Despite all the technical, medical, and political sophistication developed over the past century, despite the regulatory initiatives and the so-called War on Drugs, few people batted an eye in the late 1990s as a new wave of opioid addiction crept onto the prescription pads of America’s doctors, then morphed into an all-out epidemic of OxyContin’s chemical cousin: Heinrich Dreser’s drug. No one saw the train wreck coming—not the epidemiologists, not the criminologists, not even the scholars who for decades had dissected the historical arc of Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy.
