Red pills
boy/girl // replacement // speculative great leap forward caffeine addiction // wedding banquet smoke outs // methcathinone // the free market
Boy / girl
The reason that illicit psychotropic drugs have always been marked out on a depressant-to-stimulant spectrum is because that is the best way to understand them. There is up and there is down. There is boy and there is girl. There might not be any exceptions.1
This is one reason that adulteration is not resisted more strongly. The product is the effect. A pill will be pressed up to mimic Percocet, but there is not necessarily an expectation that it will contain oxycodone; it only needs to deliver a depressant effect.2 “Dope” suggests heroin, when the composition might be xylazine and fentanyl.3 “Cocaine” doesn’t need to contain cocaine but a mixture of substances that meet expectations of users.4 A hit of “LSD” can be any chemical that fits on blotter paper.5
The specific contents are determined by the supply and price of raw ingredients.6
Fentanyl and analogues are not recent discoveries;7 but growing and processing opium and importing it as heroin was more cost-effective than manufacturing designer opioids; and prescription opioids and opiates were easier to access than fentanyl from cross-border labs. An addict that lived long enough might see their Number Four KMT heroin flown fresh from Burma replaced with Mexican tar, replaced with Colombian retail dope, replaced with black market OxyContin, replaced with fentanyl, replaced with carfentanyl and xylazine… But what are they going to do about it?
Red pills and replacement
Opium with morphine, morphine with caffeine, caffeine with methcathinone
If we imagined a long-lived addict in urban China in the 1940s, they might mourn the passage of purity the same way. By then, not many addicts were actually smoking opium. Opium might have been as scarce as pure heroin on the streets of Vancouver or Philadelphia. Supply and price were the factors: by the 1920s, it was more profitable for producers to take their opium and turn it into heroin or morphine. And so the pipe and the den8 were replaced with tinfoil, the hypodermic needle, and the red pill.
The reason that drug markets shift away from the natural, or at least lightly processed, is so adulteration can begin and the price can be brought down. Opium can be adulterated, but it remains recognizable; the quality of heroin and morphine can’t be evaluated with the naked eye; and a red pill only needs to be a red pill.
Our ancient addict would have seen all of this: when the opium was gone and the morphine got scarce, the addicts were being given red pills instead. And then the red pills stopped being red, and they were pink pills or beige pills.9
You could swallow them, if you wanted to, but they could be smoked, too.
They were sold as different things, depending on who was buying them. The addicts knew they were the substitute for morphine. Or they might have bought another brand as an antidote to addiction. And the opiate naive might have sought them out as a nerve tonic.10
Although the early formulations probably contained nothing more than morphine and binding agents, the recipe was corrupted. One version of the red pill reported in 1925 has these contents:
Heroin hydrochloride 2 oz. 2 drachms, strychnine nitrate ½ oz. quinine sulfate 1 oz., caffeine 5 oz., milk sugar 48 oz., refined sugar 16 oz. With gum and water to "mass" this made about 10,000 pills of about 4½ to 5 grains each.
A few years later, a scientist tasked by an agency of the League of Nations to analyze the red pills found that they were seven percent caffeine, two percent heroin, and around one percent strychnine and quinine, with the rest of the bulk made up with lactose and cane sugar.11
Slowly, over the decades after the red pill was introduced in the late Qing dynasty to the end of the 1940s, opiates were replaced with caffeine. In the end, some of the red pills had no opiates—or just enough that they might be able to kill a craving. Caffeine was cheaper by weight than heroin or opiates, and it still did something.12
Vast quantities of pharmaceutical caffeine started being imported from Europe through Shanghai to produce the red pills.13
Fish scale caffeine, backyard furnaces
Opium smoking was not completely displaced by morphine and heroin (it was still prevalent in the southwest borderlands and coastal trading centers); morphine and heroin were not completely displaced by red pills (injectable morphine and heroin were prevalent in the north). And so, in 1949, all of these things needed to be cleared away.
An uncomplicated, orthodox understanding of how drugs were rooted of China by the Communist Party after 1949 is basically correct: they locked up the addicts, they evicted the foreign traffickers, they shut down the dealers, and chaotic peripheral areas that facilitated the trade were put under the control of the Party.14
But the aftermath is not as well understood. The records of early 1950s campaigns against the remnants of the trade are reliable, I’m sure. We could get a good idea what happened to addicts. But it requires a lot of speculation to make the claim that the Great Leap Forward was fueled in part by caffeine.
