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The opium war influence of opium
The opium war influence of opium
The opium war influence of opium
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This has been going on for generations. In the mid to late 1800’s, opium was a popular drug. Opium dens were all over the wild west back in the 1800’s. The opium came from Chinese immigrants who came here to work on the railroads. They used the drug to help them work and forget about the pain caused by the hard work they were doing. Opium were more used than saloons. Opium was seen as a cure for alcoholics by the late 1800’s. It was from opium that morphine, was developed as a pain killer around 1810. The people of the time called heroin a wonder drug because it stopped severe pain that came with medical operations or traumatic injuries. Morphine left the user high in a completely numb dream state. During the Civil War, the numbers of people
Before the mid 1900’s the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was formed to tax those making, importing or selling any derivative of opium or coca leaves. In the 1920s, doctors became aware of the highly addictive nature of opioids and started to avoid treating patients with them (Center, 2004). In 1924 heroin became illegal. However according to a history published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2003, anesthesiologists opened "nerve block clinics" in the 1950s and 1960s to manage pain without having to resort to surgery (Meldrum, 2003). This push for treating pain without surgery was a major factor in the opioid epidemic we see today. In 2008 the overdose death rate was almost four times the rate in 1999, and the sales of prescription pain relievers in 2010 were four times higher than in 1999 (Paulozzi et al, 2011). The substance use disorder treatment admission rate is also greater than in 1999, with it having been six times higher in 2009. Chasing Heroin’s claims surrounding the fear of prescribing pain medications is accurate as you see an increase in public policies surrounding opiate use in the early 1900’s. The climbing rates of overdose deaths and the increased amount of people seeking addiction treatment suggests that the fear of prescription opiates was
Almost one hundred years ago, prescription drugs like morphine were available at almost any general store. Women carried bottles of very addictive potent opiate based pain killers in their purse. Many individuals like Edgar Allen Poe died from such addictions. Since that time through various federal, state and local laws, drugs like morphine are now prescription drugs; however, this has not stopped the addiction to opiate based pain killers. Today’s society combats an ever increasing number of very deadly addictive drugs from designer drugs to narcotics to the less potent but equally destructive alcohol and marijuana. With all of these new and old drugs going in and out of vogue with addicts, it appears that the increase of misuse and abuse is founded greater in the prescription opiate based painkillers.
In 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act, that was years in the making was finally passed under President Roosevelt. This law reflected a sea change in medicine-- an unprecedented wave of regulations. No longer could drug companies have a secret formula and hide potentially toxic substances such as heroin under their patent. The law required drug companies to specify the ingredients of medications on the label. It also regulated the purity and dosage of substances. Not by mere coincidence was the law passed only about five years after Bayer, a German based drug company began selling the morphine derivative, heroin. Thought to be a safe, non-habit forming alternative to morphine, heroin quickly became the “cure-all drug” that was used to treat anything from coughs to restlessness. Yet, just as quickly as it became a household staple, many began to question the innocence of the substance. While the 1906 law had inherent weaknesses, it signaled the beginning of the end for “cure-all” drugs, such as opiate-filled “soothing syrups” that were used for infants. By tracing and evaluating various reports by doctors and investigative journalists on the medical use of heroin, it is clear that the desire for this legislative measure developed from an offshoot in the medical community-- a transformation that took doctors out from behind the curtain, and brought the public into a new era of awareness.
Where did this drug come from and what makes it different from any other drug that is on the market? Heroin's origins go back long before Christ was a bleep on the radar. It goes back to 1200 B.C. Or the Bronze Age. At that time how ever heroin would be known as its chemically altered state of the poppy seeds. Even at that time however the ancient peoples of that time knew that if the poppy seeds juice were collected and dried. the extract that was left behind could make a effective painkiller. This would later be named opium. There were small incidents of it appearing in Europe, for instance it was used by the gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. But as a whole it would take more then a millennium for opium to travel from the Middle East to the Europe. This only occurred do to crusades. In just a few hundred after that is went from a rarely used painkiller to a liquid that was said to cure all aliments and would even lead to the most humiliating defeat China Empire. In the 1803 opium became dwarfed by its new brother morphine which is named in honor of the Greek god Morpheus who is the god of dreams. Morphine is an extract of opium and is ruffly 10 times the strength of its counter part. After Morphine creation it was put to used almost at once to assist battle field victims. This was a mistake however, because this refined does of opium is also 10 times more addicting then it was in its original form. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers would retur...
The Impact of Opium Use in Nineteenth-Century England. Introduction Evidence from contemporary newspapers and other sources suggest that by the mid nineteenth-century England was beginning to realize the depth of its opium problem. Opium had been introduced by the Arabs around the sixteenth-century, England began to seriously trade it around the late seventeenth- century. English citizens, by this time, through its exploits, were using the drug for medical reasons.
