America’s First Addiction Crisis Had Some Striking Parallels To Today

Opium pods had long been a staple of folk medicine, brewed in teas or used in tinctures to treat a huge variety of troubles, from infants’ colic to tuberculosis. By the 1860s, medical journals touted morphine, a distilled form of opium’s active ingredient, as a miracle drug. It launched a big business, and more potent painkillers soon followed.