Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature's Best Pain Medication by Jim Hogshire

Author:Jim Hogshire [Hogshire, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781936239016
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2009-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

In America, perhaps a good tenth of the population was addicted to opium, and a higher percentage were frequent users. Figures of the exact number of addicts are difficult to determine because addiction had yet to acquire the political significance it has now. Numbers of addicts are deduced from the amount of opium consumption per capita, which was then a perfectly legal drug. In the 1890s, when opium use is believed to have reached its peak, the U.S. was importing more than 52 grains (330 mgs) per person per year. In 1883, the wholesome farm folk of Iowa supported 3,000 drugstores selling opiate concoctions. Historian David Musto estimates there were about a quarter of a million addicts in the U.S. at a time when the entire population was pegged at 76 million. At that time, most of these opium addicts were middle-class or wealthier, white women in their post-childbearing years.

At the time, opium was abundant, and sold by the pound in grocery stores and was used in about one-third of the medicines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, tranquilizers and synthetic painkillers like Demerol have largely replaced opium and its direct derivatives.

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