Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction (original) (raw)
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2019
Throughout history, at times, the politicians, media, and anti-drug activists have constructed the intimidating image of homecoming addicted soldiers as ferocious "others" who would spread narcotic epidemics and threaten the social order. This chapter looks at one of such cases: American soldiers who served in Vietnam were stigmatized as "others" for being excessive drug users. Massive and habitual consumption of drugs during the Vietnam War was contextual and usually did not continue after these soldiers returned home. But some media, politicians, and intellectuals created the myth of the "addicted army" which was used to blame soldiers for the nation's inability to win the war. The Vietnam veterans were victimized; the public began recognizing them as dangerous "Others", as junkies who would spread an epidemic of narcotic use across the United States. What is more, the image of the druggie veteran created a moral panic that was used to i...
Combat High – A Sobering History of Drug Use in Wartime
2017
• 0 Comments Germany wasn't the only power in World War Two to hand out amphetamines to its assault troops to make them fight harder. Military history often overlooks the role narcotics have played in wartime. (Image source: WikiCommons) "Drugs and warfare have always gone hand in hand-from Homeric warriors drinking wine and taking opium to Wehrmacht troops popping methamphetamines." By Lukasz Kamienski THE PHILOSOPHER Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that the history of narcotics is a study of culture itself. He may very well have been speaking about military culture. Although largely neglected by military history scholarship, intoxicants have been an integral part of the culture of war for centuries.
Snoek, A. (2015). Among Super Soldiers, Killing Machines and Addicted Soldiers: the Ambivalent Relationship between the Military and (Synthetic) Drugs. In J. Galliott & M. Lotz (Eds.), Super Soldiers (pp. 95–106). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. In this paper we will analyze several cases from the American Civil War, the two World Wars and the American Vietnam War, and contemporary research in enhancement substance, to determine how drug use can be analyzed and understood in both physical and moral (ethical) terms. This will require a discussion of drug use at different levels. First, we will address the consequences of drug use for the physical and mental sanity of soldiers, during and after wartime, irrespective of the reason for drug use. Second, we will look into the moral questions related to drug use for the enhancement of soldiers, that is, as a method for modern warfare. The moral dimension has at least two different angles: (i) the moral responsibility of superiors administering drugs to their inferiors who are exposed to the rule of full obedience, and (ii) the ethical consequences of enhancement for moral judgment by soldiers in the gray zone between acts of war and war crimes (the difference between the Super soldier and the Killing machine).
2020
The nature and management of narcotic addiction, and by extension, the nature and management of those who struggle with it, are not recent issues in the United States. Despite the current opioid epidemics and the apparent discovery of prescription-drug addiction, medical treatment of opioid dependence is already more than 100 years old. Is compulsive drug consumption a vice? A disease? A lifestyle? How does it affect the minds and bodies of those who suffer from it? How can they be cured? In the 1870s, physicians were already struggling with such questions when they pioneered what would become known as “addictology” in the 20th century. This article first endeavors to retrace the emergence of the conceptualization and perception of opiate addiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From “imported vice” to “unhealthy lifestyle” and finally “nervous disease”, narcotic dependence became an increasingly important source of concern for turn-of-the-century physicians, precipitati...
A Matter of "Vicious Habits": Civil War Families Under the Strain of War
2016
This thesis examines the long term consequences of spatial and temporal distance on marriages during the Civil War. The absence of male labor created by enlistment in the Union Army stretched women to their economic limits while physical and emotional separation created opportunities for infidelity for both husbands and wives. Central to this narrative is mid-nineteenth-century ideas about manhood. The war offered a confirmation of male adulthood, but also required men to abandon the duties to home that were no less fundamental to the ideal of male maturity. Recent scholarship on veterans' disabilities, including mental illness and substance abuse, show that this paradox continued to define soldiers' lives for decades after the war. Equally important to the narrative is perceptions of female behavior and morality as women navigated the economic hardships and exigencies of a protracted military conflict. The central themes of this thesis are brought forward by utilizing the pension records of George A. Casedy, a volunteer with the 17 th and 97 th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, as well as the 61 st New York Volunteer Infantry. Casedy contracted syphilis during the war under circumstances created by his absence in the army, circumstances which Bureau of Pension examiners in the 1890s found shocking and appalling. The distance created by the Civil War strained the fabric of George Casedy's marriage and led to decisions that had long-term negative consequences. vi
Our Opium Wars: The Ghost of Empire in the Prescription Opioid Nightmare
Third Text, 2019
This paper traces the current prescription opioid crisis to some of its origins in the orders of race, colonialism and empire that connect our present day to the past. It is something of a sketch of a larger work that seeks to complicate our understanding of the power dynamics at play in what some estimate to be the world's most profound anthropogenic public health crisis
The Age of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, and Narrative During the War on Drugs
2016
OF DISSERTATION THE AGE OF INTERVENTION: ADDICTION, CULTURE, AND NARRATIVE DURING THE WAR ON DRUGS While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19 century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a compelling heuristic for analyzing popular and literary texts as reflective of the changing shape of addiction and recovery narratives over the last half century. Johnson, by defining addiction, not intoxication, as a break with reality, argued that confronting addicts with narrative...
Chasing the Dragon: The Cultural Metamorphosis of Opium in the United States, 1825-1935
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2000
Many things to many people, opium has played a role in the emergence of several power bases in the United States. In turn, these bases of power have shaped what opium is for the rest of us. Allopathic medicine brought opium and its derivatives under its control around the turn of the century, promulgating "addiction theory" and addiction clinics as part of its rise to preeminence among rival forms of medicine. Opium also played a role in the U.S. 's international economic and imperialistic ascendance. When politicians began to deploy a new discourse on opium early in this century, they were able to appropriate medical rhetoric. As the politics of opium heated up, some doctors were able to exploit the emerging politically inspired discourse to generate a subtly different medical knowledge of opiates and addiction while establishing a new subdiscipline with the political support of lawmakers and state institutions, [opiates (opium, morphine, heroin), medicalization of opiates, addiction theory and treatment, international opium trade and policy]
Entitled to Addiction? Pharmaceuticals, Race, and America's First Drug War
This article rethinks the formative decades of American drug wars through a social history of addiction to pharmaceutical narcotics, sedatives, and stimulants in the first half of the twentieth century. It argues, first, that addiction to pharmaceutical drugs is no recent aberration; it has historically been more extensive than "street" or illicit drug use. Second, it argues that access to psychoactive pharmaceuticals was a problematic social entitlement constructed as distinctively medical amid the racialized reforms of the Progressive Era. The resulting drug control regime provided inadequate consumer protection for some (through the FDA), and overly punitive policing for others (through the FBN). Instead of seeing these as two separate stories-one a liberal triumph and the other a repressive scourge-both should be understood as part of the broader establishment of a consumer market for drugs segregated by class and race like other consumer markets developed in the era of Progressivism and Jim Crow.