Articles that teach about the history of drugs, drug production, or the politics of drugs.
Heroin is one of the clearest case studies in how politicians, moral entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats can wreck public health in the name of “saving” people. This drug went from a legal over-the-counter medicine to the centerpiece of a global moral panic in just a few decades — and the fallout still defines drug policy, mass…
Heroin has spent more than a century as politics’ favorite scapegoat. Once a legal, over-the-counter remedy sold by one of the world’s most “respectable” pharmaceutical giants, it was transformed—almost overnight—into the ultimate symbol of moral decay and criminality. That flip wasn’t driven by science or concern for public health. It was driven by racism, imperial…
Heroin might be the most demonized word in modern drug policy. It’s shorthand for “addict,” “junkie,” “lost cause,” “criminal.” But that wasn’t always the story. Heroin started out as a respected pharmaceutical product, got dragged into racialized moral panics, and ended up at the center of one of the most brutal chapters in the war…
For most modern politicians, “heroin” is a magic word. Say it, and you can justify almost anything: no-knock raids, mass surveillance, cages for people who use drugs, militarized borders, and endless billions for police and prisons. But that wasn’t inevitable. Heroin didn’t fall from the sky as a “demon drug.” It was built up—first as…
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…