The last time America faced an opioid epidemic on today's scale, the typical addict wasn't on the street. She was in the parlor.
By 1895, according to the Smithsonian, morphine and opium powders had hooked one in 200 Americans, and before 1900 the typical opiate addict was an upper- or middle-class white woman — prescribed the drug by her doctor or dosed by medicines she never knew contained it.
That epidemic faded mostly through the medical profession reforming itself, not through a crackdown. Doctors began reversing their overprescribing in the 1890s, aspirin and better medicine offered alternatives, and then the law caught up: a 1906 act forced makers to label what was in the bottle, and the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 brought the supply under control.
Look further back and the pattern holds. London's gin craze of the 1700s broke when bad harvests pushed grain prices up and tighter licensing squeezed the backstreet sellers — gin simply grew too expensive to drink. China's far larger opium catastrophe was stamped out only by overwhelming state force, at enormous human cost. Different tools, one lever: every scourge ended when the drug became scarce, costly, or controlled.
Fentanyl breaks the lever. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, it is roughly 50 times stronger than heroin, cheap to manufacture, and entirely synthetic — no poppy crop to fail, no harvest to drive up the price. About two milligrams, the weight of a few grains of salt, can be lethal, and it is routinely mixed into other drugs, so users rarely know it is there.
After China tightened controls on several precursors, researchers reported this year in Science that street supplies appeared to grow weaker and scarcer — the first real sign the old lever might work.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