I believe that to be true, though.15 There was a caffeine problem in the 1940s, and then a caffeine problem appeared again the 1970s—and there has to be something happening in the intervening three decades.
This is a collection of circumstantial evidence.
There is a supply of caffeine. In 1956, pharmaceutical producers in China began extracting the mild stimulant from fish scales.16 The process—crystals of guanine was separated from fish scales, then converted to xanthine, and then converted to caffeine—was well-known,17 but had not been tried in China.18 This went into injectable ampules of sodium benzoate and caffeine,19 other Soviet recipes, and patent medicines.
At the same time, production and marketing of pharmaceuticals was being brought under the control of the state. Distribution networks penetrated into the countryside.20 Caffeine was among the drugs sent out to rural communities.21
There are scattered anecdotes. There is an account of farmers shooting up their draft animals with caffeine at the height of the Leap,22 taking some for themselves, and getting hooked.
There are illicit caffeine extraction operations in the 1970s.23
There were warnings about illicit use in the 1980s.24
And then reports of widespread abuse in the 1990s.
We have an appetite suppressant and stimulant available during a during a mass mobilization of labor in the middle of a famine! But no hard evidence. It was a local phenomenon, probably. And nobody was dying. And there was no law against any of this.25
Shanxi flour (A)
If it was a local phenomenon, we should speak locally. We should talk about Shanxi.
All of this matters—the red pills, the fish scale, the barefoot doctors, the illicit extraction, the warning—because it helps to explain this account of the rituals for caffeine smoking at social functions in Shanxi:
Since many years ago, the custom in Shanxi for funerals, weddings, and other celebrations, or for welcoming guests at home was for the host to offer tea, cigarettes, and also an off-white lump. Guests would skillfully heat the product and inhale the vapors. Their labors would be rewarded with a feeling of joy and refreshment.
The ritual, and the skill and the knowledge they’re talking about here are things passed on from generations. They are smoking the red pill again, so many years later.
Shanxi flour (B)
A television news report shot in Shanxi in 2006:
Voiceover: It appeared that the hard work of the relevant departments has achieved the goal of reducing the use of [caffeine] by the masses. However, while conducting interviews, our reporter found that the caffeine problem has not actually been solved but only driven underground.
Journalist: Is it true that nobody here [uses caffeine] anymore?
Villager [1]: Some people use it.
Villager [2]: Before Spring Festival, it gets scary. You get a big crowd of people, one-by-one, sucking [the smoke] up with paper tubes. It gets so you can barely breathe in there. You can smell it from fifty, sixty meters away.
Journalist: If we wanted to see [someone smoke it], could we see it?
Villager [1]: You can't see it. The Public Security Bureau catches them.
Voiceover: After we reassured them that we would not disclose the identity of the smoker, a villager agreed to take us on a walk through the village. During this investigation, the reporter found several houses where people were smoking [caffeine]. At a villager's home, we spoke with a young man that preferred to speak hypothetically [about the use of caffeine]. After a while, he produced a cardboard box and asked the reporter if he might like to refresh himself. That box is where he stored his [caffeine].
Shanxi flour (C)
We can be even more local. We can talk about Changzhi.
Changzhi is located around the middle of the province. Zhengzhou is about a hundred miles south. Taiyuan is about a hundred miles north. It’s coal country. It’s West Virginia.
The police noticed in the early 1990s (and maybe before, see: note 24) that the laborers in the mines and attendant industries were smoking what they called miànmian.26 At first, this meant sodium benzoate-caffeine. It went down the mines with them and on long drives across the plains. But when the pharmaceutical supply was compromised or insufficient, black market caffeine pills appeared.27
And when the Public Security Bureau cracked down on the black market caffeine, dealers went in search of an alternative
Purists
A news story from earlier this month:
In recent days, the Public Security Bureau officials in Lingchuan County, Jingcheng, Shanxi cracked a massive drug trafficking case. Ten suspects have been apprehended, 49.848 kilograms of narcotics confiscated, and 430,000 yuan in drug money seized in a case that involved smuggling across provincial borders.
