The Ripley Bee-July 12, 1951

Two Addicts Picked Up After Failure to Get Dope Here

Even small towns like this one can be stop-offs on the long trail down which dopers stumble to degradation and ruin. 

Two human derelicts who said they were man and wife proved that here as the told their story of addiction to Mayor Robert C. Rohner and Chief of Police Harry Reinsmith at city hall.

Reinsmith had arrested them after they attempted unsuccessfully to get narcotics for faked ailments from several local physicians and one drug store.

They gave their names as Opam Irene Watson, 36, and Edward Watson, 49. Both said they had no real home address, that she was a native of North Carolina and he was from Missouri. They reported they were connected with a carnival that was playing in Maysville, Ky.

Both were emaciated. wan, shaken from their addiction. But they freely answered every question.

The mayor grilled them on suspicion they might be peddlers as well as addicts. But finally they convinced him they were not.

They had neither hypodermic needles nor dope in their possession. 

But they could not deny their addiction. The arms of both of them were punctured like pincushions.

They said they mainly used heroin, but also took morphine if they couldn't get the "big H."

They wouldn't name a single procurer from whom they obtained the stuff. They wouldn't even give the names of towns and cities where they had gotten it. 

Ed said they became desperately in need of dope while in Maysville.

They came here, he said, because they thought they might have a better chance of "taking a shot" out of a doctor here than in Maysville, where physicians knew there was a carnival in town and possibly would be more on the alert.  

But things didn't work out like that. Doctor after doctor turned them down. So did the drugstore. 

Finally they stopped at the office of Dr. Lyle C. Franz.

The physician was out. But the janitor was in the waiting room. They pushed past this man into the doctor's office. 

The janitor ejected them and notified Dr. Franz as soon as he returned. The physician phoned Reinsmith. 

The officer picked up Watson near the physicians office and arrested Mrs. Watson near the bus station. 

At the hearing before Mayor Rohner, Mrs. Watson admitted she twice had been an inmate of the federal hospital for dope addicts in Lexington, Ky., and said he had been there once. She told the mayor that both of them were released form that institution in February 1961, after serving sentences of one year and one day. 

Mayor Rohner reported the woman said she wanted to go back to the institution. But officials there told him in a phone conversation that they had a long waiting list and it would be impossible to admit either of them in the near future. 

So the mayor instructed Reinsmith to return them to Kentucky. He drove them in a police cruiser to the Maysville-Aberdeen bridge.

They had came here by bus.