Post Civil War Opioid Epidemic of Veterans

Calling @White Flint Bill - you said you had just attended a talk in Richmond about this topic. I would love to hear more and I'm sure others would too. Could you please tell us more?
Most definitely Google the " history of heroin" quite a few articles come up. Narccon has a good basic article in the history of opiate addiction. One possible mistake is that it states that Heroin was outlawed in 1920. My understanding is that the Weeks Act of 1913 banned most dangerous drugs and established the present day system of drug schedules.
No doubt there was some opiate addiction pre Civil War but the ACW just exploded the addict population.
If course there were no statistics from that era but it was a known problem.
Heroin was invented by a German Pharmaceutical Company and marketed as a safe non addictive alternative to the older opiate Morphine. By the time Congress outlawed it it was almost forty years to late. Of course by 1913 not to many ACW vets left .
Leftyhunter
 
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The talk was by Jonathan Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at Binghampton University. Here are some of the highlights:

At the time of the ACW opioids were the most commonly prescribed drugs in use, accounting for 80% of all prescriptions. More than just painkillers, they were used to treat nearly every ailment imaginable, including toothaches, rabies, diarrhea, menstrual cramps, pneumonia etc. But it was their widespread use on wounded and sick soldiers that got so many of them addicted.

At the beginning of the war the Federal Army purchased millions of doses, as did the Confederates. A CSA Surgeon's handbook said opium was as necessary for a surgeon as gunpowder was for a soldier.

Aside from their value as painkillers, because they cause constipation the drugs were effective against diarrhea, which was often fatal.

Morphine was the primary painkiller used for wounds/amputations and it was highly addictive. Many wounded vets carried their addictions with them after the war. The addicts (in those days the word "addiction" wasn't used, rather it was called a "habit") were socially stigmatized for having weak self-control. Addicts were denied pensions.

The drugs and hypodermic needles were easy to acquire.

Patent medicines that claimed to cure the "habit" were big business after the War. There were no regulations of such "medicines" and some were themselves primarily morphine. Treatment centers/hospitals were called "inebriety clinics" (inebriety being another word then used for addiction).

Many soldiers lived with their addictions for decades.

Eventually the medical community began to take action against abuse of opioids by physicians and the prescription rate fell dramatically in the early 20th Century. I know from other research I've done that the introduction of aspirin as a painkiller also had a significant effect.

Much of the talk traced the similarities between today's crisis and the post Civil War epidemic. Afterwards there was a panel discussion including experts on today's problem

The speaker only mentioned this in passing, but a fascinating fact about the 19th century problem is that it affected women much more than men. Opioids such as morphine or laudanum were given to women for a wide variety of "women's ailments" and abuse and addiction became widespread. In some cases wives of addicted vets became addicted themselves.

This is all relevant to a project I'm working on. I wasn't aware of this forum until now, but I'll try to remember to come back with other interesting info as I find it.

thanks for asking
 
I wasn't aware of this forum until now, but I'll try to remember to come back with other interesting info as I find it.
Thanks so much for sharing info from the lecture @White Flint Bill and thank you @NH Civil War Gal for starting the thread and paging Bill to provide a synopsis! We will look forward to additional updates.
 
The talk was by Jonathan Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at Binghampton University. Here are some of the highlights:

At the time of the ACW opioids were the most commonly prescribed drugs in use, accounting for 80% of all prescriptions. More than just painkillers, they were used to treat nearly every ailment imaginable, including toothaches, rabies, diarrhea, menstrual cramps, pneumonia etc. But it was their widespread use on wounded and sick soldiers that got so many of them addicted.

At the beginning of the war the Federal Army purchased millions of doses, as did the Confederates. A CSA Surgeon's handbook said opium was as necessary for a surgeon as gunpowder was for a soldier.

Aside from their value as painkillers, because they cause constipation the drugs were effective against diarrhea, which was often fatal.

Morphine was the primary painkiller used for wounds/amputations and it was highly addictive. Many wounded vets carried their addictions with them after the war. The addicts (in those days the word "addiction" wasn't used, rather it was called a "habit") were socially stigmatized for having weak self-control. Addicts were denied pensions.

The drugs and hypodermic needles were easy to acquire.

Patent medicines that claimed to cure the "habit" were big business after the War. There were no regulations of such "medicines" and some were themselves primarily morphine. Treatment centers/hospitals were called "inebriety clinics" (inebriety being another word then used for addiction).

Many soldiers lived with their addictions for decades.

Eventually the medical community began to take action against abuse of opioids by physicians and the prescription rate fell dramatically in the early 20th Century. I know from other research I've done that the introduction of aspirin as a painkiller also had a significant effect.

Much of the talk traced the similarities between today's crisis and the post Civil War epidemic. Afterwards there was a panel discussion including experts on today's problem

The speaker only mentioned this in passing, but a fascinating fact about the 19th century problem is that it affected women much more than men. Opioids such as morphine or laudanum were given to women for a wide variety of "women's ailments" and abuse and addiction became widespread. In some cases wives of addicted vets became addicted themselves.

