Morphine 307Drawbacks.When used to reduce continual pain in serious disease, too
much morphine can increase discomfort rather than relieve it and cause a
condition in which a patient experiences pain from activity that should not be
uncomfortable.
Morphine can make people drowsy, so they should avoid operating an au-
tomobile or other hazardous machinery until they know how the drug affects
them. Despite morphine’s safety in a medical context, it can be hazardous
when injected into fluid circulating through the spinal cord and brain, and if
hospital staffs use this technique, they are advised to have resuscitation equip-
ment on hand.
Nausea and vomiting are common unwanted effects from morphine. It pro-
motes constipation and urine retention. Itching and hives can occur. The drug
interferes with sexual activity by male rats and lowerstestosteronelevels in
human males. Morphine can impede breathing and often is avoided if a per-
son suffers from asthma. Rats dosed with morphine for six weeks developed
a weakened immune system. People can experience seizures and accelerated
heart activity from a strong dose.
Abuse factors.After several weeks of medical dosage a person can experi-
ence noticeable dependence with morphine. Such development should take
longer with adulterated street supplies. Medical patients who were surveyed
about their experience with morphine claimed to have experienced no diffi-
culty in stopping the drug. Addiction from medical use is almost unheard of.
Normally withdrawal symptoms are a mild version of the opiate withdrawal
syndrome. Tolerance is normally described as evidence of drug abuse, but
morphine tolerance can develop in persons receiving the drug medically for
pain relief. Symptoms of such tolerance include a need to take doses more
often and at a higher strength in order to produce the same amount of pain
relief. This is notable because tolerance to medical effects of a drug tends to
be unusual; perhaps the development indicates a substantial psychological
component in morphine’s pain management. Tolerance is commonly observed
among addicts, but they do not continually increase their dosage. At some
point they generally reach a level adequate to maintain the sensations they
seek. In the 1980s a mice experiment indicated that vitamin C may prevent
morphine tolerance and dependence, but judging from subsequent absence of
this technique in treating humans, apparently initial hopes for the therapy
have not been fulfilled.
One of the main appeals in illicit use of morphine is the drug’s ability to
induce calmness. People making unauthorized use of the drug for this purpose
are not so much using the drug for recreation as for relieving mental suffering.
In some people the drug can cause euphoria, a characteristic that can have
appeal strictly for recreation but also for self-medication. In these and other
respects, morphine and heroin will appeal to the same sorts of people for the
same sorts of reasons.
For decades morphine addiction was portrayed as the classic kind of drug
abuse. Although the substance was unwelcome in the workplace as the
twenty-first century began, a century earlier some workers used the drug to
increase productivity in both manual and intellectual tasks by relieving ten-
sion that otherwise diminished performance. Other pharmaceuticals later su-