America’s opioid epidemic began more than a century ago – with the civil war | Science | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/30/americas-opioid-epidemic-began-more-than-a-century-ago-with-the-civil-w
An estimated two million people abused opiates during the war, after using drugs disseminated by healthcare providers, doctors and nurses to stem pain
For many Americans, it was the prescription of a well-meaning physician that sent them down the dark road.
Aggressive marketing and over-prescribing of painkillers touched off a scourge of opiate addiction and Congress, pushed by the destruction it had wrought, introduced a new law to reform painkiller prescribing.
It was 1915 and Congress was considering what would become the first law to criminalize drug use, the Harrison Narcotic Act. By this time, addiction had already touched middle-class housewives, immigrants, veterans and even physicians hoping to soothe their own aches and pains. Between the 1870s and 1880s, America’s per capita consumption of opiates had tripled.
More than a century later, Americans are fighting some of the same demons.
Since 1999, more than half a million Americans have died of drug overdoses. Recent data shows the trend accelerated in 2016, when 63,600 people were killed by overdoses and the rate of Americans dying increased by 21%.
“There was a massive opioid epidemic after the civil war,” said Robert Heimer, a professor of epidemiology and pharmacology at Yale University School of Public Health. “Except is wasn’t a black market – it was a perfectly legal market filled with patent medicines that contained not just cocaine and opiates, morphine mostly, but also alcohol.”
Laudanum, Heimer said, “was commonly taken as a relief of colds, coughs, and in stronger form was particularly good for lung diseases such as tuberculosis, which was common at the time, in addition to being widely used in combat situations to facilitate amputations”.
Where Purdue Pharma marketed Oxycontin to doctors as a “continuous around-the-clock analgesic” formulation of semi-synthetic oxycodone great for chronic pain, Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup marketed morphine and alcohol to parents as a “perfectly harmless and pleasant” way to produce “quiet sleep, by relieving the child from pain”.
History, Courtwright said, offers some “grounds for optimism”. Beginning in the 1890s, physicians began to criticize colleagues who reached for the prescription pad when patients had aches and pains; pharmacists refused to sell heroin or cocaine (then both legal); and in 1906 muckraking journalists and campaigners successfully argued for reforms to end the sale of patent medicines.
By 1915, Courtwright argues in the New England Journal of Medicine, “the Harrison Act closed the barn door after the horse was back in”. Problematically, the Harrison Act also became the first law to criminalize drug use and opiate maintenance therapies, such as methadone and buprenorphine.