Opium
How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World
The book is a a breezy history of a substance described as “reluctant to give up its secrets” and a somber account of futile efforts to discourage its abuse. Psychiatrist Halpern and writer Blistein begin with the bad news. “In 2017,” they write, “47,600 people died of opioid-related overdoses—more than gunshots and car crashes combined and almost as many as were killed in the entire Vietnam War. The disease is straining our prison system, dividing families, and defying virtually every legislative solution to treat it.” Rewinding the clock, the authors explain that no wild poppy produces as much opioid-rich sap as Papaver somniferum, so it was likely a mutation preserved by prehistoric humans. For millennia, physicians and writers praised its effects and people consumed it as liberally as many of us take aspirin. Addiction was known and deplored but opium was legal and cheap, so users usually led normal, productive lives. Many Americans regarded addiction as a moral failure which was aggravated by the myth that opiate use was a foreign—mainly Chinese—depravity. For long not much punitive action was taken against the use of opium till the 1960s and an explosion of drug use among whites. Consequently, America has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the Richard Nixon–initiated war on drugs. Ironically, the traditional opiate villain, heroin, is becoming scarce as super-powerful, synthetic narcotics—e.g., Fentanyl—are replacing natural opiates, leading to the current addiction epidemic. Straining for optimism, the authors describe scientific advances and a change in our moral disapproval of addiction, which might help alleviate this disaster. The book is a riveting account of opium and its misuse which so far seems to be an insoluble problem. TW
The Mosquito
A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator
The book is a wandering treatment of one of life’s constant annoyances and worse. “We are at war with the mosquito,” and there’s reason for that: there are something like 110 trillion mosquitoes floating around humankind’s ankles and nostrils at any given moment and when you count up the death toll from malaria, Zika virus, dengue fever, and the like, mosquitoes are responsible for some 830,000 human deaths per year, logarithmic orders from the 10 or so humans who fall victim to sharks. The author calculates that as many as half of all the humans who have ever lived may have fallen to mosquitoes, especially in the days before quinine and DDT were discovered. The author’s survey of history covers ground that is largely well known, including the role of mosquito-borne illnesses in the American Revolution and Civil War and the long effort, planned under Julius Caesar but not effected until Benito Mussolini’s reign, to drain the Pontine Marshes outside Rome. The author does uncover some lesser-known moments, however, such as the malaria research conducted by Chinese scientists during the Vietnam War and he is good on why some human populations seem more vulnerable to mosquito-borne illnesses than others. TW
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