CHARLES E. TERRY WAS BORN in 1878 in Hartford, Connecticut. During his childhood, his family moved to Florida and then to Georgia in an attempt to allow his father, who suffered from tuberculosis, to regain his health. His father eventually succumbed to the disease, leading Terry to study medicine; he enrolled in the University of Maryland Medical School in 1899. After graduation, he settled in Jacksonville, Florida, and joined his brother-in-law in medical practice.1 He had a successful career in Florida, becoming president of the Duval County Medical Society in 1910, and in the same year, city health officer of Jacksonville, a position he held until 1917.
As city health officer, Terry was a whirl of activity. He began strict enforcement of the sanitary codes, lobbied for more sewage and drainage improvements, and established programs to give schoolchildren medical examinations, eradicate rats, and ensure smallpox vaccination on a house-to-house basis. He also created a midwifery program and a visiting nurse service. Terry is, however, mainly remembered for his campaign against drug addiction. During his time as city health officer, he secured the passage of a municipal ordinance which identified and contacted all users of opiates and cocaine; the ordinance also established a program giving the health department authority, if necessary, to legally supply the addicts with drugs. This was the first such “maintenance” drug program in the United States.
In the selection reprinted here, Terry lays out the requirements for a successful program against addiction. Terry stopped supplying addicts with drugs after the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, although he was pessimistic about the effectiveness of this legislation.2 He concluded one article with a diatribe against physicians:
Experience has conclusively shown the futility of looking to the medical profession for the solution of the narcotic evil and, until legislators, both state and national, come to realize this fact and take cognizance of it in anti-narcotic enactments, a continuance of the abuses of the past may be expected.2(p1092)
Terry was a member of the American Public Health Association and served as its president from 1914 to 1915. He was chair of its Committee on Habit-Forming Drugs and worked to defend addicts and decry repressive measures regarding the drug issue. He later became executive director of a private group, the Committee on Drug Addictions, which was funded by the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which was in turn funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. In 1928, with his third wife, Mildred Pellens, Terry published The Opium Problem, still regarded as a classic in the field.3
References
- 1.Courtwright D, “Terry, Charles Edward”, in American National Biography, vol 21, Garraty JA, Carnes MC, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 460–461 [Google Scholar]
- 2.Terry CE, “Six Months of the Harrison Act,” Am J Public Health 6, no. 10 (1916):1087–1092 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 3.Terry CE, Pellens M, The Opium Problem (New York, NY: Committee on Drug Addictions, Bureau of Social Hygiene, 1928). [Google Scholar]