Granted, opioid based Pain killers like OxyContin have been invented and used for centuries. It was Hippocrates who first used opioids as a form of medicine. He used opium to stop the pain of internal illnesses, like "women’s diseases" (Blachford and Krapp). But as time went on chemists were able to actually separate and isolate more compounds from the opium plant, such as the chemical Thebaine, the main substance used to make Oxycodone (Meier 57). Oxycodone is the chemical in OxyContin that gives it the pain killing effects, it was developed in Germany circa 1916, and they labeled it under the name Eukodal (Blachford and Krapp). From there, the FDA first approved the use of Oxycodone in 1976 (Blachford and Krapp). Then In 1996 a drug manufacturer by the name of Purdue Frederick started the sale of Oxycodone under the brand name OxyContin, in order to sell the drug he opened a special unit known as Purdue Pharma (Meier 12). Following the release in 1996, it became highly sou...
The opium trade was incorporated to the China culture into the global market. During that period the economies of India, China and Britain were connected to one another in a trade that was one of the most important connection as a role in the global market. The opium trade started in the 17 century the drug was just shipped from Portuguese Goa in Portuguese and British ships, the opium was held by a monopoly who was controlled by the Dutch. Taking the opium in EIC vessels was really criticized by the directors of the London Company, for incurring losses and putting in danger legal forms of the famous Sino-British trade, since this drug was illegal in China. The EAST INDIA COMPANY by regulating and restricting production,
There have been many different types of ordinances and laws that have been put into place to limit the use of either drugs or alcohol targeting minority groups in particular such as the Temperance Movement targeting African-Americans or even the San Francisco Opium Parlors city ordinance. The Temperance Movement was put in place to limit and regulate alcohol consumption. In the year of 1875 in the city of San Francisco, there were more than eight opium parlors within three city blocks of city hall; this would eventually lead to the first ordinance of its kind. The efforts of both the Temperance Movement and that between state and local levels of government who sought to control the use of opium amongst the Chinese could be defined as racially motivated.
Drug use and abuse is as old as mankind itself. Human beings have always had a desire to eat or drink substances that make them feel relaxed, stimulated, or euphoric. Wine was used at least from the time of the early Egyptians; narcotics from 4000 B.C.; and medicinal use of marijuana has been dated to 2737 B.C. in China. But it was not until the nineteenth century that the active substances in drugs were extracted. There was a time in history when some of these newly discovered substances, such as morphine, laudanum, cocaine, were completely unregulated and prescribed freely by physicians for a wide variety of ailments.
Heroin was originally synthesized in 1874 by a man named C.R Alder Wright. Created as a solution to opium, a drug that had plagued many American households. It was originally produced for medical purposes evidently becoming highly addictive. Heroin “... was originally marketed as a non-addictive substance” (“History of Addiction”) which inevitably increased its popularity. It became especially popular in places of poverty. Heroin became a solution to struggle. So common it was almost as if heroin was a prescribed medicine for hardship. Known as “[a] treatment of many illnesses and pain” (“A brief history of addiction”) but later revealed that it caused more harm than good. Being so easily accessible it became immensely common among musicians.
This didn’t last very long considering morphine was found to be much more addictive than alcohol. In the early 1900s, morphine was identified as a controlled substance under the Harrison Act. The Harrison Act was put in place to control morphine by making it only legal for those with a prescription for the drug to carry and use it. It is now considered a Schedule I&II drug, which basically defines the levels of enforcement against the drugs. At the time, morphine was the most commonly abused drug, because of its mind-numbing, and reality shattering capabilities.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, Opium is a “reddish-brown heavy-scented addictive drug prepared from the juice of the opium poppy, used as a narcotic and in medicine as an analgesic”. In China, Opium was first intended for medical use and later, during the 19th century it became a symbol of problems that hit on China. China’s high consumption of Opium brought social calamity for the country and in the other hand, it contributed to the economic prosperity Britain was going through. Opium also created tension in the Sino- British relationship, which Opium Wars gave a partial end to. The results of the Opium Wars can be considered unfair for China, not only did they have to open ports but they also had to pay for reparations.
The Opium War The Opium War, directed by Jin Xie, paints a rather impartial account of the Opium War, starting with the appointment of Lin Zexu to end the opium trade in China to the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. This film seemed to fairly depict the faults of both the Chinese and the British during the 1830’s and up to 1842. That said, the Opium War illustrated two important factors that both helped to promote the conflict and eventual military confrontation between China and Britain. The first is the state of the Chinese government at the time of the opium trade. There was enough corruption within the government itself that it was very difficult to halt trading at its source.
Gregorio Lopez Mr. Locks British Lit 4/7/14 The First Opium War and its aftermath on Chinese To the normal Chinese man during the early 19th century, opium was nothing more than a luxury that only those of higher power or influence could indulge themselves in. Yet by the middle of the 19th century opium had become a commodity that everyone could have and that at the same time they seemed to need. Even though it was now such a big part of the normal chinese culture, it did not benefit the people nor Chinese culture, it did not benefit the people or the government. The only benefit it did seem to have was towards the British.
Drug use and abuse is as old as mankind itself. Human beings have always had a desire to eat or drink substances that make them feel relaxed, stimulated, or euphoric. Humans have used drugs of one sort or another for thousands of years. Wine was used at least from the time of the early Egyptians; narcotics from 4000 B.C.; and medicinal use of marijuana has been dated to 2737 BC in China.