Our Opioid Project: A Brief Intro

This project is meant to trace the history of opioids from the Chinese Opium Wars until the modern era through several lenses. We begin by looking at the earliest history of mass opioid use in the Opium Wars, in which opium became a tool of imperialism and conquest as it was weaponized by the British. We then trace the use of opioids as tools of medicine in the American Civil War, using this as the initial seed of what became the opioid crisis in the modern-day United States. Our analysis of opioids in modern times includes a review of how Purdue Pharma successfully marketed its new medicine, OxyContin, to the recently-recognized general condition of chronic pain, while arguably intentionally omitting OxyContin’s risk for tolerance and addiction. We also look at the economics of the opioid crisis, its inequitable effects on varying socioeconomic classes, and provide some examples of opioids in the current news cycle. Finally, we bring this issue close to Duke, and look at the opioid crisis in Durham through an oral history.

Throughout the course of this project, we have been interested in answering two key questions:

-How do the historical instances of opioid weaponization, specifically the Chinese Opium Wars, mirror the tactics used by pharmaceutical companies that precipitated the modern U.S. opioid crisis?

-How have the effects of the opioid crisis in Durham County differed to the rest of the country? How has Durham County’s handling of the opioid crisis differed?

We hope that the following sections, and ultimately our conclusion, will answer these questions, at least to the degree that inquiries about such complex processes are answerable.