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Opium - How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R560
Discovery Miles 5 600
You Save: R179
(24%)
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Opium - How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World (Hardcover)
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List price R739
Loot Price R560
Discovery Miles 5 600
You Save R179 (24%)
Supplier out of stock. If you add this item to your wish list we will let you know when it becomes available.
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In 2017 over 60,000 Americans died as the result of opioid
overdoses, more than died annually in this country during the peak
of the AIDs epidemic, more than die every year from breast cancer,
and more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam War. But even
though the overdose crisis ravaging our nation seems impossible to
ignore, few understand how it came to be. OPIUM tells the
extraordinary and at times harrowing story of how we arrived at
today's crisis, a story that begins at the dawn of human
civilization with enterprising poppy farmers in Mesopotamia,
explores the breakthroughs of too-often forgotten experimental
chemists in the Arab world who first refined poppy juice into
opium, of colonial powers who spirited opium around the world in
the interest of building out empires, of psychiatrists like Freud
who ushered opium into modern medicine, and finally the story of
the pharmaceutical conglomerates we know today that used opium and
its more potent cousin, heroin, as a model for a wave of pills that
laid the groundwork for today's overdose epidemic. Throughout, the
book demonstrates how opium has served as a currency that helped
develop the global economy. Wielded as a tool with which all kinds
of brokers of power--empires like the British Commonwealth setting
off China's Opium Wars, titans of modern medicine, and American
drug companies, to name a few--could profit and expand, no matter
the human cost, opium has proved both a frequent impetus for and
obstacle to improving modern life. In its final chapter, OPIUM
takes us inside the cutting edge of the opiate epidemic, showing
how the nation's top doctors are confronting the crisis head on, in
part using the lessons of opium's complex history.
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