adapted from
Peaceful Measures
By Bruce Alexander
Heroin is one of a large family of drugs called `opiates,' or sometimes `opiods.' The family includes opium, morphine, codeine, and many other drugs. In equivalent doses, the pharmacological effects of most of these drugs are very similar to those of heroin, although none of them arouses the fear and horror among the public that heroin does.
The opiate family has several branches. Some opiates are extracted from opium poppies, some are synthesized artificially, some are manufactured naturally in the bodies of human beings and other vertebrates, and some exceptional synthetic opiates, the so-called agonists, have exactly the opposite effect to the others and serve as antidotes to them.
Like most psycho-active drugs, opiates are carried in the blood to the brain, where they exert their primary psychological effects. How they enter the bloodstream does not matter much - they can be injected, smoked, snorted, swallowed, or taken rectally in a suppository. The effects are the same, although the route of administration affects the speed of action and the amount that is required to produce a given effect.
Like most drugs, the opiates have some side-effects and large overdoses can be fatal. As well, people sometimes become severely dependent on or addicted to them. Although these adverse effects are of the greatest concern to the War on Drugs, they are relatively uncommon in the normal course of legal and illegal opiate use.
Opiates are highly effective in circumstantial use by sick people. They were so highly regarded in the nineteenth century as remedies for pain, anxiety, cough, and diarrhea that some physicians referred to them as G.O.M.- `God's Own Medicine'. Although opiates are normally prescribed by doctors in the Western world, they work as well when administered by folk doctors or by private individuals. In remote areas of Laos, for example, there are essentially no doctors and self-medication with locally grown opium is the only effective treatment for many diseases.
Opiate drugs do not cure diseases in the way that anti-biotics do, but there are many cases where temporary relief of symptoms aids recovery. In other cases relief of symptoms is simply humane. Even in the industrialized world, after decades of pharmacological research, there are still no better drugs than the opiates for many purposes.
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