Booknotes: Opium Slavery

New Arrival:

• Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis by Jonathan S. Jones (UNC Press, 2025).

Considering the mass use (and misuse) of prescribed opiates during the conflict, it is no surprise that dependency became a long-term problem for a great many Civil War veterans. From the description: "During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or “enslaved,” as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction’s health and social consequences."

Jonathan Jones's Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis "unearths the poorly understood stories of opiate-addicted Civil War veterans in unflinching detail, illuminating the war’s traumatic legacies."

The manner in which the contemporary professional medical field and society at large characterized addiction only added to the coping and treatment challenges that addicted veterans and their families faced. More from the description: "Medical and government authorities compounded veterans' suffering and imbued the epidemic with cultural meaning by branding addiction as a matter of moral weakness, unmanliness, or mental infirmity. Framing addiction as “opium slavery” limited the efficacy of care and left many veterans to suffer needlessly for decades after the war ended."

In order to gain an understanding of the breadth and scale of the problem, Jones consulted a wide variety of sources such as "veterans' firsthand accounts as well as mental asylum and hospital records, government and medical reports, newspaper coverage of addiction, and advertisements." The resulting study also "provides critical historical context for the modern opioid crisis, which bears tragic resemblance to that of the post–Civil War era."