Opium 335Paregoric was first produced in the eighteenth century as an asthma medicine.
The compound is no longer used for that purpose but can reduce lung con-
gestion by helping people to cough up mucus. Paregoric is a standard diarrhea
remedy and is used to help infants suffering from drug withdrawal syn-
dromes. In the 1960s the compound had a flurry of popularity among opiate
addicts who would process the product in hopes of isolating the opium, then
inject the substance they produced. The outcomes were typical of what hap-
pens when oral medications are injected, resulting in lung damage and dis-
figuring injuries to injection sites.
Less familiar modern opium preparations include home remedy mixtures
of the substance withcaffeine, aspirin, and acetaminophen (Tylenol or other
brands). In America opium preparations were once a standard method of qui-
eting noisy infants and children, and that practice is still followed in some
parts of the world. One hazard in that custom is the possibility of fatal over-
dose, as people administering such concoctions do not always understand
pediatric dosage.
Drawbacks.Although some opium users have generally unhealthy life-
styles, few ailments have been attributed solely to the drug. Those ailments
tend to be in the gastrointestinal tract, such as problems with the small intes-
tine’s bile duct. “Cauliflower ear,” in which an ear thickens and becomes mis-
shapen, was once associated with opium smoking. The affliction, however,
apparently came not from the drug but rather from the habit of lying down
for hours in a comatose condition with an ear pressing against a hard surface.
Abuse factors.Recreational use of opium is harder to define than we might
think, because even if persons take the drug in a social setting, they can be
seeking to reduce mental anxiety or physical pain, which is not the same as
using a drug for fun. Some people swallow dry opium or drink tea made with
seed or with dried heads of poppy flowers. In the nineteenth century poppy
tea was a common medicinal drink, but in the early twenty-first century the
habit tends to be limited to opiate addicts. The traditional recreational way to
use opium is to inhale its smoke. Heating opium enough to make it smoke
can reduce the drug content, and opium is already far weaker than substances
refined from it (such as morphine andheroin). One authority estimates that
the amount of active drug inhaled by someone who smokes a given weight
of opium will typically be 300 to 400 times less than the drug content in the
same weight of injected heroin. Moreover, while an entire dose of heroin
might be ingested in a few seconds, a pipeful of opium is smoked over a
much longer period to slowly savor its effects, further reducing the opium’s
impact. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge started out using opium
for medical purposes, as did Thomas De Quincey, and both men produced
classic accounts of hallucinations and creative inspiration occurring under
opium’s influence. Those accounts and later ones may well be true, but for
such results people need to be particularly sensitive to the drug and also be
prone to such experiences regardless of pharmaceutical encouragement. Ar-
senic is sometimes added to opium to increase smokers’ interest in sexual
activity, a practice generating reports of arsenic poisoning among users.
Drug interactions.Not enough scientific information to report about the