The strange history of opiates in America: from morphine for kids to heroin for soldiers

[unhappycamper]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/15/long-opiate-use-history-america-latest-epidemic



Opium and cocaine used to be easily found in common pain relievers, making it easy to be quietly addicted.

The strange history of opiates in America: from morphine for kids to heroin for soldiers
James Nevius
Tuesday 15 March 2016 06.30 EDT

America’s burgeoning opiate problem is a tragedy, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise: it stretches back to the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620.

Among the Pilgrims was physician Samuel Fuller, and in his kit bag he likely carried an early form of laudanum, the opium/alcohol tincture first created by famed chemist Paracelsus.

Like other opiates, laudanum is derived from the opium poppy (the “joy plant” as the Sumerians called it 5,000 years ago). Like all opiates, it was an effective pain killer, an anti-diarrheal and a soporific. In the rough frontier of early America, opiates helped ease the pain brought on by such ailments as smallpox, cholera and dysentery.

By the American Revolution, opium was a common medical tool. Thomas Jefferson, though generally skeptical of the medical treatments of his day, turned to laudanum in his later years to help ease his chronic diarrhea – an affliction that probably helped kill him.