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Methadone
Opiates are a family of addictive drugs derived from opium poppies, including opium, heroin, morphine, methadone, codeine, and fentanyl. Opiates are frequently used for medical pain management, as well as recreationally for their relaxant and euphoric effects.
Opiates Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Opiates or refer to Opiates. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 15
Quotes
Just as when all legal routes to alcohol were cut off, beer disappeared and whisky won, when all legal routes to opiates are cut off, Oxy disappears, and heroin prevails. This isn’t a law of nature, and it isn’t caused by the drug—it is caused by the drug policy we have chosen. After the end of alcohol prohibition, White Lightning vanished—who’s even heard of it now?—and beer went back to being America’s favorite alcoholic drink. There are heroin addicts all across the United States today who would have stayed happily on Oxy if there had been a legal route to it.
This is worth repeating, because it is so striking, and we hear it so rarely, despite all the evidence. The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.
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Conclusion
Quotes
I try now to picture Harry as the first dose of opiates washes through his system and it makes him still and calm. What does he think in that moment? Does he think of Henry Smith Williams and Billie Holiday and his order to his agents to “shoot first” when they saw drugs? Does he think of the scream he heard all those years before as a little boy in a farmhouse in Altoona, and of all the people he had made scream since in an attempt to scrub this sensation from the human condition—or does he, for a moment, with the drugs in his hand, hear, at last, the dying of the scream?
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Opiates Term Timeline in Chasing the Scream
The timeline below shows where the term Opiates appears in Chasing the Scream. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: Sunshine and Weaklings
...a heroin addict undergoing withdrawal visited Henry Williams’s brother Edward, a doctor who specialized in opiate addition. Edward Williams wrote the man a prescription for heroin—which was common practice, as pure...
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Henry Williams knew that before opiates like heroin were illegal, patients frequently bought them from pharmacies and used them without issue....
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Chapter 10: Marisela’s Long March
...succeeded. Later, when Mexico started giving addicts legal access to safe drugs, Anslinger blocked U.S. opiate exports to Mexican hospitals until the Mexican government gave up and started doing Anslinger’s bidding.
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Chapter 12: Terminal City
Every day, millions of people legally take opiate painkillers in hospitals around the world. According to the pharmaceutical theory of addiction, they should...
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Chapter 15: Snowfall and Strengthening
...Hari discusses Swiss heroin clinics, Americans frequently tell him that the U.S. does prescribe strong opiates, like Oxycontin and Vicodin, and they have led to a disastrous drug epidemic. Baffled, Hari...
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The first question is when American opiate addicts start to cause problems. Drug policy expert Meghan Ralston tells Hari that, whereas Switzerland...
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...fast. Most Americans blame greedy doctors and pharmaceutical companies, who get patients “accidentally addicted” to opiates. But doctors have always given surgery patients heroin, without creating accidental addicts. Hari argues that...
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The third and final question is why patients transition from weaker opiates, like Vicodin and Oxycontin, to stronger ones, like heroin. Most Americans blame this on chemicals:...
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Similarly, Americans once consumed opiates and cocaine through drinks and cough syrups. But drug prohibition encouraged traffickers like Arnold Rothstein...
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Conclusion: If You Are Alone
...his life, Anslinger started taking morphine for his chest pain. He died pumped full of opiates, the same chemicals he spent his life trying to suppress. Hari wonders what Anslinger thought...
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