Opiates have gone by many names in their millennia-long entanglement with humans, in an ever-refined chain of pleasure: poppy tears, opium, heroin, morphine. With the advent of synthetic opiates like fentanyl, we\u2019re seeing addiction and devastation on a scale unmatched in the 5,000-year history of the drug\u2014but also a return to some of the same patterns and failed attempts at regulation that have haunted our efforts to control it. Cultural historian Lucy Inglis tells the painful, pain-fighting story of opium, and how its history is really our history\u2014from trade and war to medicine and money.
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