In recent days, the Clarion Ledger and its partners in the USA Today network of newspapers have published a comprehensive look at the nation’s opioid epidemic.
America’s addiction to painkillers — both legal and illicit — has created a crisis that has attracted the attention of policymakers from the White House to the statehouse.
One of the more interesting pieces in the series explained that the current epidemic is not the first time this country has struggled with opium and all of its natural and synthetic derivatives. A century and a half ago, the nation went through a similar scenario and addressed it in much the same way as is being proposed today.
According to the article, which quoted the research of drug historians, from the 1840s to the 1890s, the United States saw opiate usage rise by more than 500 percent. Addiction rates went from 0.72 addicts per 1,000 persons before 1842 to a high of 4.59 per 1,000 by the 1890s.
Although the use of opium to treat a wide range of diseases dates back 5,000 years, there was an explosion in U.S. narcotic consumption during the second half of the 19th century, partly because of the injuries spawned during the Civil War and partly because disease was such a common occurrence prior to the development of modern sanitation systems. At the same time, drugmakers, led by German chemists, were developing all kinds of new drugs to deal with pain and illness. In 1898, Bayer, best known today for its aspirin, began to market an alternative to morphine that it called heroin, which it produced until 1913, by which time it became well-established that the addictive downside of the drug greatly overshadowed any medicinal benefit.
At the turn of the 20th century, the medical community responded. Doctors already in practice cut down on prescribing opiates, and those in training in medical school were warned about the dangers.
All this sounds terribly familiar. In the late 20th century, pharmaceutical companies developed “wonder drugs,” semi-synthetic versions of opium such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, and marketed them heavily to doctors and consumers, while all the while downplaying the highly addictive nature of the drugs. Drugs that were intended for traumatic injury or end-of-life palliative care were increasingly being used to treat chronic pain.
With an estimated 100 Americans dying every day from drug overdoses, the backlash has set in. Mississippi and other states are pursuing regulations to curb the prescription of painkillers and encourage non-opioid methods to treat chronic pain.
If history is any guide, that approach should work, but it sadly may be too late for many of those already addicted. In the early 20th century, the rate of addiction retreated not only because changes in medical practice created fewer addicts but also because those who were already addicted didn’t live very long.
