Posts Tagged ‘Drugs’
“Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real”*…
Opium’s history in the United States is as old as the nation itself. During the American Revolution, the Continental and British armies used opium to treat sick and wounded soldiers. Benjamin Franklin took opium late in life to cope with severe pain from a bladder stone. A doctor gave laudanum, a tincture of opium mixed with alcohol, to Alexander Hamilton after his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.
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…
Doctors then, as now, overprescribed the painkiller to patients in need; and then, as now, government policy had a distinct bias. Learn more at: “Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction.”
* Andre Malraux
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As we moderate our intake, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Norman Rufus Colin Cohn; he was born on this date in 1915. A historian of fanaticism, his remarkable The Pursuit of the Millennium, a tracing back of the mythologies associated with medieval apocalyptic movements that characterized– and ultimately marred– the revolutionary movements of the 20th century, was ranked as one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century in a survey conducted by The Times Literary Supplement. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, an honor to which he was nominated by Isaiah Berlin.
“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves”*…
One of 29 maps from WomanStats, plotting the status of women around the world. Visit Landesa for more on this particular issue, and for what you can do to help.
* Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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As we realize that the greater good is in out self-interest, we might send transcendental birthday greetings to Albert Hofmann; he was born on this date in 1906. As a young chemist at Sandoz in Switzerland, Hofmann was searching for a respiratory and circulatory stimulant when he fabricated lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD); handling it, he absorbed a bit through his fingertips and realized that the compound had psychoactive effects. Three days later, on April 19, 1943– a day now known as “Bicycle Day”– Hofmann intentionally ingested 250 micrograms of LSD then rode home on a bike, a journey that became, pun intended, the first intentional acid trip. Hofmann was also the first person to isolate, synthesize, and name the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin.
He died in 2008, at the age of 102.
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on”*…
When states ran out of execution drugs, they started paying tens of thousands of dollars to Chris Harris, a salesman in India with no pharmaceutical background…
The sad tale in its entirety at: “This Is The Man In India Who Is Selling States Illegally Imported Execution Drugs.”
* William S. Burroughs
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As we plan our last meals, we might recall that it was on this date in 1659 that William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who had come to the New World from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, are hanged in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs. The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death. A third Quaker, Mary Dyer, was arrested with Robinson and Stevenson, and marched to the execution spot with them, but given a reprieve at the last moment– banished (again) from the Colony. She returned the following year, was apprehended, and hanged. Together, the three are known as the “Boston martyrs.”
Stevenson, Dyer, and Robinson being led to their fates.
“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”*…
Drug companies have a problem: they are finding it ever harder to get painkillers through clinical trials. But this isn’t necessarily because the drugs are getting worse. An extensive analysis of trial data has found that responses to sham treatments have become stronger over time, making it harder to prove a drug’s advantage over placebo…
Bad, good, or simply confusing news? Decide for yourself at Nature.
* Salvador Dalí
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As we take the red pill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1814 that London suffered “The Great Beer Flood Disaster” when the metal bands on an immense vat at Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery snapped, releasing a tidal wave of 3,555 barrels of Porter (571 tons– more than 1 million pints), which swept away the brewery walls, flooded nearby basements, and collapsed several adjacent tenements. While there were reports of over twenty fatalities resulting from poisoning by the porter fumes or alcohol coma, it appears that the death toll was 8, and those from the destruction caused by the huge wave of beer in the structures surrounding the brewery.
(The U.S. had its own vat mishap in 1919, when a Boston molasses plant suffered similarly-burst bands, creating a heavy wave of molasses moving at a speed of an estimated 35 mph; it killed 21 and injured 150.)
Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery
“OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard”*…
From 1999 to 2010, the sale of prescription painkillers to pharmacies and doctors’ offices quadrupled. In the exact same time span, the number of overdose deaths from prescription painkillers also quadrupled, rising to almost 17,000…
How the American opiate epidemic was started by one pharmaceutical company: “Poison Pill.”
* Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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As we note that “one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small,” we might send re-engineered birthday greetings to Sir Thomas Bouch; he was born on this date in 1822. A railway engineer and executive whose career began at age 17, Bouch was knighted for designing the two-mile-long Tay River Bridge— on which an estimated 75 people died when the bridge collapsed. An enquiry found Bouch to be liable, by virtue of bad design and construction; he died four months after the verdict.
Bouch is thus also indirectly responsible for the best-known poem, “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” by the gentleman widely-regarded to have been the the worst published poet in British history, William Topaz McGonagall.
Sir Thomas Bouch
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