By
1895, morphine and opium powders, like OxyContin and other prescription opioids today, had led to an
addiction epidemic that affected roughly 1 in 200 Americans. Before 1900, the typical opiate addict in America was an upper-class or middle-class white woman. Today, doctors are re-learning lessons their predecessors learned more than a lifetime ago.
The Civil War helped set off America’s opiate epidemic. The Union Army alone issued nearly 10 million opium pills to its soldiers, “Though it could cure little, it could relieve anything,” he wrote. “Doctors and patients alike were tempted to overuse.”
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s,
medical journals filled with warnings about the danger of morphine addiction. But many doctors were slow to heed them, because of inadequate medical education and a shortage of other treatments
In 1982, Courtwright wrote, “What we think about addiction very much depends on who is addicted.” That holds true today, he says. “You don’t see a lot of people advocating a 1980s-style draconian drug policy with mandatory minimum sentences in response to this epidemic,” he says. “The wave of medical opiate addiction in the 19th century was more accidental,” says Courtwright. “In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there’s more of a
sinister commercial element to it.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...icas-19th-century-opiate-addiction-180967673/
