Shooting Up: How War and Drugs Go Together

[bemildred]

OF ALL THE CULTURAL NARRATIVES to emerge in the aftermath of American wars, few have proven as pervasive as the Soldier’s Disease. Popular lore holds that the Soldier’s Disease affected hundreds of thousands of Civil War veterans, Yankee and Confederate. A term so specific and vague all at once, the Soldier’s Disease sounds like something meant to conjure up millenniums-worth of human destruction and violence.

Yet it was never that visceral, or all that physical. The Soldier’s Disease was code for addiction to morphine or other opiates. Given the industrial nature of the Civil War, and the state of medical treatment at the time, the source of the addiction developed from amputations caused by shrapnel wounds. Morphine and the like numbed the horrifying pain that came with the amputations and recovery process. That dependence became addiction, and returned home with the veterans after the war, unleashing a great scourge upon the land.

So goes the narrative, at least. There’s just one problem, though: the Soldier’s Disease is more myth than historical record. Modern studies reveal that sure, many a Civil War vet had their opiate issues, but so did a lot of Americans in that era, not the least because of a booming (and often unchecked) pharmaceutical industry. Further, the first chronicled use of “Soldier’s Disease” didn’t appear until 1915, a good 50 years after Appomattox. Why? There was a growing antidrug political movement occurring across the nation, and it needed some talking points.

The hazy truths and distorted falsehoods of the Soldier’s Disease are among the case studies explored in Lukasz Kamienski’s absorbing and comprehensive Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War, published this month by Oxford University Press. “As has been the case throughout the centuries,” Kamienski writes, “prescription and self-prescription of intoxicants remains intrinsic to military life.” He then goes on to show how combatants have used substances to alter reality, sometimes to augment their performance on the battlefield, sometimes to escape the consequences of the very same thing.

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/26/shooting-up-how-war-and-drugs-go-together/

[jomin41]

1. Hmmm

“As has been the case throughout the centuries,” Kamienski writes, “prescription and self-prescription of intoxicants remains intrinsic to military life.”

Actually, intrinsic to civilian life as well, imho.

[bemildred]

2. Quite.

What has always been interesting to me is how we have good, moral drugs and bad, immoral drugs, and we find reasons why the good drugs are good for us and reasons why the bad drugs are bad for us (they make us immoral is popular all over), but generally that has little to do with the effects of the drug, it's more like an obedience ritual, like with forbidden foods (lent) and forbidden sex (unmarried, imaginative, or non-procreative, as you like).

Cannabis, about which the only real complaint has to be that it won't make a complete, satisfying diet, just not enough calories, has been demonized for decades, while booze, which kills millions and disables multiples of that, is promoted and sold by the gallon world wide. And tobacco.