In March, officers at the Lucheng station of the Lingchuan Public Security Bureau found evidence that Wang ×long was trafficking caffeine. Based on their years of experience and knowledge of narcotics smuggling, investigators believed they were only seeing scooping up a small fish in a large operation. After further investigation, they drew a connection between their suspect and two more further up the chain: Zhang ×suo (male, seventy-five years old) and Niu ×ping (male, sixty-nine years old). After putting Niu ×ping under surveillance, police determined that the [caffeine] was probably coming from Henan.
The age of the alleged traffickers is notable. They know the real thing. They are purists.
Mavericks
When the Public Security Bureau noted that pharmaceutical factories were selling tons of it without asking for paperwork, when you couldn’t get away with moving sacks of it—there had to be a replacement.
That is why there is a methcathinone problem is Shanxi.
It is easier to synthesize than methamphetamine.28 It can be consumed in the same way. The stimulant effects are more intense than caffeine, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The drug is manufactured in Henan and then shipped north.
Changzhi became “the primary consumption and distribution center for methcathinone at both the provincial and national levels.”29
Methcathinone use has given rise to its own subculture in Changzhi, [Wang Gang, director of the addiction treatment department at the Changzhi Voluntary Rehabilitation Hospital] said, and the drug even has a nickname in the local dialect: jin’er, which translates as “something exciting.” “People don’t see it as illegal behavior but rather as a common habit,” Wang said.
30
Other markets
Methamphetamine has a flavor and a texture that is hard to fake. And so that is why it is now most frequently marketed in China as pills: mágǔ.31 The tendency is always to adopt forms that lend themselves to adulteration. The methamphetamine pills do not need to contain any methamphetamine.32 They only need to do something.
Fairy water—shénxian shuǐ—referred first to preparations containing gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) and prodrugs.33 GHB was made illegal in 2005 but continued to be openly marketed by halfway legitimate companies as a healthier and cheaper alternative to drinking booze.34 Once again, the form was ripe for adulteration. Fairy water came to be applied to mixtures that contained other sedatives, like nimetazepam.35
Free market (some kind of conclusion, but let me get back to this in some other way…)
Opium cultivation expanded because of the need to fund colonial adventures and new state formations that rose in response to the challenge of colonialism.36 Revenue farming and opium funded these regimes. Opium is the product of the earliest stage of capitalist development, and subject to only minimal processing and standardization. Morphine began to be sold at a large scale in Asia in the late nineteenth century. This is the next stage: opium as an industrial medical product—processed into heroin or morphine or fortified with these products—and international commodity, and the application of medico-administrative thinking to consumers.37 The red pill (and advances in heroin marketing and hypodermic morphine) followed from these trends—made with products coming down a supply chain that stretched out to Europe, and becoming or imitating a clean and modern medical product. Liberation provides a lengthy intermission in China. Different forces start to operate: Marxist scientism and Maoist mobilization shaping industrial processes and medico-administrative thinking. And then everyone is spit out into the twentieth century to absorb the "psychotropic techniques" first developed within the Western military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex.38
This appears more complicated because of the intervention of hobbyists that would dispute ketamine being called a downer. Drawing on clinical pharmacology, they would advise that it is a dissociative. That’s a helpful term (first used by Ed Domino to describe ketamine in 1965, suggested by his wife, but it goes back much further). Still, if you take enough, you’ll pass out, so it’s a downer. I am sorry to be so simplistic. Most psychedelics can be dealt with the same way: if you take enough, you won’t be able to sleep. Scopolamine and other deliriants could be the exception, but they’ll still knock you out—and I’m not sure they can be termed recreational drugs.
An example from Philadelphia contained fentanyl, fentanyl analogues and metabolites (para-fluorofentanyl, fluoro-4-ANPP, fluoro-phenethyl-4-ANPP [the latter two might be pharmacologically inactive]), gabapentin (an anticonvulsant with reported euphoric effects), and acetaminophen.
This is an example from Chicago: a bag sold as heroin contained 6-monoacetylmorphine, 6-acetylcodeine, noscapine (the first three are impurities of heroin synthesis), fentanyl, etizolam (a benzodiazepine not legally marketed in the United States), quinine (a cure for tropical parasites and a common cutting agent in illicit drugs), niacinamide (vitamin B3), and xylazine (veterinary anesthetic that seems to rot the skin of habitual injection users).
