Biography
Charles B. Towns was born in Georgia in the year 1862 on a small farm. In his youth he worked as a farm hand; he later moved into railroading and eventually sold life insurance at which he was successful. He then moved to New York and between 1901–1904 he had a partnership in a brokerage firm that failed. It was at this time he was approached by a mysterious unnamed individual who claimed that he had a cure for drug addictions such as heroin, opium and alcoholism. The mysterious individual suggested to Towns they could make a lot of money from it.
In spite of Towns' own doctor stating the cure was ridiculous, Towns set out to find addicted people by placing ads for "drug fiends" who wanted to be cured. Towns by this time had read all the known literature on drug addiction and alcoholism. By this trial and error approach Towns refined his cure. Towns' reputation spread in the criminal underworld and he treated addicted gangsters. He involved Dr. Alexander Lambert in his venture. Dr. Lambert was a professor at Cornell University Medical College, who as a physician to President Theodore Roosevelt informed various people in government about the Towns-Lambert cure. Towns was eventually sent by the US government to China to assist with the recovery of some of the 160 million drug addicts in the country. By 1908 while in China, Towns claimed to have cured thousands by his methods. Between the years 1910 and 1920 he aided in the drafting of the Boylan Bill and the Harrison Act.
Towns claimed a 90% success rate from his cure based on the reasoning that those people he never heard from again had been cured. Towns' reputation by the 1920s had greatly diminished in the medical community as his claims regarding his cure became more exaggerated. The Towns-Lambert cure bordered on quackery.
Lambert eventually broke off his association with Towns Hospital. Towns was making claims that his cure was guaranteed to work for any compulsive behavior, from morphinism to nicotinism to caffeinism, to kleptomania and bedwetting. Lambert realized that the percentage of those deemed to be cured needed to be greatly reduced since he had observed that a number of people over the years kept returning for cure after cure. During the 1920s a large part of the hospital revenues was from repeat business.
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