OPIATES

"Among the remedies which it has pleased the almighty God to give to man, to relive his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as Opium"

DOPE FRIEND PARADISE

In medicine, the term opiate describes any of the narcotic opioid alkaloids found as natural products in the opium poppy plant, Papaver somniferum. 


Opium was on legal sale conveniently and at low prices throughout the century; morphine came into common use during and after the Civil War; and heroin was marketed toward the end of the century. These opiates and countless pharmaceutical preparations containing them "were as freely accessible as aspirin is today." 

They flowed mostly through five broad channels of distribution, all of them quite legal:

* Physicians dispensed opiates directly to patients, or wrote prescriptions for them.

* Drugstores sold opiates over the counter to customers without a prescription.

* Grocery and general stores as well as pharmacies stocked and sold opiates. An 1883-1885 survey of the state of Iowa, which then had a population of less than 2,000,000, found 3,000 stores in the state where opiates were on sale--- and this did not include the physicians who dispensed opiates directly.

* For users unable or unwilling to patronize a nearby store, opiates could be ordered by mail

Most of the opium consumed in the United States during the nineteenth century was legally imported. Morphine was legally manufactured here from the imported opium. But opium poppies were also legally grown within the United States. One early reference--- perhaps the earliest--- was in a letter from a Philadelphia physician, Dr. Thomas Bond, who wrote to a Pennsylvania farmer on August 24, 1781: "The opium you sent is pure and of good quality. I hope you will take care of the seed." During the War of 1812, opium was scarce, but "some parties produced it in New Hampshire and sold the product at from $10 to $12 per pound."


WHO IS USING OPIUM


Several characteristics of opiate use under nineteenth-century conditions of low cost and ready legal availability will strike contemporary readers as strange. First, most users of narcotics in those days were women. An 1878 survey of 1,313 opiate users in Michigan, for example, found that 803 of them (61.2 percent) were females. An 1880 Chicago study similarly reported: "Among the 235 habitual opium eaters, 169 were found to be females, a proportion of about 3 to 1." An Iowa survey in 1885 showed 63.8 percent females.

The use of opiates by prostitutes did not fully account for this excess of women in the user population. Thus the Chicago report noted: "Of the 169 females, about one-third belong to that class known as prostitutes. Deducting these, we still have among those taking the different kinds of opiates, 2 females to 1 male. "The widespread medical custom of prescribing opiates for menstrual and menopausal discomforts, and the many proprietary opiates advertised for "female troubles," no doubt contributed to this excess of female opiate users. A 1914 Tennessee survey, which found that two-thirds of the users were women, noted also that two-thirds of the women were between twenty-five and fifty-five."

"The first twenty years of this period," the survey report commented, "is about the age when the stresses of life begin to make themselves felt with women, and includes the beginning of the menopause period. [Nineteenth-century women, on the average, reached menopause somewhat earlier than twentieth-century women do.] It appears reasonable, therefore, to ascribe to this part of female life, no small portion of the addiction among women."

EFFECTS

To be a confirmed drug addict is to be one of the walking dead. . . . The teeth have rotted out, the appetite is lost, and the stomach and intestines don't function properly. The gall bladder becomes inflamed; eyes and skin turn a bilious yellow; in some cases membranes of the nose turn a flaming red; the partition separating the nostrils is eaten away-breathing is difficult. Oxygen in the blood decreases; bronchitis and tuberculosis develop. Good traits of character disappear and bad ones emerge. Sex organs become affected. Veins collapse and livid purplish scars remain. Boils and abscesses plague the skin; gnawing pain racks the body. Nerves snap; vicious twitching develops. Imaginary and fantastic fears blight the mind and sometimes complete insanity results. Often times, too, death comes-much too early in life. . . . Such is the torment of being a drug addict; such is the plague of being one of the walking dead.