Articles that teach about the history of drugs, drug production, or the politics of drugs.
Heroin has been called many things: miracle medicine, demon drug, public enemy, and now, a “national emergency.” What it’s almost never called is what it actually is: a powerful opioid whose risks are massively amplified not by its chemistry, but by a century of political theater, racist panic, and weaponized morality masquerading as “public health.”…
Heroin is the perfect case study for how drug policy gets written: not by science, not by compassion, but by fear, racism, and raw political convenience. We took a medically useful substance, buried it in moral panic, criminalized the people who used it, and then pretended the disaster that followed was somehow the drug’s fault….
Heroin is the perfect case study for how drug policy actually works in the real world: not as a rational response to risk, but as a mashup of racism, moral panic, corporate lobbying, and state control over bodies. If you want to understand the War on Drugs, start long before Nixon. Start with heroin. This…
Heroin didn’t start its life as the boogeyman of the drug war. It started as a pharmaceutical brand name — proudly sold by one of the world’s biggest companies, touted by doctors, and shipped around the globe as a medical miracle. Today, that same substance is the centerpiece of “opioid epidemics,” mass incarceration, racist policing,…
Heroin didn’t start as a street drug. It started as a miracle medicine, endorsed by doctors, advertised by pharmaceutical companies, and sold over the counter. Then politics, racism, and moral panic lit the fuse on one of the most disastrous policy shifts in modern history: the criminalization of opioids. This is not a story about…
Heroin didn’t become a “demon drug” because of chemistry. It became a demon because politicians, cops, and moral crusaders needed enemies more than they needed evidence. The chemical stayed the same. The story around it changed — and that story has put millions of people in cages, cemeteries, and lifelong stigma. This is the history…
Heroin didn’t start its life as the boogeyman of drug policy. It began as a pharmaceutical golden child — a branded, legal medicine pushed by one of the world’s most powerful corporations. Less than a century later, it became the centerpiece of the modern “war on drugs,” used to justify mass surveillance, mass incarceration, and…
This academic article reveals how criminalizing the opium poppy turned medicine into crisis—and how legal cultivation could end the opioid epidemic once and for all. Lessons from Portugal, Switzerland, and history show: prohibition kills, cultivation heals.