Addiction to prescriptions nothing new

Jimmy Gardiner twisted and turned in his Rhode Island jail cell. It had been hours since he’d had access to cocaine, and he was becoming so sick that a doctor had to be called in. Ironically, it was a handful of local doctors who were the very reason that people like Gardiner were addicted to drugs in the early 20th century.

In 1916, physician Dr. Charles O’Leary, dentist Dr. Daniel D. Rogers, and pharmacist John S. D’Arcy were arrested and charged with conspiring to violate the federal drug act. D’Arcy was employed at Towle’s Drug Store, which sold more drugs than any other pharmacy in the state of Rhode Island. Ninety-five percent of their business was brought in through prescriptions written out by O’Leary and Rogers. Within a period of two months – between April and June 1915 – Dr. Rogers handed out prescriptions for 9,000 morphine tablets and 58,000 heroin tablets. During that same period, Dr. O’Leary prescribed 2,000 morphine tablets and 44,300 heroin tablets. In addition, between the two of them, the pharmacy received prescriptions totaling six pounds of opium and 48 ounces of cocaine. Between March 1915 and August 1915, each time either of the doctors wrote out a prescription to be filled at Towle’s, D’Arcy gave them a kickback of three dollars.   

During the trial, a 26-year-old male witness named James Perry swore that he had observed young girls buying narcotics at the pharmacy in his presence. The reason he was present at the pharmacy so often, he testified, was because he had been addicted to morphine, cocaine and heroin and frequently scored his drugs from D’Arcy. Another man, William Grosse, testified that he had witnessed people not only buying drugs at the pharmacy, but going into the back room to use them immediately.

D’Arcy was found guilty of the charge against him and sentenced to serve almost two years in prison. In response to his plea to be placed at an out-of-state prison so that his young son would not be aware of his confinement, he was committed to the Atlanta Penitentiary in Georgia.

Rogers, an 1883 graduate of the Philadelphia Dental College, was found guilty and sentenced to serve three months at the Rhode Island State Prison in Cranston.

Forty-eight-year-old O’Leary, the son of a wealthy doctor who had grown up shadowed by servants, had been let out of jail on bail and failed to appear for the trial. In Dec. of 1916, he was located in New York. So strung out on drugs he was unable to walk or talk coherently, he was transported to Bellevue Hospital for treatment before being arraigned as a fugitive from justice. An eight-year addict, he pleaded nolo to the charge of conspiring to violate the federal drug act. He was sentenced to serve three months at the Providence County jail and saw his license to practice medicine revoked.

Later that decade, O’Leary resumed his medical practice from an office in Providence. Unmarried, he moved around to a series of boarding houses within the city. In June of 1930, he was placed at Dexter Asylum in Providence, a residential institution for the poor and sick. He died in January 1947 after suffering from chronic hepatitis – an inflammation of the liver – and malnutrition for many years. Only a few months after being released from prison, Rogers died from the effects of tuberculosis pneumonia.