Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium. By Lucy Inglis. Pegasus Books; 448 pages; $28.95. Macmillan; £25.00.
HUNTINGDON, West Virginia, is dying. As a share of the town’s population, overdoses kill more than ten times the American average. Startling numbers of babies are reportedly addicted to opioids at birth. The country at large is suffering, too: 42,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2016, compared with 58,000 fatalities in the Vietnam war. This is not how things were meant to be. Scientists developed opioids to dull pain, not cause it.
As Lucy Inglis recounts in her sweeping new history of opium, the tension between the substance’s medicinal virtue and its dangers is ancient. From their earliest uses, opium and its cousins have both soothed and troubled people. Roman herbalists used the drug to combat dysentery, even as they warned against the “chilled extremities...
from The Economist: Books and arts https://ift.tt/2vw1PLL
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