Benzocaine or lidocaine numb the nose and throat. Caffeine and levamisole bulk out the powder and provide a stimulant hit. Phenacetin potentiates stimulants and gives a fish scale gleam. To make sure it does something, amphetamines and cathinones can be added (nowadays, fentanyl and opioids are popular for that use).
Here’s an example: “NBOMes–Highly Potent and Toxic Alternatives of LSD.”
I think this looks a bit like the phenomenon of "mock" or "imitation" or "meatless" meat of the 1930s and 1940s. There are more recent examples from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The supply of the real thing is restricted, so the consumer is given an alternative. Americans are told that they must eat less meat; the solution is hamburgers made from soy protein, coconut oil, modified food starch, yeast extract, cultured dextrose, and methylcellulose. I don’t believe anybody would have chosen mock chicken over the real thing. Corn-fed USDA Prime is preferable for most people to the popular vegetarian alternative. But you take what you’re given.
Alpha-methylfentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl were found in samples of illicit heroin in the United States in 1979. These and other analogues were found through the 1980s. There was illicit domestic experimentation. A chemist from DuPont was arrested in 1985 for trying to sell a batch of a fentanyl analogue. A year later, a chemist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory was caught for the same. At least four clandestine laboratories were raided in the 1990s.
There were still dens but the quality had declined. A North China Herald reporter visited one in Shanghai in 1936: “The shock produced by the sanctum we have so suddenly penetrated is like a well-directed blow between the eyes. The room is small, dark and malodorous beyond description. It is a prison, ten by teen feet, on the floor of which lie several men of the beggar class, some of them in the act of injecting heroin into their flesh, others resting between 'shots.'"
There is a picture (image) of them in Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China by Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun (it’s helpful because the book’s description of them as looking like “small and slightly unripe lychees” could be misleading). The source is an undated manuscript by someone named C. P. Fairchild. He calls them “pink pills.” The Modern Chinese Narcotics Trade 中国近代贩毒史 has this description: “Red pills”—hóngwán—"used heroin and morphine as their main ingredient, as well as white aresenic, and were the size and shape of soybeans. Appearing at the end of the Qing dynasty, they were pink"—fěnhóngsè—"in appearance, earning them their name. The flavor when smoked was mild. After consuming the effects were more peculiar than those produced by opium, and so they became popular during the Republican era." The History of Narcotics in China 中国毒品史 says: "Red pills"—hońgwán—"also known as red pearls"—hóngzhūzhu—"pearls"—zhūzhu—"appeared in the late Qing dynasty and gained popularity in the Republica era. Appearing similar to soybeans, they used heroin, morphine, and an anesthetic"—the name given is gǔxuān—"in addition to sugar, caffeine, quinine, and white arsenic. When they first appeared, they were red, earning them their name. Later, they appeared in light gray”—huīqīng—“and other colors.”
The spread of illicit red pills kept pace with the legitimate pharmaceutical industry, which also marketed intoxicating tonics and opium replacements, some of which contained opiates and opioids, amphetamines and other stimulants, cocaine, and belladonna alkaloids. (It’s not directly related, as it deals with semen retention, but I recommend reading “The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea in Republican China” by Hugh Shapiro to get a feeling for the biomedical industry in the 1920s and ‘30s.)
Both recipes are found in "The Mysterious Heroin Pills for Smoking,” Bulletin on Narcotics, Vol. IV, No. 1 January-March 1952, published by the United Nations Department of Social Affairs.
It’s hard to find information on the bioavailability of smoked caffeine. In a video on YouTube, a young man smokes ground coffee and reports: "I mean, I never smoked crack before. I'm never gonna smoke crack, you know, never gonna do that shit. But this—… I think it feels like— somewhat like— it's like one eighth of crack. It's, like… It hits you, bro. It hits you. You just wanna, like, do shit. You're like, 'I'm so motivated. Let's do this shit. Let's do some stuff.'"
