The Opioid Blues

The Philipsburg Mail, Nov 24, 1899.

"You see the drug was so deceptive that while under its influence I could work and be free from pain, so instead of laying up and letting Nature do her work and cure me, I kept taking the injections until the pain would grow worse when I was completely from under the influence. The first thing I knew I could not do without it. I was compelled to take it night and morning to be at all comfortable. Then as I used it, I was not content to simply have enough to keep me free from pain. But like that fire, when once kindled, it grew in force and strength."

These are the vivid words of a man struggling with opioid addiction, but they do not adorn the pages of a contemporary news outlet, nor do they advance the underlying political platforms promoted in the pages of a modern newspaper. They come from an 1878 issue of the Chicago Tribune.

Americans struggled with their own opioid crisis in the nineteenth century. An estimated 1 in 2001 people were addicted to opioids by the end of the 19th century, not that far off from the approximately 1 in 1542 Americans who were dependent on or addicted to opioids in 2016.

What were the causes of the 19th-century opioid crisis?

Over-prescription by doctors and easy access to opioids—remarkably similar to the causes of the modern epidemic.

In the 19th-century, opium-based patent medicines such as laudanum and paregoric were popular solutions to a wide-range of ills, from coughs, to aches and pains, to diarrhea, to the euphemistic “female complaints.” In fact, many of the opioid addicts during the late 19th-century were women, particularly white women of the middle and upper classes, who became addicted after being prescribed opium-based medicines by their physicians.

These opioid-saturated medicines were widely available, with ads for them appearing in newspapers around the nation. One such medicine, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, was geared toward young children and promised to not only soothe teething babies but also claimed it “corrects acidity of the stomach, relieves wind colic, regulates the bowels, and gives rest, health, and comfort to mother and child.” The fact that it was laced with opiates wasn’t mentioned.

The Civil War introduced a new demographic of opioid addicts: soldiers. Morphine, derived from opium, had been around since the early 1800s, but the introduction of the hypodermic syringe into mainstream medicine around the time of the Civil War made it possible for military doctors to easily treat wounded soldiers without the side effects of orally administered opioids.

When the soldiers returned home, some of them returned addicted to the morphine administered to them in hospitals, while others became addicted after the war as a way to treat the chronic pain resulting from war wounds.

So how was the 19th-century opioid epidemic resolved?

In the late 19th century, medical professionals began to realize the detrimental effects of opioids. “Who is responsible for […] morphine victims?” asked a doctor in an 1892 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He then answered his own question: “The physician and the druggist, most largely.”

As awareness of the dangers grew among doctors and pharmacists, opioids were prescribed less often and became less freely available, which helped lower the number of new addicts. This, combined with state and federal regulatory legislation, helped eventually end the epidemic.

Of course, just because the 19th-century epidemic ended, it didn’t mean opioid abuse was completely eliminated. Abuse continued on a smaller scale, complicated by the introduction in the late 19th century of an opioid marketed as a safe alternative to morphine: heroin.

A Note about Fred McDowell from Straw, MN 55105

Earlier this month, I went to the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund post office box and pulled out a package from Mr. Kevin Hahn.  The package claims to have been sent from a place known as Straw, MN 55105.  Of course, this place does not exist.  Nevertheless, inside I found several photographs and the note below:

Peter May Finds Solace with Patton

JERI ROWE - Greensboro News & Record - February 1, 2001 

Peter May closes his eyes and scrunches his face when he recalls his trip last September to Mississippi.

He hears the industrial whirring of a huge cotton gin and sees a small, white-plank church bathed in a van's headlights. As he walks toward the clouds of cotton dust, he looks for the sight he wants to find: the grave of legendary blues musician Charley Patton.

He grabs his guitar and camera from the van and ambles into a cemetery choked with knee-high weeds. He stumbles, looks around, stumbles again. Then, he sees in front of him, chiseled in granite, the words, "CHARLEY PATTON, THE VOICE OF THE DELTA."

He found it. His home.

"Come on up and talk to us, Charley,'' May says, smiling.

May is 35, a short, slender man with long, boyish, brown bangs. He rolls his own cigarettes, shaves every few days and helps his wife, Susan, take care of their four daughters, ages 5 to 11. He sells tires by day; he plays the blues by night.

And May can play. He plucks the guitar strings like some jazz-cat drummer and sings in a bar-worn, scruffy voice about leavin', liquor, redemption and a girl named Laura Mae.

Hear for yourself Friday at The Garage in Winston-Salem, Sunday at The Blind Tiger in Greensboro or next Thursday at Ziggy's nightclub in Winston-Salem. Or simply pick up his latest release, ``Black Coffee Blues,'' a CD of haunting authenticity filled with the ghosts of Patton, Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Those were the very ghosts May has wanted to find. In September, he spent 14 hours on the road with three friends. They traveled through the Deep South to pay respects to the people who had created the music they all loved.

