Drug trafficking

Opioid epidemic shares chilling similarities with the past

Most U.S. drug epidemics over the past two centuries were sparked by pharmaceutical companies and physicians pushing products that gradually proved to be addictive and dangerous. In the 1800s the drug was often opium, usually sold as a liquid in products like laudanum, and given to patients for pain or trouble sleeping. Mary Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln’s wife, took it for headaches and became addicted.

The drug was also used to get high. “Opium fiends” smoked it in opium dens like those in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Rev. Frederick Masters, a 19th century Methodist missionary, described opium dens in that city as dark, fumy basements “sepulcher-like in their silence save for the sputtering of opium pipes or the heavy breathing of their sleeping victims.”

The young nation’s drug problem grew because of morphine, a painkiller derived from opium through a chemical process that was perfected by E. Merck & Company of Germany. It made battlefield injuries more bearable for Civil War soldiers, but so many veterans got hooked that morphine addiction was sometimes called “the army disease.”