Question

What parallels might you be able to draw between the 'Opioid Crisis' in the United States today and the 'Opium Crisis' of early nineteenth century China?

Answer 1

• One of the more distressing truths of America’s opioid epidemic, which now kills tens of thousands of people every year, is that it isn’t the first such crisis.
• Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States, China and other countries saw drug abuse surge as opium and morphine were used widely as recreational drugs and medicine.
• In the West, doctors administered morphine liberally to their patients, while families used laudanum, an opium tincture, as a cure-all, including for pacifying colicky children.
• In China, many millions of people were hooked on smoking opium. In the mid-1800s, the British went into battle twice, bombing forts and killing thousands of civilians and soldiers alike to keep the Chinese market open to drug imports in what would become known as the Opium Wars.
• Today’s opioid crisis is already the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. Opioid overdoses killed more than 45,000 people.
• As many as 313,000 people were addicted to injected morphine and smoked opium in the United States in the late 19th century.It was also estimated that as many as 16.2 million Chinese were dependent on opium and smoked the drug daily.
• In the United States today, about 2.6 million people suffer from opioid use disorder.
• In the 19th century, like today, the medical community was largely responsible for the epidemic. Doctors did not fully appreciate the risks these drugs posed. In the 1800s, many doctors viewed morphine as a wonder drug for pain, diarrhea, nerves and alcoholism.
• In addition to getting homemakers, Civil War veterans and others addicted, many doctors became addicts themselves. The drug was overused in large part because there were few alternatives; aspirin, for example, didn’t become available until the late 1890s.
• Today’s opioid crisis has its roots in the 1990s, when prescriptions for painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin started to become common. Companies like Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, aggressively peddled the idea that these drugs were not addictive with the help of dubious or misinterpreted research.