Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Initially, heroin abuse was confined to a poor, urban underclass. By the 1940s, however, heroin addiction had spread to the Harlem jazz scene, and by the 1950s—through the writings of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs—to the beat generation. By the mid-1960s, more than 500,000 Americans were addicted to heroin. Virtually all major U.S. cities, as well as countries like Britain, France, and Germany, were caught in heroin’s snare. The U.S. government took action, pressuring Turkey to stop producing opium and eliminating importation of heroin from France. (This success was dramatized in the 1971 movie The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider.) By the 1970s, opium production had moved to an area in the highlands of Laos, Thailand, and Burma (now Myanmar), known as the Golden Triangle. No group suffered this switch in opium production more than American soldiers in Vietnam, about 15 percent of which became addicted to heroin. In the summer of 1971, President Nixon declared an “all-out war on drugs.” “America has the largest number of heroin addicts of any nation in the world,” he said. “If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us.” Nixon chose Elvis Presley to be the public face of his war on drugs. Ironic, given that at the time of Presley’s death in 1977, Valium, methaqualone, morphine, codeine, and barbiturates were found in his bloodstream. Presley wasn’t the only celebrity to die from a drug overdose: Janis ...