The Bulletin on Narcotics article says: “It was shown that imports through the Customs at Shanghai amounted to 48,236 pounds of caffeine and 2,701 pounds of strychnine in 1923, and 22,234 pounds of caffeine and 1,304 pounds of strychnine in 1924...” An editorial from the Anti-Opium Association in the China Medical Journal says :"[Caffeine's] unrestricted use in China is increasing rapidly, and each month now as much as 2,000 lbs. are imported, chiefly to Shanghai and Hankow." It tells us exactly where the caffeine was coming from, too. In 1923, twenty three thousand pounds came from Great Britain, around nine thousand from Japan, and around three thousand from France.
A necessary complication to this story is that the producers and traffickers of heroin, opium, and other illicit drugs were often not shut down but got out before anyone came around to enforce the new laws. The Kuomintang went south to Burma and took over the trade. Taiwan became crucial to the shipment of Southeast Asian heroin, sometimes with the support of American intelligence agencies.
I promise I’m not the only one. Caffeine abuse in the 1950s and 1960s, or abuse at some unspecified time in the past is mentioned as the source of abuse in the 1990s and later.
Liz P. Y. Chee’s Mao's Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China has a reference to a report from this year. The abstract for a 1958 article in China Aquatic Products 中国水产 confirms it and lists some of the players: 用鱼鳞制造“鸟粪素”的加工方法. A 1959 article tells us that the hairtail harvest has been improved by the Great Leap Forward and the Anti-rightist Campaign and caffeine extraction is booming: 积极回收带鱼鳞制造鱼油和咖啡因. Jumping ahead, a 1965 article informs us about ongoing production: 在鱼品加工厂里. It is hard to find references to amounts produced, since I can only read abstracts, but it seems that the Shanghai factory could make make six tons of caffeine a year from fish scales: 20世纪60年代中国工业托拉斯的 兴起及其体制困境 (PDF).
A Fisheries Research Board of Canada document from 1947, commenting on the extraction of crystals of guanine from fish scales says: "During the war considerable quantities of caffeine were made this way."
In the 1950s, some caffeine was extracted from tea leaves, as we see from a 1954 article: 伟大祖国的药物资源及其利用 咖啡因的原料——茶叶. But most was imported, as we know from the 1958 article in China Aquatic Products.
The problem of manufacturing the ampules is discussed in a 1953 paper: 安息香酸钠咖啡因安瓿的制造问题. In 1954, Chinese Pharmaceutical Journal 中国药学杂志 carries a number of articles about this formulation, noting that it is a Soviet innovation. There is also reference to Ivan Pavlov and "Pavlov's mixture," which was bromide and caffeine, sometimes with sodium benzoate, intended to calm hyperactive children (nowadays, methylphenidate or dextroamphetamine are used for the same thing).
There is a relevant chapter—"Pharmaceuticals Reach the Villages"—in Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China by Xiaoping Fang.
Caffeine was being used in more applications at that time than it is at present, especially without amphetamines around. It is recommended in the Handbook for Rural Doctors 农村医生手册 in 1959. It was included on the list of fifty-two drugs and compounds required by rural communities in a 1965 list: 第一批下乡成药52种介绍. Caffeine is recommended in a manual for barefoot doctors for treatment of asthma, chronic bronchitis, gas intoxication, electric shock, heat stroke, poisoning by neurotixic plants (Tripterygium wilfordii is specified). Beginning in the 1960s, it was also included in compounds of Chinese medicine.
There were veterinary applications for the combination of sodium benzoate and caffeine. The earliest publication I can find is from 1964. It suggests it as a cure for an animal poisoned by calcium cyanide.
This is mentioned in The History of Chinese Anti-Drug Campaigns 中国禁毒史 without giving specific dates or locations.
There is an editorial in Chinese Pharmaceutical Journal in 1984 warning pharmacists to keep a close eye on sodium benzoate-caffeine: 加强对“安钠咖”的管理. A report in People’s Justice 人民司法 mentions a pharmaceutical factory getting loose with its supply (it happens to be in Shanxi): 严惩贩毒罪犯 净化社会风气. There is an article in Medical Information Work 医学情报工作 in 1987 that calls sodium benzoate-caffeine “the new ‘opium’” (the other drug that it highlights as a risk is an opioid called bucinnazine): 加强对麻醉性镇痛药强痛定和其他成瘾性药品的管理——秦皇岛市青龙县两乡滥用成瘾性药品的调查报告.
After 1979, legal changes forbid the manufacture and sale of caffeine.
