The Morphine Molecule
The author isolates the story of the morphine as a tale of good versus evil poised on a cliff beneath heaven and overlooking hell. Morphine became the engine which drove the creation of modern surgery while also destroying too many lives to even start counting. It is a scientific discovery worthy of just one metaphorical comparison…or, well, two, but it really best applies to just the obvious one:
“Discussing it, you could invoke some of humankind’s greatest cultural creations and deepest questions: Faust, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, discussions on the fundamental nature of man and human behavior, of free will and slavery, of God and evolution.”
“Dreamland was the summer babysitter.”
The title is obviously a metaphor, but many readers may be surprised to discover in its opening paragraphs just how specific, narrow and precise the origin to which the broader application of the meaning can be traced. A private swimming pool opened for business in Portsmouth, Ohio in the historically significant year of 1929. At a whopping one-hundred yards long, the swimming pool was not just an instant hit, but a long-term success, depending in large part because back then parents could leave their kids at such a place while they disappeared for a few hours before coming back to pick them up safe and sound.
"The Holy Grail"
There is a Holy Grail of in the world of medicinal science. It has been pursued ever since morphine turned out not to be it. The Crusade, alas, continues unfulfilled, that Holy Grail, also know as:
“a morphine-like painkiller that was not addictive” and which law enforcement hope “would lessen the fallout from its attempts to rid the country of opium.”
Does Anyone Know a Good Pain Mechanic?
The right to health care should be a given and most patients and many physicians believe that. Unfortunately, a much bigger split exists between patients who believe they have right to pain relief and physicians who know they do not. Not by choice, of course, but simply because as difficult as it may be to work out a system in which everyone can exercise their right to health care, that difficult gets dialed up eleven when it comes to the right to the relief of pain. A universal pain reliever capable of treating every person and every type of pain does not and most likely will not ever exist. John Loeser of the Center for Pain Relief explains the root of this chasm between patient and physician in a metaphor that should make it clear for everyone who has ever taken their car to a mechanic who simply can’t figure out what’s wrong with it, explaining that patients:
“treat themselves like an automobile. People become believers in the philosophy that all I need is to go to my doctor and my doctor will tell me what the problem is.”
An Epidemic Impacting “Good” People
The attention paid to opiate addiction which transformed from it from an epidemic to a “crisis” in record time shares much with other drug problems that have severely impacted America: from heroin to meth and from cocaine to crack. None of those drug epidemics have been treated in quite the same way as the opioid “crisis” and there is a very, very good reason for that differentiation that brings everything back full circle to that middle class swimming pool babysitter in Portsmouth:
“The signature location of this [opioids] drug scourge, meanwhile, was not the teeming, public crack houses. It was, instead, kids’ private suburban bedrooms and cars—the products of American prosperity. The bedroom was the addict’s sanctuary, the shrine to the self-involvement dope provokes. It was their own little dreamland”
