>> safe for babies. this is c-span3 with politics and public affairs programming throughout the week and every weekend 48 hours of people and events telling the

american story on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs at our websites. and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. you can watch those classes here every saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern and sundays at 1:00 p.m. this week we're back at bowling green state university for the second part of professor scott martin's class on the history of opiates in america. this runs a little over 1:20. okay. our main reading this week was david cartwright's "dark paradi paradise" a history of opiate addiction in america. and it's one of the major texts,

one of the first books written about opium and the history of drugs in general. i was talking to you and you liked it. let's talk about opiate addiction as the book goes over. who was the average opium addict in the mid to late 19th century and, again, a couple of related questions, what's meant by addiction and why was medical use of laudanum and morphine so common? j jump right in. >> the average opium addict was white, middle class women.

>> that seems out of character, doesn't it, considering what we think of drug addicts today. so why was that person -- >> isn't it because it was a drug they could use inside the home. they couldn't go outside and drink. it wasn't their status. it would ruin the ideology of the feminine role model at the time so they could take it in their home, so to speak. >> were they doing it recreationally? >> more than likely they mentioned here there were a lot of medicinal uses, coughing, menstrual cramps, why it became so common. it seemed to address so many

issues, diarrhea, cramping, coughing. if you could get sick with it, it addressed it somehow. >> and it was used to treat anxiety and depression and that was also why women would be especially prone, too. >> yeah. it's sort of psychoactive calming qualities and men, particularly male physicians, frequently didn't know what to do with women. and so they prescribed laudanum for both psychological as well as if physical ills. >> feeding into that, page 59, the anonymous lady of culture who mentions that morphine makes life possible. it adds truth to a dream. what more does religion do? perhaps i shock you, what i mean is that truth alone is both not

enough and too much for us. the idea that there was -- that this was an outlet for the women who were taking it. they weren't going at it for recreational use, but once they'd gotten their hands on it, it did take the edge off the day. >> frank? hold on a second. >> that's fine. it was a drug of younger people. on page 37 in the first full paragraph right near the middle charles earl describes it as a vice of middle life. >> and how did women get their hands on it? did they just see it in the store one day and think, hmm, that looks good?

na nate? >> i think it goes back to that one image we saw at the beginning of class where it was prescribed for everything. if a woman went to the doctor with an ailment, the doctor would describe the various forms of opium that would be medicinally acceptable by whatever ailment she had which would be considered anything at that point. >> we'll get back there eventually. keep talking. >> you just passed it. >> there it is. that's why i asked you to keep this one in mind. it's significant that this is a woman in her doctor's office who is being prescribed laudanum for everything that ails you. what is meant -- go ahead. >> not to jump too far ahead in

time but there's a similar discussion about psychoactive pharmaceuticals in the psychiatric industry now that they're prescribed for anything. if you're seriously depressed, you get a psychoactive chemical, but if you've just had a bad week, you can go in and get a prescription for something as well. >> yeah. prescription drug abuse has become -- i think i read in the paper last week it has eclipsed auto fatalities as the biggest cause of death because of the prevalence of the oxycontin and all the antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs that are usable. >> one of the things that got me -- looking at with this woman in this picture here, she is

definitely probably an upper middle class person. she has on this fur, this fancy hat. and on pages 39 and 41 cartwright agrees that it's something that apparently the upper -- the middle class and upper class were more susceptible to. on 41 he writes brain workers and professional men were frequently cited in connection with opium and morphine addiction. >> and as we'll see next time also with cocaine use because they would have this debilitating job and needed a pick-me-up. >> how did they make the jump from being stigmatized with the chinese immigrants who are these subhuman people to this drug of the wealthy and the well to do?

>> this woman wasn't going to be smoking it. laudanum is very different than smoking it. >> what is meant by atrogenic addiction? going through all of these again. there we go. go ahead. >> the last paragraph of 42 is talking about the term and he breaks it down about physicians, about causing or contributing to the addition and he refers specifically to regular practitioners not selective practitioners but ones that were working in the field and prescribed these ailments.

