Among any other forms of addiction, drug addiction is considered to be the “killer” of them all. There are various drugs that people get addicted to and one of them is opiate. We have for sure heard or witness stories of people who lost their lives due to this addiction. If not lost, their life is a misery.
To combat addiction, we rely on the best addiction centers so we can continue living our lives for our own sake and that of our loved ones. Doctors then prescribed the right medicines that can help drug addicts fight addiction and eventually, go back to how their lives used to be- a definitely better one.
The article below talks about a 19th century opiate addiction- how it was viewed back then as well as the role of the government. Click on this link to read the whole story.
“The man was bleeding, wounded in a bar fight, half-conscious. Charles Schuppert, a New Orleans surgeon, was summoned to help. It was the late 1870s, and Schuppert, like thousands of American doctors of his era, turned to the most effective drug in his kit. “I gave him an injection of morphine subcutaneously of ½ grain,” Schuppert wrote in his casebook. “This acted like a charm, as he came to in a minute from the stupor he was in and rested very easily.”
Physicians like Schuppert used morphine as a new-fangled wonder drug. Injected with a hypodermic syringe, the medication relieved pain, asthma, headaches, alcoholics’ delirium tremens, gastrointestinal diseases and menstrual cramps. “Doctors were really impressed by the speedy results they got,” says David T. Courtwright, author of Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America. “It’s almost as if someone had handed them a magic wand.”
By 1895, morphine and opium powders, like OxyContin and other prescription opioids today, had led to an addiction epidemic that affected roughly 1 in 200 Americans. Before 1900, the typical opiate addict in America was an upper-class or middle-class white woman. Today, doctors are re-learning lessons their predecessors learned more than a lifetime ago.”
The post Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction appeared first on Addiction Treatment.
from
http://alanonmeetingsnear.me/2018/01/04/19th-century-opiate-addiction/
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