Heroin, Dope Fiends and Mystics

For those who get the impression from the news that heroin addiction is a new problem, please understand that heroin has been around for a long, long time, and I mean long. The earliest written history of the opium poppy dates back to the Sumerians in 3300 B.C. The name for the opium poppy is Papaver Somniferum. Arab merchant traders spread the knowledge and use of opium as far as Greece. Of course, it eventually spread across the world — there were medicinal purposes, such as insomnia or pain relief, pleasure purposes and even spiritual purposes as some used it to enhance mystic and religious experiences and rituals.

Around the first century A.D. a leading physician, Dioscorides, wrote about opium crushed and mixed with liquids in an elixir that cured diarrhea, nausea, insomnia and that had an aphrodisiac effect. As Europe established means to travel around the world, the Portuguese discovered the value of opium and traded it along with other goods. The Portuguese introduced the smoking pipe and along with greater access opium became a problem across the far East. Opium’s addictive powers were enhanced by innovative means of using opium and greater access.

Eventually, in the 19th century, scientists learned how to isolate morphine from opium, then later in the century the hypodermic needle was invented, then heroin was discovered by the chemist C.R. Alder Wright in 1874. The smoking pipe was what created the addiction epidemic in the Far East — America and the west were affected by the needle and heroin. Laws were created to deal with opium dens and overdoses and spreading addiction. Campaigns started to demonize heroin. Black market trade exploded. First the Chinese were used as demons who spread heroin, then African-Americans were the demons, then hippie junkies in alleys — now heroin is in middle class and upper class homes.

The efforts to demonize and punish heroin users have failed. Opioids prescribed by Pharmacists and used by people across the socio-economic realm are not much different from heroin — the make-up of the drug, and effects it has on the body and mind are almost identical. Heroin sold on the street can be laced with certain products, and opioids sold by Pharmacies are regulated, but the drugs, heroin, morphine, OxyContin, Percocet, are what they are and the body and mind don’t know the difference. Someone addicted to OxyContin is just as addicted as someone addicted to heroin.

When opioid addicts are cut off by doctors and Pharmacists, they often go to the street for heroin, because the body craves what originated in the opium poppy. Perhaps we should stop demonizing heroin because it’s sold on the streets and look at what creates the demand — addiction. If we can talk reasonably about heroin, and if we remove the old ideas of dope fiends, and remove the romance of the mystic seeking transcendence, and then look at the drug for what it is and what it does, then maybe with science, facts and reality we will make progress reducing the deaths caused by ignorance and fear more so than the drug itself.