OPIUM

A breezy history of a substance that “is reluctant to give up its secrets” and a somber account of futile efforts to discourage its abuse.

Psychiatrist Halpern and writer Blistein (David's Inferno: My Journey Through the Dark Wood of Depression, 2013, etc.) begin with the bad news. “In 2017,” they write, “47,600 people died of opioid-related overdoses—more than gunshots and car crashes combined…and almost as many as were killed in the entire Vietnam War. The disease is straining our prison system, dividing families, and defying virtually every legislative solution to treat it.” Rewinding the clock, the authors explain that no wild poppy produces as much opioid-rich sap as Papaver somniferum, so it was likely a mutation preserved by prehistoric humans. For millennia, physicians and writers praised its effects, and people consumed it as liberally as many of us take aspirin. Addiction was known and deplored, but opium was legal and cheap, so users usually led normal, productive lives. Many Americans regarded addiction as a moral failure, which was aggravated by the myth that opiate use was a foreign—mainly Chinese—depravity. America’s first anti-drug law was an 1875 San Francisco ordinance making it a misdemeanor “to operate or visit an opium den.” It didn’t work, but activists persisted. In 1922, Congress first legislated severe penalties for possessing or selling illegal narcotics. This was also a failure, but it was not a national issue because addiction seemed confined to nonwhite races. Matters changed with the 1960s and an explosion of drug use among whites. The U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the Richard Nixon–initiated war on drugs. Ironically, the traditional opiate villain, heroin, is becoming scarce as superpowerful, synthetic narcotics—e.g., Fentanyl—are replacing natural opiates, leading to the current addiction epidemic. Straining for optimism, the authors describe scientific advances and a change in our moral disapproval of addiction, which might help alleviate this disaster.

A fine account of opium and its misuse, which so far seems to be an insoluble problem.