Un-American
Mike Jay: Opium, 21 June 2012
Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream
by Thomas Dormandy.
Yale, 366 pp., £25, March 2012,978 0 300 17532 5 Show More
by Thomas Dormandy.
Yale, 366 pp., £25, March 2012,
“... How can opium be so ancient, and addiction so modern? The drug has not changed, nor has the human metabolism. In the earliest written records – Sumerian tablets and Egyptian papyri – it is already praised as a euphoric, a sedative and a supreme remedy against pain. Galen and his contemporaries added cautions about its dangers, but the most emphatic of these concerned overdose: the difference between an effective dose and a lethal one is uncomfortably small, and the tolerance that develops rapidly with regular use means that no standard dose can be stipulated ... ”