Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

by Beth Macy

dopesick

the latest synthetic opioid, carfentanil, imported from China with a stroke on a computer keyboard. Carfentanil is an elephant sedative one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, which is twenty-five to fifty times stronger than heroin.

Drug overdose had already taken the lives of 300,000 Americans over the past fifteen years, and experts now predicted that 300,000 more would die in only the next five. It is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of fifty, killing more people than guns or car accidents, at a rate higher than the HIV epidemic at its peak.

When a new drug sweeps the country, it historically starts in the big cities and gradually spreads to the hinterlands, as in the cases of cocaine and crack. But the opioid epidemic began in exactly the opposite manner, grabbing a toehold in isolated Appalachia, Midwestern rust belt counties, and rural Maine.

Until we understand how we reached this place, America will remain a country where getting addicted is far easier than securing treatment.

it. And opium was a chief ingredient in laudanum, the alcohol-laced tincture used to treat everything from yellow fever and cholera to headaches and general pain.

1804, at the end of Alexander Hamilton’s ill-fated duel

lin manuel miranda mentioned!!!!

Dr. Alexander Wood, the Scottish inventor of the hypodermic needle,

Electrospray mentioned

So when doctors departed from the homes of the injured Civil War veterans they were treating, it became standard practice to leave behind both morphine and hypodermic needles, with instructions to use as needed.

iatrogenic.

In the United States, cough drops and even baby-soothing syrups were laced with heroin,

The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 severely restricted the sale and possession of heroin and other narcotic drugs, and by 1924 the manufacture of heroin was outlawed, twenty-six years after Bayer’s pill came to market.

The “respectable” upper- and middle-class opium and morphine addicts having died out, the remaining addicted were reclassified as criminals, not patients.

But the yellowed newspaper warnings would become moot, like so many historical footnotes—destined to repeat themselves as soon as they receded from living memory.