Opium information

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An article in Popular Science Monthly in 1888 showed the results of a Survey of Boston druggist. An inspection of stores found noted "During my leisure time I have looked up more than 10,000 recipes. It has been my practice to go to the files, open the book, or take up a spindle at random, and take 300 recipes just as they come. The first store I visited I found 42 recipes which contained morphine out of the 300 examined. Close by, a smaller store, patronized by poorer people, had 36. Up in the aristocratic quarters, where the customers call in carriages, I found 49 morphine recipes in looking over 300. At the North End, among the poor Italian laborers, the lowest proportion of 32 in 300 was discovered. Without detailing all the places visited, I will summarize by saying that, in 10,200 recipes taken in 34 drug-stores, I found 1,481 recipes which prescribed some preparation of opium, or an average of fourteen and one half per cent of the whole."(27 ).

During the nineteenth century in Britain yearly opium consumption increased from one pound per thousand people, to ten pounds per thousand at the end of the century (28 ).

Addiction plagued white women in the 1800, according to a survey taken the majority of addicts were white women (29 ).

In 1914 the Harrison Act became law. This required prescriptions for obtaining opiates. Only medical practitioners could write prescriptions and only pharmacists who had federal tax stamps could distribute opiates. The US Supreme Court (U.S. v. Jin Fuey Moy, 241 U.S. 394 ( 1916 ). ) Originally upheld prescriptions to maintain opiate addiction. This decision was Later overturned by the US Supreme Court (U.S. v. Doremus, 249 U.S. 86 ( 1919 ))(30 ).