I am in the middle of a post on Dreamland (Sam Quinones) and how it is so wrong, but honestly I don’t think I can wait that long so here’s an easily encapsulated teaser.
On page 39 Quinones says “Most drugs are easily reduced to water-soluble glucose…Alone in nature, the morphine molecule rebelled.” I am reasonably certain that is horseshit. Glucose contains three kinds of atoms- carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. The big three of organic chemicals. Your body is incapable of atomic fusion, so the atoms it starts with are the atoms it ends up with, it can only rearrange them into different molecules. Morphine is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and that nitrogen has to go somewhere, so I guess technically you can’t reform it into just sugar. But lots of other medications have non-big-3 atoms too (although, full disclosure, when I spot checked there was a lot less variety than I expected).
This valorization of morphine as the indigestible molecule is equally bizarre. Morphine has a half-life of 2-3 hours (meaning that if you have N morphine in your body to start with, 2-3 hours later you will have N/2). In fact that’s one of the things that makes it so addictive- you get a large spike, tied tightly it with the act of ingestion, and then it goes away quickly, without giving your body time to adjust. Persistence is the opposite of morphine’s problem.
This is so unbelievably wrong I would normally assume the author meant something entirely different and I was misreading. I’d love to check this, but the book cites no sources, and the online bibliography doesn’t discuss this particular factoid. I am also angry at the book for being terrible in general, so it gets no charity here.
Aceso Under Glass 