"Breathing that same air and walking on that same ground, it gives you a perspective you can't find in North Carolina,'' May says.

May discovered Patton through listening to bluesman Skip James. Then May created his own school to understand the man who had helped create Mississippi's rural blues, the foundation of today's rock 'n' roll.

May read books. He listened to Patton's recordings. He went to a blues workshop in Connecticut and took private lessons in Massachusetts. Then he sat on his bed for hours, playing Patton's tunes over and over until he got them right.

Finally, for his own self-styled graduation, he went on a blues pilgrimage to a cemetery south of Indianola, Miss.

When he found Patton's tombstone, he felt dazed at first. But that feeling vanished when he saw a ``tall boy,'' a 22-ounce Budweiser can, near Patton's grave. He tossed it, thinking of a line from the old blues song ``One Kind Favor'': ``See that my grave is kept clean.''

Then he lit one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, knelt beside the grave and, inside the blinding swath of the van's headlights, began to play ``Down the Dirt Road Blues.'' The tune seemed appropriate as he sat alone in the dark beside a dirt road in Mississippi.

I'm going away to a world unknown

I'm going away to a world unknown

I'm worried now. But I won't be worried long.

"It seemed like the air just soaked up that music,'' May says.

May often wonders why he - a preacher's son from Winston-Salem - has become so intrigued by this black-born music. He hasn't an answer. But like many of us, he enjoys the search. Especially that night in Mississippi.

"This music is about freedom,'' he says. ``When you listen to it, there's always some kind of line about going down the road and being by myself. It's like you've been somewhere, and you think, 'I am somebody.' And man, I think I need that freedom. It's liberating.''

Mt. Olive Cemetery is now listed on the National Register

By Roslyn Anderson - Nov 11, 2017 - Mississippi News Now

Ida Revels Redmond, the daughter of Hiram Revels.

A nearly forgotten cemetery in west Jackson, the burial site of African Americans as far back as the early 19th century, is being restored and recognized for its historical relevance. The more than 200-year-old Mount Olive Cemetery is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Jackson State University researchers and the work of members of the Stringer M W Grand Lodge on Lynch Street led to the restoration of a cemetery, home to slaves and statesmen. 

"We want to make sure the story is told how it was," said Heather Wilcox who spearheaded the Mt. Olive Cemetery Project.

That story is of African Americans in the cemetery adjacent to Jackson State University. It dates back to the early 1800's.

The burial site on Lynch street began on a plantation. There rest the souls of more than 1,400 slaves, laborers, business owners and an elected official.

"I found a death certificate of a man who was shot and killed by the police in 1940, and that was indicated on his death record," said Wilcox who began researching the cemetery in 2015. "Another shocking thing was the amount of babies that are buried there."

Combing through state death records, she discovered 268 identifiable graves and 1,193 unidentified. There are one thousand four hundred 61 graves. 

The Topeka Kansas native found documentation of 241 children less than one-year-old and 95 children five and younger.

It is history the researcher and JSU doctoral candidate was drawn to and yearned to know more about when she moved to Jackson in 2010 and visited the cemetery.

"I want them to know when they walk past that we remember them," said Wilcox. "That we know who they are and that we are paying homage to them because they've laid the foundation to where we are and where we're gonna go."

Two statues were restored and tower over the resting place of graves identified and unknown.

The Statue of Jim Hill in Mt. Olive

They are Jim Hill, a former slave, elected Mississippi Secretary of State in 1874 and Ida Revels Redmond, the daughter of Hiram Revels.

He was the first African American elected to the U.S. Congress in 1870.

"Our forefathers who built those statues wanted us to remember," added Wilcox.

"That cemetery reflects the history of Mississippi," said Milton Chambliss whose grandfather is buried in Mt. Olive.

J.R. Chambliss was a prominent Jackson businessman who operated a shoe repair business across the street from the cemetery.

The elder Chambliss also established the first African American Boy Scout Troop in the state at Pearl AME Church.

"We have actually a gold mine of black history in the United States, from the Civil War to slavery, before the Civil War to the Reconstruction Era to the Civil Rights Era and right up to today," said Milton Chambliss.

The ceremony celebrating the Mt. Olive Cemetery Project was filled with nearly 200 people; many who had a hand in the project from the university to cemetery descendants and the community.

Wilcox's research uncovered the first documented burial was that of a six-day old child who died June 25, 1807.

Mrs. Barbara Chris Curry Turner was the last known person to be buried at Mt. Olive. Her death date is April 18, 1997.