by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Truthdig) Yes, we in the medical profession got millions of Americans addicted to heroin and fentanyl. But that was all just a big misunderstanding. Why get into it?
And sure, nearly one in ten adults has had a family member die from a drug overdose. Ordinary people are furious about it, too. Their under-appreciated rage drove skepticism of official COVID-19 narratives, and that same rage might sway the outcome of the Presidential election — heck, might even land us in a war with Mexico! (Wouldn’t that be the ultimate “Wag the Dog”-level distraction from those sociopaths upstairs in our House of Medicine!)
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So, yes, agreed. All good points.
But look, we medical people who see the patients and do all of the work — we, the House staff — we’re downstairs people. We can’t do anything about what goes on up above. Yes, agreed, it’s shameful how easily the upstairs sociopaths conned us, and it’s annoying to see them now so fabulously rich. But doctors being intentionally manipulated into destroying the lives of millions — that could have happened to anyone. Why stay angry about it? Ancient history! It’s not like it’s still happening, right? (Right?)
Surely you don’t want to burn down the entire House? I mean, we work here. And the pay is not bad. Let’s just focus on the patients before us, and try to stay positive … Right?
Heroin™ — brought to you by Bayer!
As a medical student, I was once told by my attending physician that people treated with morphine for pain don’t get addicted.
Surprised, I asked, “But what about all of the Civil War veterans?”
When the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, both sides demobilized a weary horde of chronically wounded and ill. Some soldiers had contracted tuberculosis, or a lingering pneumonia (in the days before antibiotics). Others had suffered field amputations with handheld saws. But whether the question was chronic coughing or terrible pain, the answer was morphine. The newly invented hypodermic needle allowed for fast-acting injections. Veterans everywhere got hooked, to the point that addiction was called “the Soldier’s Disease.” Soon morphine had moved beyond the battlefield and was in use for everything from menstrual cramps to teething.
Vintage ad for a morphine-based child’s medicine. From the DEA’s online museum.
Things got so bad that when heroin (diacetylmorphine) arrived, it was welcomed as an improvement. Chemists had discovered it decades earlier, but in 1898 the pharmaceutical company Bayer started selling it as Heroisch, German for “heroic.”
Yes, Heroin was a trade name. It was Heroin™ — brought to you by Bayer!
Doctors desperate for something safer than morphine often convinced themselves this new drug wasn’t addictive.
“Heroin … possesses many advantages over morphine,” wrote a physician in 1900, in the precursor to the New England Journal of Medicine. “It is not a hypnotic … [and there is no] danger of acquiring the habit.” The philanthropic St. James Society even mounted a campaign to mail free heroin samples to morphine addicts (!), to help them break the habit.
Other doctors, alarmed, saw the public swilling down heroin, and berated their fellow physicians for not sounding the alarm.
“The patient comes to look on heroin as a harmless sedative for his cough,” wrote one such physician in 1912, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, because too many doctors think it’s safe:
“A patient who came under my observation told a physician, who was called to treat him for an attack of laryngitis, not to give him anything that contained opium, because he had formerly been a slave to this drug. The physician replied: ‘I will give you some heroin; there is no danger of habit from that’.”
Ordinary Americans weren’t buying it, and by 1906 we had established the federal Food & Drug Administration, because moms want to know if it’s got heroin. Cure-alls like the morphine-and-alcohol-based Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup definitely did quiet fussy babies, but it’s believed that thousands never woke up again.
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