Heroin is different things to different people. Lou Reed gives an addicts' view when he sings the song "Heroin" - "I feel just like Jesus' son" (among other things). But it generally has an image of being a great evil. There are many subjective opinions around.

Historically, it seems the first evidence we have of opium is in ancient Greece. It was widely used throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries in the form of Laudanum and later Morphine. Laudanum was toted as a great cure-all. Everything from headaches, stress, sleeplessness, to diahorrhea could be effectively treated. England fought a war against China to force them to import opium.

Last century opiates had nowhere near the evil reputation they do today, quite the opposite. Here is how a leading medical journal in the United States described opiates in 1868:

[Opiates] cause a feeling of delicious ease and comfort, with an elevation and expansion of the whole moral and intellectual nature... There is not the same uncontrollable excitement as from alcohol, but an exaltation of our better mental qualities, a warmer glow of benevolence, a disposition to do great things, but nobly and beneficently, a higher devotional spirit, and withal a stronger self-reliance, and consciousness of power. Nor is this consciousness altogether mistaken. For the intellectual and imaginative faculties are raised to the highest point compatible with individual capacity... Opium seems to make the individual, for a time, a better and greater man.

- As quoted in Snyder, Prof. S. H. (General Editor),"The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Drugs - Heroin, The Street Narcotic", Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1986.

In Australia, opium was outlawed toward the end of the 19th century but only in it's smokable form. This didn't affect white users, who used it in medicines. It is plain now that the outlawing of smokable opium was an entirely racist act, done merely because the whites didn't like the self-satisfied looks on the faces of opium smoking Chinese. They accused the Chinese of inflicting their opium on young people and making them do all sorts of unspeakable things. That was just propaganda. It was also sorely hypocritical since it was the British who forced opium on the Chinese in the first place in what have become known to history as the "Opium Wars".

In Australia heroin was legally available over the counter at chemist shops in the form of a linctus (cough syrup) until 1953. Before 1953 there was not one single death recorded in Australia of heroin overdose. There was no evidence of heroin addiction, not one single reported case. Sounds strange eh? there was heroin, there must have been people addicted to it. That's probably right. But the addicts could just go to the corner shop and buy it! They didn't have to steal, mix with criminals, prostitute themselves to get it. Their dependency made little or no more impact on their lives than caffeine does for millions of people today.

The BMA (forerunner of the AMA) lobbied the Australian government not to ban heroin. It was a useful medicine, an excellent pain killer: more powerful than morphine. The Australian government of the time simply folded to pressure from the US, who was experiencing drug problems of it's own, to outlaw it. The US, not satisfied with creating havoc in their own country with prohibition, insisted that all other countries follow their disastrous example. And, stupid us, we did.

CEIDA Heroin Fact Sheet

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