In 2008, overdoses from opium-based painkillers surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the most common cause of accidental death in America. The reason: we’ve failed to learn from history.
About 6,000 years ago, around the time of Abraham, the Sumerians settled between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. They invented cuneiform writing. They invented farming. And they discovered a plant called “hul gil,” or “the plant of joy.” Carl Linneaus, an eighteenth-century botanist, called it Papaver somniferum. William Osler, the founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital, called it “God’s own medicine.” Today we call it the opium poppy.