An article from the Journal of the Shanxi Advanced Police Academy 山西警官高等专科学校学报 starts its timeline in the 1990s, even if I would speculate it’s earlier: 山西省精神药品咖啡因滥用问题.
Later, it was a combination of ephedra and caffeine. This is explained in an article by Minqi Zhao: “New Psychoactive Substances and Law Enforcement Responses in a Local Context in China—a Case Study of Methcathinone”, which makes reference to 甲卡西酮在山西某市蔓延的成因及对策.
That is what people on the internet say, at least. It even uses similar ingredients: ephedrine or pseudoephedrine are oxidized to methcathinone.
This is quoting the Minqi Zhao article.
This is from an article in Sixth Tone: “Abuse of ‘Zombie Drug’ Has Skyrocketed in Shanxi, Says Report.”
These are often red pills, too, coincidentally. Maybe there is some reason for this. In Narcotic Culture, there is some speculation about this: “The heroin pills took their name from the infamous 'red pills' prescribed in 1620 to the Guangzong emperor, who died soon after taking the drug. The name may also have been linked to 'the red lead magic drug' (hongqian qiyao), rumoured to contain the first menstrual blood of a virgin. Red pills resonated with red cinnabar, a time-honoured ingredient of Daoist alchemy. In parts of northern China heroin was even referred to as 'cinnabar' (dansha or danliao).” General cultural affection for the color red might have something to do with it. Maybe red dye is easiest to procure.
They may contain methamphetamine. It is still fairly cheap to produce. There is plenty of it flowing from Southeast Asia. But there are lots of cheaper substitutes and adulterants. And, again, caffeine is usually one of the key ingredients of mágǔ. Again, full circle, all the way back to the 1930s.
The Chinese National Narcotics Control Commission identified the two other frequent ingredients as gamma-Butyrolactone (GBL) and 1,4-Butanediol (BDO), which are both prodrugs of GHB: 国家禁毒办权威发布毒品基础知识(二):合成毒品 “神仙水”.
It’s hard to date this, but it seems that energy drink producers had GHB products in the mid 2000s. A major supplier was raided in 2017: “Seven arrested in raid on Chinese factory producing energy drink laced with ‘party drug’.” By that time, they had already lost all licenses to make beverages. The branding had already been picked up by opportunists. The legitimate-looking beverages remained on sale in downmarket KTVs and night clubs: “Police in Hainan Province seize GHB drug disguised as beverages.”
In the 2000s and 2010s, shénxian shuǐ clearly referred to GHB. This is attested to by scientific drug enforcement literature: “神仙水”混合型液态毒品的GC/MS定性检验. A 2018 article gives the names shénxian shuǐ and kǎwa cháoyǐn (this is after the beverage mentioned in note 34 [I think the name is supposed to sound Japanese or Korean]) for GHB drinks: 这些饮料有“毒”!不要喝. In 2021, shénxian shuǐ is applied to a drink containing a benzodiazepine called nimetazepam: "聪明药""神仙水"祸害青少年 严惩新型毒品犯罪刻不容缓.
I'm drawing on "Opium and the Beginnings of Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia" by Carl A. Trocki, as well as "A Fresh Approach to Southeast Asian History" by Howard Dick, and "Revenue Farming and the Changing State in Southeast Asia" by John Butcher in The Rise and Fall of Revenue Farming: Business Elites and the Emergence of the Modern State in Southeast Asia, and “Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895” and “Opium and Empire: Some Evidence from Colonial-Era Asian Stock and Commodity Markets.”
The line from "The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century" begins: “Medicine, as a general technique of health even more than as a service to the sick or an art of cures, assumes an increasingly important place in the administrative system and the machinery of power, a role constantly widened and strengthened.” Talking about the American context but applicable to China at around the same time, Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider in Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness: “Physicians were intimately involved with opiate addiction at all phases: people became addicted through medical and quasimedial treatments; medical discoveries like the hypodermic needle made ingestion easier; and the recognition of the 'addiction as a disease' led to medical treatments. Thus, in a real sense, 19th-century medical practice created the very addiction problem it was treating at the century's close.”
“Psychotropic techniques” comes from Testo Junkie by by Beatriz Peciado, translated by Bruce Benderson. It also contains brief further explication of how military pharmaceutical advances spread out to recreational illicit drug markets.