. This perversion often dethrones reason, and manifests itself in the next generation forward, in terms of epilepsy, insanity, pauperism, and prostitution. Adami showed, in working with guinea pigs, that the progeny of those poisoned with alcohol were blasted and smitten with decay, almost without exception. If all people were alcoholics, the race would soon become extinct. Fortunately, nature has decreed that the stock poisoned and blasted with alcohol will soon run itself out and cease to produce its kind. Thank God for that. After twenty-two years of experience with all kinds of human ailments and their treatment, I am willing to combat without mercy the fallacy that alcohol is necessary as a medicine. So far from being a specific for anything, it is always a poison. When stimulation is necessary there are other stimulants with better effects and without the degenerating, habit-forming properties of this vicious stuff. I once heard a revival preacher, in England, characterize alcohol as the devil in solution, and I thought he was not far wide of the mark. Is it not queer that people should elect to poison themselves with this soul-destroying beverage, when the effects of it are so manifest! The agitation for prohibition, begun down in the south, where the people appreciate that the black man, always a menace to society, becomes a fiend when he adds alcoholic poisoning to his degenerate instinct. Out of self defense against the Negro, the people of the south adopted prohibition, and the wisdom of their measures is gradually dawning upon the rest of our great country. Utah, although traditionally committed to the cause of pro-