Enjoyed this immensely. As a survivor of the 1990’s West Coast Chiva Drug War i’ve witnessed the cyclical nature of Opiates/Opioids both stateside & overseas. The Heroin scene of the west coast changed in 2000 from taffy Black Tar Heroin from Mexico to whats now a two decade long running Fentanyl disaster. The Short acting fentanyl means repeat usage based on its short high which increases #1-potential for overdose #2—infections from multiple injections. #3–endocarditis. The Heroin(Chiva) of the 1990’s required only 2 shots a day to be high, not just well, high.. a wake up & a noon shot.
Thank you for sharing! And I'm glad you enjoyed the piece. Yes, the switch from old-school Mexican heroin to fentanyl was a very interesting--and tragic--transition. It reflects a broader shift in the global drug market towards synthetic drugs sourced from China. My next book High and Mighty will examine all of this extensively.
Glad you have survived amidst this mess. Thx for reading :)
You want to make this all about Politics, and Political Power. Everything isn't Politics. You are selectively using facts to support a spurious axe-grinding narrative. The facts you present are roughly accurate, but they're used so selectively that the takeaway is misleading.
Underplaying the role that physical pain and psychic trauma play in motivating addiction to opioids is misleading.
Underplaying the fact of the relatively recent inventions of purified synthetic drugs--and the hypodermic needle--is misleading. Purified opiate compounds, purified cocaine, and the hypodermic needle have been around for less than 200 years. They introduced an extra level of intensity--and reinforcement, and lethal hazard--to the effects of the substances.
Put those two factors together and the result is "soldiers disease"- a phrase that arose in the 19th century on the basis of evidence, not as an exercise in manipulating language for propaganda, as you imply in this post.
Have you ever paid an in-person visit to library bookshelf HV5800-5881? There were books on this cluster of topics published prior to the year 1999. More than three of them. I realize that the sensationalism of condensed rehashes like Blitzed is all very impressive, for someone unfamiliar with the preexisting literature. But professional historians- including medical historians and physicians- have drawn on an abundance of documented observations to support the linkage between "battle fatigue", "shellshock", and the resort to an opioid habit as a palliative and coping strategy. Yet for some reason you find it imperative to dismiss it as a myth.
I admit that I haven't read the book Shooting Up. But I'm skeptical that Lukasz Kamienski cited "soldier's disease" as if it were a confabulation, or a hoax. Undoubtedly the syndrome was used to support the prohibitions of the Harrison Act, but it's no more fictional than the dysfunctional syndromes used by advocates of alcohol prohibition as evidence to support the passage of the 18th Amendment.
As for your Salt-related observations, conflating the phenomenon of opioids with the history of sodium chloride for the purpose of historical interpretation is just plain incoherent. Similar analogies can be drawn with the spice trade, and with foodstuffs, and with any other valued trade good, for that matter. But the analogies are much too general to support your claims.
Such as they are. For example, this piffle: "since many amphetamines have been, and continue to be, legal (such as Pervitin in Nazi Germany or Adderall in modern US), the tax revenue generated from them is spent on whatever projects governments deem fit. The US government, as readers should know, spends most of its money on its military. Accordingly, a sizable portion of the money spent on taxes for drugs like Adderall winds up in the military budget..."
There's a Federal sales tax on prescription drugs? Who knew? Tell me about it.
Care to run some actual relevant numbers for me, in comparison with other taxable commodities? Along with balancing the supposedly sizeable revenue sum you're insinuating with the amount of US government dollars paid by Federal medical plans to the pharma companies to cover those prescription drug expenses?
Spoiler alert: contrary to your murky insinuations, Adderall is not an especially noteworthy line item in the Federal military budget. That''s just some hokum you came up with by rubbing a handful of data points together. And there's a lot more of it where that came from, in your posts on this site.
My objection here isn't even centering on any particular issue stance of yours. My problem with your post is that you're proffering an absurdly half-cooked narrative. You're making every move in drug policy into an unerringly successful Government Plot- whether it's involved permitting a steady flow of drug supplies as a trade commodity, or acting to restrict/prohibit them. The reality is that public policy in this arena has always lagged behind technological discovery--and Modernity itself. Every effort at asserting more restrictive Control has resulted, over the long run, in an escalation of Chaos. I don't celebrate the results of that dynamic. It's what turned fentanyl- which had been medically used since the 1960s- into the primary staple substance of the illicit street market in opioids. But it does show that the grand sweep of Official Institutional Power is not nearly as omnipotent a historical force as you imply with your crackpot narrative.
