Opium: Reality's Dark Dream by Thomas Dormandy

Author:Thomas Dormandy [Dormandy, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, social history, Medical, Pharmacology, science, Life Sciences, Botany
ISBN: 9780300175325
Google: HTkTjeoz55MC
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-05-15T00:24:44.684524+00:00

Death from withdrawal does occur but is rare. The patient may beg to be taken out of his or her misery but they are usually too weak to take their own lives. If no additional drug is given the symptoms begin to subside on the fourth to sixth day but the patient is left deeply exhausted, nervous and restless. He or she may continue to suffer from stubborn colitis. Today the clinical course can be significantly modified with tranquillisers, opiate analogues and expert hypnotherapy and psychotherapy but it remains one of the most painful experiences – and one of the most effective means of torture – in the technically advanced world.

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In general the honeymoon with the new ‘safe’ opium derivative was slightly shorter than after the introduction of morphine to replace laudanum. In 1906 the Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association added a warning to its listing of heroin among ‘new and non-official cough and pain-killing remedies’ that ‘the habit is readily formed and can lead to deplorable results’. Such perceptions take time to percolate through the medical profession and took even longer a century ago. For a few critical years the warnings bypassed the lobbyists and politicians who now clamoured in Washington for all drugs of abuse to be stamped out once and for all. Campaigners with their sights fixed on such luminous objectives sometimes miss seemingly unimportant details. For some years heroin was such a detail.

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