This is all relevant to a project I'm working on. I wasn't aware of this forum until now, but I'll try to remember to come back with other interesting info as I find it.

thanks for asking

Opioid addiction was a problem for residents of the post-war Confederate veteran homes. One exasperated administrator in the South Carolina home declared that he thought the majority were there.
 
Opioid addiction was a problem for residents of the post-war Confederate veteran homes. One exasperated administrator in the South Carolina home declared that he thought the majority were there.

How did they handle it? Did Drs back then, since I'm assuming this was long before regulation, give it out or what?
 
How did they handle it? Did Drs back then, since I'm assuming this was long before regulation, give it out or what?

The best they could, in the early days a resident could be expelled for bad behavior, but by the 20th century as the veterans aged it was almost impossible. The South Carolina home didn't open until 1909 14th of the sixteen states that had Confederate homes.
 
Wow, that was late in the game. If a veteran of the CSA was 20 when enlisted, then he would be 60 in 1909. A good many of them were older than 20 when enlisted. Why so late in opening homes? Surely, with the maiming and just overuse and worn-out-ness these homes were needed sooner.
 
Wow, that was late in the game. If a veteran of the CSA was 20 when enlisted, then he would be 60 in 1909. A good many of them were older than 20 when enlisted. Why so late in opening homes? Surely, with the maiming and just overuse and worn-out-ness these homes were needed sooner.

It was late, many of the homes opened in the 1880s, North Carolina in 1891, South Carolina had opened a home for war widows and veterans' orphans before they did for the veterans. To their credit, they had spent millions of dollars on veterans benefits such as pensions, artificial limbs, etc. Still, they were the last of the former Confederate States to open a home. Border states like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri had opened homes years before. Only Oklahoma (1912) and California (1928) operated by the UDC were later.
 
I found a very interesting article on the subject of opioid addiction in post Civil War America. The author makes some claims that I was previously unaware of.

Particularly that opioid addiction was particularly bad in the Southern states, especially among white southerners, which the author claims possibly had the highest rates of addiction in the world at that time.

As others have stated above, the start of many of these addictions was a result of treatment for wounds, sickness, etc. Other contributing factors, were to turn to drugs as an escape from the grief of the loss of family members in the war, escape from the loss of wealth, inability to cope with their changed social world.

Source:
https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2016/11/civil-war-veterans-opiate-addiction-gilded-age/
 
I found a very interesting article on the subject of opioid addiction in post Civil War America. The author makes some claims that I was previously unaware of.

Particularly that opioid addiction was particularly bad in the Southern states, especially among white southerners, which the author claims possibly had the highest rates of addiction in the world at that time.

As others have stated above, the start of many of these addictions was a result of treatment for wounds, sickness, etc. Other contributing factors, were to turn to drugs as an escape from the grief of the loss of family members in the war, escape from the loss of wealth, inability to cope with their changed social world.

Source:
https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2016/11/civil-war-veterans-opiate-addiction-gilded-age/

Thanks for sharing the article. A good read. The professor who gave the lecture specifically discussed the case of Captain Chappell, who was wounded in Pickett's Charge. Instead of being treated as a hero, as others were, he was shamed and stigmatized because of his addiction, and denied a pension, leaving him and his family in poverty. Sad story.

Digging into my own past I discovered that when the widow of one of my Confederate ancestors filed her pension application, she listed his cause of death as inflammation of a gunshot wound he'd received at the 3rd Battle of Winchester--36 years earlier. Then when I later found his widow's death certificate I was surprised to find that it said she died of "morphine habitual. Probably an overdose of morphine." My theory is that her husband was on morphine for all those years because of his unhealed wound and that she ended up hooked on it too. Whether that's the story or not, that sort of thing was sadly all too common.
 
Thanks for sharing the article. A good read. The professor who gave the lecture specifically discussed the case of Captain Chappell, who was wounded in Pickett's Charge. Instead of being treated as a hero, as others were, he was shamed and stigmatized because of his addiction, and denied a pension, leaving him and his family in poverty. Sad story.

Digging into my own past I discovered that when the widow of one of my Confederate ancestors filed her pension application, she listed his cause of death as inflammation of a gunshot wound he'd received at the 3rd Battle of Winchester--36 years earlier. Then when I later found his widow's death certificate I was surprised to find that it said she died of "morphine habitual. Probably an overdose of morphine." My theory is that her husband was on morphine for all those years because of his unhealed wound and that she ended up hooked on it too. Whether that's the story or not, that sort of thing was sadly all too common.

Thanks for sharing, what tragic stories those are.

It just goes to show that so often the effects of war are felt on people far after the fighting stops.
 
I'm just guessing but that Era following the Civil War was fairly "lawless" . (At least on the movies.) A habit or addiction had to be supported or paid for some sort of way. Just like today. Probably A lot of Burglaries and robberies occurred to help pay for those drugs. Again just like today!
 
I'm just guessing but that Era following the Civil War was fairly "lawless" . (At least on the movies.) A habit or addiction had to be supported or paid for some sort of way. Just like today. Probably A lot of Burglaries and robberies occurred to help pay for those drugs. Again just like today!
It was legal and easily accessible back then. That criminalization was not attached to it made it cheap and socially acceptable.
 
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