Don't Be Tempted by Heroin or "Snow," Aug. 6, 1924

A Game of Chance. . . To the Boys and Girls of Today, Beware of Narcotic Demons

The bite of a rattlesnake is deadly—and you know it. A drink of carbolic acid or other well-known poisons will quickly end life’s story, as you do not need to be reminded.

But the lure of the narcotic demon—which comes disguised as something a little different—rouses your curiosity to try just “one sniff,” just “one shot.” That something which ever watches over children and fools whispers faintly a warning that “the bogey man’ll git you ef you don’t watch out,” but who in that sweet budding spring of youth, when all its prospects please, any longer believes in a “bogey man”?

And so, willing to try anything once, in the common parlance of youth, you take a chance; that is, if you have never learned that it is no change, but a certainty you are taking. Just as true a certainty as though you leap from the brink of a lofty cliff, knowing nothing of what lies below.

Oh, yes, somewhere down the face of that precipice may be growing a tree whose friendly branches may break your headlong fall and make it possible, perchance, for a rescue that may never come—or when it comes, shall find a creature so shattered and torn that it can never be the same again.

Is that the kind of “chance” you are willing to take?

No, indeed, not if you know it! Not if you see it first—and you may know it; you may see it first! Heroin—an innocent looking white powder called “snow”—is four times as powerful as morphine. Boys and girls of high school age become addicts in seven to ten days, and heroin has been known to make addicts even in less time. And so ghastly is the plight of an addict, so hopeless his chances of permanent recovery, that they are called “the living dead.”

The mission of this message is to tell you that “one sniff”—that “one shot”—is the leap in the dark, which will make it doubly hard for you to decline the second “shot,” and the next one harder yet.

Does it look like a chance worth taking? You know it doesn’t, for it is no chance, it is a moral certainty, and you can’t afford to “take a chance” in as deadly a game as this.

--R.P.H.

From page 11 of the Carolina Jeffersonian, Raleigh, N.C., Aug. 6, 1924

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073001/1924-08-06/ed-1/seq-11/#words=AUGUST+6%2C+1924