Enjoyed this immensely. As a survivor of the 1990’s West Coast Chiva Drug War i’ve witnessed the cyclical nature of Opiates/Opioids both stateside & overseas. The Heroin scene of the west coast changed in 2000 from taffy Black Tar Heroin from Mexico to whats now a two decade long running Fentanyl disaster. The Short acting fentanyl means repeat usage based on its short high which increases #1-potential for overdose #2—infections from multiple injections. #3–endocarditis. The Heroin(Chiva) of the 1990’s required only 2 shots a day to be high, not just well, high.. a wake up & a noon shot.
Thank you for sharing! And I'm glad you enjoyed the piece. Yes, the switch from old-school Mexican heroin to fentanyl was a very interesting--and tragic--transition. It reflects a broader shift in the global drug market towards synthetic drugs sourced from China. My next book High and Mighty will examine all of this extensively.
Glad you have survived amidst this mess. Thx for reading :)
You want to make this all about Politics, and Political Power. Everything isn't Politics. You are selectively using facts to support a spurious axe-grinding narrative. The facts you present are roughly accurate, but they're used so selectively that the takeaway is misleading.
Underplaying the role that physical pain and psychic trauma play in motivating addiction to opioids is misleading.
Underplaying the fact of the relatively recent inventions of purified synthetic drugs--and the hypodermic needle--is misleading. Purified opiate compounds, purified cocaine, and the hypodermic needle have been around for less than 200 years. They introduced an extra level of intensity--and reinforcement, and lethal hazard--to the effects of the substances.
Put those two factors together and the result is "soldiers disease"- a phrase that arose in the 19th century on the basis of evidence, not as an exercise in manipulating language for propaganda, as you imply in this post.
Have you ever paid an in-person visit to library bookshelf HV5800-5881? There were books on this cluster of topics published prior to the year 1999. More than three of them. I realize that the sensationalism of condensed rehashes like Blitzed is all very impressive, for someone unfamiliar with the preexisting literature. But professional historians- including medical historians and physicians- have drawn on an abundance of documented observations to support the linkage between "battle fatigue", "shellshock", and the resort to an opioid habit as a palliative and coping strategy. Yet for some reason you find it imperative to dismiss it as a myth.
I admit that I haven't read the book Shooting Up. But I'm skeptical that Lukasz Kamienski cited "soldier's disease" as if it were a confabulation, or a hoax. Undoubtedly the syndrome was used to support the prohibitions of the Harrison Act, but it's no more fictional than the dysfunctional syndromes used by advocates of alcohol prohibition as evidence to support the passage of the 18th Amendment.
As for your Salt-related observations, conflating the phenomenon of opioids with the history of sodium chloride for the purpose of historical interpretation is just plain incoherent. Similar analogies can be drawn with the spice trade, and with foodstuffs, and with any other valued trade good, for that matter. But the analogies are much too general to support your claims.
Such as they are. For example, this piffle: "since many amphetamines have been, and continue to be, legal (such as Pervitin in Nazi Germany or Adderall in modern US), the tax revenue generated from them is spent on whatever projects governments deem fit. The US government, as readers should know, spends most of its money on its military. Accordingly, a sizable portion of the money spent on taxes for drugs like Adderall winds up in the military budget..."
There's a Federal sales tax on prescription drugs? Who knew? Tell me about it.
Care to run some actual relevant numbers for me, in comparison with other taxable commodities? Along with balancing the supposedly sizeable revenue sum you're insinuating with the amount of US government dollars paid by Federal medical plans to the pharma companies to cover those prescription drug expenses?
Spoiler alert: contrary to your murky insinuations, Adderall is not an especially noteworthy line item in the Federal military budget. That''s just some hokum you came up with by rubbing a handful of data points together. And there's a lot more of it where that came from, in your posts on this site.
My objection here isn't even centering on any particular issue stance of yours. My problem with your post is that you're proffering an absurdly half-cooked narrative. You're making every move in drug policy into an unerringly successful Government Plot- whether it's involved permitting a steady flow of drug supplies as a trade commodity, or acting to restrict/prohibit them. The reality is that public policy in this arena has always lagged behind technological discovery--and Modernity itself. Every effort at asserting more restrictive Control has resulted, over the long run, in an escalation of Chaos. I don't celebrate the results of that dynamic. It's what turned fentanyl- which had been medically used since the 1960s- into the primary staple substance of the illicit street market in opioids. But it does show that the grand sweep of Official Institutional Power is not nearly as omnipotent a historical force as you imply with your crackpot narrative.