>> these are doctor induced. these women began using opiate products because they were prescribed for a variety of ailments, many which would have fallen under the category of female problems. we didn't know what they were. recovering from childbirth. all sorts of conditions like this. yeah, frank? >> at this point in time how easy was it to be referred to as a physician. throughout history at different times it's been easier or more difficult to fall under that term. could a lot of the people who were prescribing, this seems to work and they were little more than flakeplaques? >> for the most part probably not. for the most part by the late 19th century the american medical profession had undergone professional development to the point where you really needed 0

to go to a medical school as opposed to simply apprenticing with a doctor. you needed to have a degree. this was not quacks giving out opiums. this was doctors prescribing tore patients symptomatic. they gave it for everything but the question is why? linda? >> medical use of laudanum and morphine were common across the board, or was it common in white, middle-class society? i don't think it had made the leap yet. and my question would be, also, do you think it was caused by an aspect of poverty where they didn't have access to physicians. they might not have the money to

actually go out and buy mrs. swanson's -- >> mrs. winslow's soothing syrup. >> mrs. winslow's soothing syrup. >> certainly astrogenic addition, physician induced, is going to be more prevalent in those groups who can go to doctors and that's why the average opium addict was a white, middle-class woman where it was acceptable and common practice to go to a physician for a variety of different ailments and complaints, and you could also afford to do that. probably laudanum was known among other classes of folks, but they might -- probably didn't use it as much because it wasn't recommended. certainly morphine would not have been as accessible unless you went to a doctor. so that it's probably why it was centered in the middle class and particularly among women. >> from reading your late 19th

century england, too, wasn't laudanum pretty much recognized in england as a problem? >> sure. i think it was recognized in the united states, too. >> at this time in late 19th century it was recognized here? >> sure. >> you can see that with the wyatt earp story, his first compani companion, if you will, whatever, was addicted to laudanum. and they recognized it as an unhealthy addiction to laudanum. >> and to make the connection to now, we -- you just mentioned oxycontin, oxycodone, all of those, are recognized as being a problem but yet, at the same time, there's a huge prescription drug fraud in those drugs, but i have back issues

and my doctor has said, anytime you need it, i will write it for you, but you have to come into the office so that i can see you actually are clearly suffering from symptoms. it's recognized as a problem but is still prescribed. >> npr had two medical experts on their show and they were talking about this very same thing, addiction to painkillers, withdrawal, and how it's being prescribed and how it's being regulated. one of their callers had to fill out a psychological profile sheet, and he had said that his use of alcohol was moderate and that he had suffered depression episodes and they would not -- would not -- prescribe him painkillers. >> nate? >> well, i think part of the

reason why that's so common now and why this was common then is those drugs were really effective. there's nothing that really matches what they do especially with laudanum and morphine. they didn't have anything else that could address a wide accompany of ailments, do it really well, and have repeat effects. it wasn't like you had diminishing effects over time, or at least not from what cartwright was saying. if you took morphine, it took care of whatever problem you had. you could continue to do that over and over again and never really grow immune to that in a sense. >> joe? >> during this period we're still figuring out the difference between an illness and the symptom of an illness. if you are eating contaminated food and you throw up, the treating effect that you are throwing up, not the illness, that has a lot to do with it. if you don't know what is wrong with you and something will make you feel better, it doesn't matter what it is. >> right. and i think that's a really important point that the state

of medical knowledge at this point was not such that physicians really knew what caused a lot of illnessness. they didn't know how to cure them. they hoped you would recover, your body would fight off the disease or illness, whatever it was. remember, it's only after the civil war even that the germ theory of disease becomes well known. you should use sterile instruments when you operate on people. you shouldn't use the same ones on numerous people. cholera, yellow fever, were not well known before this. there was no way to address them other than to address the symptoms, which might be pain, dysentery, all sorlts of things which laudanum and morphine genuinely could help with.

>> it also addresses why it was so common to use. during the civil war and early revolution they knew it worked for pain and that it would less ep shock and allow a soldier to recover -- recover or deal with horrific waundz on amputations and that's why it was so widely prescribed. so there you have an instance of we know it works for pain. then it snowballs from there. >> chris? >> they had quite a bit on hand and would use it for various things. there's an excerpt from the revolutionary war where the guy says it's a terrible thing too much but you needed it at times, too. if the physician doesn't have it on the battlefield it will be rendered useless. i know in the civil war they talked about on page 54 how much opium and morphine were taken in this last paragraph and spoke to the decline because by the turn

of the 20th century, veterans were dying off. is that where they see the turn? after the civil war, they had battlefield wounds. on the page, talk about a guy who spent time in andersonville prison and he was trying to recover from the effects of the stomach ailment and stuff like that. is that one of the big uses as well, trying to cure from those ailments and then when they're dying off you see change to new drugs, right? >> yeah. there's a great deal of controversy about that because you would think that with the civil war, both the use of it during the war for these hundreds of thousands of wounded but also for chronic pain and injuries, all of these guys who lost limbs and other sorts of things, some of them still had shrapnel or bullets in their bodies always getting infected. so you would think there would be a lot of opium abuse and addiction among those and,