King Charles of New York City

Narcotic prohibition began in the United States without a Constitutional Amendment as was required for alcohol. The Congress of the United States passed a law in late 1914 to regulate an orderly means of narcotic distribution and taxation, without the slightest intention of declaring opiates and cocaine to be illegal. Nevertheless, narcotics were banished a few years later because of the actions of the United States Treasury Department in conjunction with rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court. One man, more than any other, provided the executive branch of the United States the opportunity, rhetoric and patriotic zeal to outlaw narcotics. That man was Charles Barnes Towns. Some called him “an undisputed king, or perhaps emperor, so magnificent were his accomplishments.” Another called him a “Solon of Narcotics.” A prominent Boston doctor said he was “one of the most persuasive and dominating personalities in the world.” Towns achieved a national and even international prominence. He wrote a book and nearly three dozen medical magazine articles, which earned him the reputation as “one of the most knowledgeable and altruistic addiction experts in the United States.” Towns believed that the nation had the opportunity to solve the tragedy of drug addiction once and for all if only the country would follow his rational recommendations. Towns was no temperance movement crusader. Instead, logic, common sense, and good world-wide government could eliminate illegal drugs from ever reaching the United States. The illegal drug problem could be solved for good. In the meantime, the addicts, most of which were innocent victims, were in desperate need of help. More than seventy years before the Betty Ford Clinic opened in 1982, Charles Towns opened a treatment center on Central Park in Manhattan in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States. The likes of W.C. Fields, Lillian Russell, and John Barrymore eventually required the services that Towns Hospital provided. At one time Charles Towns was reputed to possess the only known opium cure in the world. He had perfected this solution in China after having been sent there as a United States drug treatment ambassador. Upon his return, he gave his secret remedy away and had it published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Many considered Towns an accomplished philanthropist interested only in the betterment of mankind. Towns believed the world would be a better place if alcohol had never been invented as a beverage. In nature, he described alcohol as being an excretion and the garbage of vegetation. Liquor tended to make man brutal and dull his judgment while beer tended to make man slow-witted and entirely void of judgment. The alcohol drinker only had a choice of what kind of insanity he wished to eventually experience: he could either become an interesting maniac or a brutal idiot. Sooner or later, the consumer of alcohol would need hospitalization. That is, if the victim was lucky enough to live that long, or was not first killed by patent medicines or by the cruel for-profit sanitarium industry. While Towns neither drank nor used drugs himself, there was one substance that he had once used: tobacco. Towns hated tobacco in ways few have ever written. Any tobacco advocate, later on in the Twentieth Century, who attempted to deny that no one had known about the evils of tobacco in the past, had never read Charles Barnes Towns. He considered tobacco to be the greatest vice that was devastating humanity. If a teenage boy was disobeying his father, the most likely cause was that the boy had learned to smoke cigarettes with his buddies, which had bred a noxious spirit of disobedience. If a female starting smoking, she was very likely to become a prostitute, lose her beauty, and be despised by most men. Cigarette smoking led to a callous indifference to the rights of others, which forced nearby non-smokers to experience the most offensive smell under heaven. While Towns was an atheist, had he believed in the devil, probably Towns would have asserted that devil would have been smoking a cigarette when his true identity was revealed. How can it be that this most persuasive and influential personality of the 1910’s can be almost entirely forgotten today? So very few know that the first prescriptions, written as a result of Federal law, largely descended from Charles Towns’ advocacy to control and monitor narcotics. The year 2015 represents the centennial of the Federal law that implemented narcotic prohibition, yet this milestone has been passing unnoticed among what many historians have considered more significant events, such as the sinking of the Lusitania. However, with the magnitude of the illegal drug problem facing the United States today, the origins of Federal narcotic legislation may significantly improve our focus on the mistakes of the past so that they may not be repeated. By 1920, the Towns Treatment had been criticized as being ineffective. By then many believed Charles Towns to be just one more quack that ran a sanitarium in New York City. The hospital remained open as a drying out place mainly for wealthy alcoholics. An alcoholic could be puked and purged in privacy in relatively comfortable surroundings. In late 1933 a seriously inebriate financial analyst by the name of Bill Wilson began being treated at Towns Hospital for his alcoholism. During his fourth visit a year afterwards, Wilson had a white-light experience there, which led to him to become a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and author of the book that shared that name. Wilson carefully avoided writing about controversial figures such as Towns and Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Group, until many years later. A.A also evolved with a singleness of purpose, which remains silent to this day about drugs. Herein one can discover that without Charles Barnes Towns, the struggling fellowship of A.A. in the late thirties may not have been successful without the assistance of this almost entirely forgotten man. Thanks to Google Books and the Internet, a fascinating, previously untold story can now be revealed.