“The Civil War caused this massive epidemic of opioid addiction among … veterans,” said Jones, an assistant professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington.
“In a lot of ways this is the first … example … in U.S. history of … the problem of opioid addiction becoming really epidemic in the true sense of the word,” he said in a recent interview.
It was epidemic “both in scale, just the sheer number of people who got addicted, and also the fact that after the Civil War it becomes … front page news,” he said. “It becomes a really major public health, and also kind of a cultural, crisis in the post-Civil War decades.”
One estimate suggests that by 1890, several hundred thousand Americans, many of them, probably, Civil War veterans, were addicted, according to Jones’s research. “It’s the first example of these kind of recurring opioid crises that we have,” he said.
His book, “Opium Slavery: The Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis,” is due out in 2023, according to the University of North Carolina Press.
The 1861-1865 war claimed over 700,000 lives, and maimed and sickened tens of thousands of people.
Soldiers and sailors suffered terrible wounds, and many underwent amputation at the hands of surgeons who had few other remedies.
Doctors had been aware of the danger of opioid addiction well before the Civil War, Jones said.
“They knew about drug tolerance, that if you take opioids over time, the longer that you take them, the more that you need,” he said. “They knew that it was a problem that eventually led to overdose.”
“But it was never … front page news … until the Civil War caused the number of cases to just go through the roof,” he said.
Opium was also a valuable pharmaceutical. “It does so many different things,” Jones said. It was used to kill pain, stop deadly diarrhea and suppress coughs. “Opium was like a godsend,” he said.
And it was the crucial drug as the war broke out.
The weapons of the Civil War produced ghastly wounds. Bullets were large and made of soft lead. “They tended to not just go through and through, so they wouldn’t leave clean wounds” he said.
Sometimes they would lodge in a bone. Sometimes they would fragment or ricochet off a bone into another part of the body.
In addition, fevers and diarrhea were rampant. Soldiers’ camps were dirty and unsanitary. Drinking water could be contaminated with parasites. And the idea of bacterial infection was still a mystery. Many men died or were incapacitated by illness.