- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction
-
1 Drugs 101 -
2 Alcohol -
3 Cocaine -
4 Opium -
5 Cannabis -
6 Tobacco -
7 Crackdown -
8 Amphetamines -
9 Alternative Consciousness -
10 Nixon’s War -
11 Reagan’s War -
12 Supply Side -
13 Kingpin -
14 Plan Colombia -
15 Catastrophic Success -
16 Our Man in Lima -
17 Bolivian Backlash -
18 El Narco Mexicano -
19 Fear and Loathing in Central America -
20 The Global War -
21 The War over the War on Drugs -
22 Law Enforcement and Incarceration -
23 Cannabis Revisited -
24 Big Tobacco -
25 Psychedelics 2.0 -
26 The Most American Drug -
27 Opioid Nation - Concluding Thoughts and a Tentative Way Forward
- Notes
- Gratitude
- Index
Opioid Nation
Opioid Nation
- Chapter:
- (p.390) 27 Opioid Nation
- Source:
- Drugs and Thugs
- Author(s):
Russell Crandall
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
This chapter introduces narcotics that have been derived from chemical compounds in poppies and part of the American pharmacopeia since the early nineteenth century. It talks about the United States' first opiate-addiction epidemic that developed in the context of an extensively unregulated market for new compounds, which physicians prescribed for ailments from menstrual cramps to the common cold. It also references how researchers synthesized new opioids, such as hydrocodone and oxycodone, with the expectation that these new molecules would prove less habit-forming as federal and state governments cracked down on the runaway market in the early 1900s. The chapter recounts the production of Percocet and Vicodin in the 1970s by combining semisynthetic opiates with acetaminophen, which was considered an elusive quest for a non-addictive painkiller. It mentions how the norm started to shift in the 1980s and 1990s, wherein pain was increasingly described not only as a symptom but as an illness in itself.
Keywords: narcotics, American pharmacopeia, opioids, habit-forming, semisynthetic opiates, opiate addiction
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction
-
1 Drugs 101 -
2 Alcohol -
3 Cocaine -
4 Opium -
5 Cannabis -
6 Tobacco -
7 Crackdown -
8 Amphetamines -
9 Alternative Consciousness -
10 Nixon’s War -
11 Reagan’s War -
12 Supply Side -
13 Kingpin -
14 Plan Colombia -
15 Catastrophic Success -
16 Our Man in Lima -
17 Bolivian Backlash -
18 El Narco Mexicano -
19 Fear and Loathing in Central America -
20 The Global War -
21 The War over the War on Drugs -
22 Law Enforcement and Incarceration -
23 Cannabis Revisited -
24 Big Tobacco -
25 Psychedelics 2.0 -
26 The Most American Drug -
27 Opioid Nation - Concluding Thoughts and a Tentative Way Forward
- Notes
- Gratitude
- Index
