VIDEO – HIGH HISTORY LESSON –

July 18, 2023 – Psychiatrist Halpern and writer Blistein 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. 

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