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Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)
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C
To the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jonathan Jones about his book titled Opium Slavery, Civil War Veterans, and America's First Opioid Crisis, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Helping us understand how kind of two things that are very often documented and talked about in American current politics and in American history actually go together, right? The American Civil War gets talked about a lot. The impact of opium and opioids in the US Is also often discussed, but I certainly wasn't really aware that they also were happening at the same time and are intertwined with each other. When we go back into this period where of course the cosmic conflict of the Civil War was really violent and had lots of kind of obvious physical impacts and medicine was a really key part of it. And so I suppose if I had thought about it, I would have realized that painkilling drugs would have been there too. But this book really helps us understand just how much of a big deal that was for those who fought in the war, but also everyone around them. I mean, this wasn't something that wider society could or did ignore.
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A
So.
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B
So we've got quite a lot of things to discuss. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here I'm.
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B
Very pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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A
Yeah. So I'm a historian of the U.S. civil War and a historian of medicine. And so my research interests have always kind of been at the intersection of these two points. And so this book was kind of a natural expression of those twin scholarly interests. I teach at James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. So I'm also extremely lucky to be a Civil War historian in the place where the Civil War happened. And so some local connections in my research as well. A lot of the post Civil wars opioid crisis developed in some of the war torn areas of the US south, like the Shenandoah Valley. And so for a variety of reasons, feel really lucky to be based out of this particular part of the country.
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B
That's definitely key, given what we're talking about. How did that lead or did that lead then to this particular project? What's the origin story of the book?
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A
Yeah, great question. It was actually completely an accident. I didn't plan to end up moving to Virginia and to visit some of the places that I write about in the book. The research predated that move. The book really stretches back to a kind of accidental research find. I feel like this is a little bit of a cliche. About 10 years ago, when I was working on a little bit past. Past 10 years ago, when I was working on an early version of my master's thesis, which was about Civil War veterans, a different phenomenon about Civil War veterans, I kept finding in the primary sources these sort of offhanded references to morphine use among people who had fought in the Civil War, but decades after the Civil War. And so that really kind of raised my interest. I had a few years away from the project, and when it was time to go back to grad school and to pursue this research full time, I could not shake that the memory of those accidental primary source research finds. And it also happened that around the same time the opioid crisis in the present day US was getting a tremendous amount of media coverage, a lot of scrutiny that kind of tracked a surge in opioid overdose deaths. And so I was shocked by how what I was seeing on television and hearing on the radio so closely mapped what I had been finding in the aftermath of the Civil War. VETER VETERAN in the aftermath of the Civil War among veterans. And so that encouraged me to really dive into this history even deeper, and that ultimately became my PhD dissertation and now my first book.
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B
Thank you for giving us that backstory of the project. I think that's always very interesting. And it's actually on that sort of theme of backstory that I'd like to get into the book. Because of course we are going to be talking about the Civil War itself and the aftermath, but we do need to go a bit before that as well, I think, to kind of understand the changes that happened. So what role did opium play in the US before the war started? Was it important? Why? What was going on?
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A
Yeah, it was so important, it's really shocking. When I set out to kind of tell this story, I had anticipated sort of focusing on the wartime years, the four years from 1861-65, and the post war decades, like the 60s, the 70s, into the 80s and 90s. But I realized that in able to, you know, in order to do justice to this story, I had to trace the history of opium much further backwards in time than just 1861. And in doing so, what I discovered is that opium and some of its derivatives like morphine and an even older drug called laudanum, which is sort of like alcohol and opium mixed together, you can imagine how potent that is. These drugs have hundreds of years worth of history. Before the US Civil War, in the colonial era, in the early Republic of the United States, opioids, especially opium and laudanum were, were common household drugs. They were used for really anything you can think of. At one point I actually sat down kind of combing through pharmacy records and home remedy books, medical texts, to kind of count the number of different medical ailments that opioids were seen as remedies for. And I stopped counting at 150. I mean, everywhere I turned in the primary sources, I found opium. And so all of that is to say that opioids are tremendously important medical drugs. Kind of like the first line of defense for ailments ranging from coughing to insomnia to pain, and also kind of diarrheal sicknesses, things like that. Well before the US Civil War, people would oftentimes grow opium poppies in their gardens. By the time that you get to the era of sort of the Transportation Revolution, the 1830s, 1840s, opium poppies are flooding into the country at that point, sort of being siphoned off of the international opium trade, Asia. And so there's a surge in opium imports about 20 years before the Civil War, that even that leads to even more opium consumption. So an extremely, extremely important medication. In fact, civil, pre civil war doctors in The United States, they sort of struggled to put into words just how important opioids were in their version of medicine. And so they often framed them as a divine gift. Like these medicines were so important that they assumed the role of the divine. They were seen as gifts of God to ease suffering. So tremendously important.
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B
Yeah, that's really, really very important. So I'm glad you told us because I don't think we'd realize just quite the scale of it without that sort of explanation. But those sorts of phrases of like divine gift makes it sound like it was important, but not in the context we'd have now of kind of important, but in a bad way. So what was the sort of cultural or societal perception of this? Like, did. Was there an idea of opium addicts? Was it an epidemic problem or was it like. No, no, this is a great thing for sure.
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A
Yeah, it's kind of flip flopped from how we oftentimes think about opioids today. Like, we realize in the 21st century, of course, that opioids are extremely important painkillers, but there is this sort of dark side. So when we think about the painkilling properties, we also automatically think about addiction. And so, you know, raises questions like how, how old, kind of chronologically, how far back in history does that association of painkillers with addiction go? In kind of tracing the origin story of sort of the concept of opioid addiction, I found that decades before the U.S. civil War, going all the way back to around the year 1800 at least, there was an awareness, especially among well educated doctors, but also ordinary folks without medical training, there was an awareness that opium could be addictive. And so this knowledge long predated the Civil War. Going into the Civil War, Civil War surgeons, the kind of folks that were responsible in the military for taking care of the soldiers health needs during battle, you know, before battle, et cetera, they were well aware that these medications could be addictive if used in a certain way. So, so people knew, for example, and wrote pretty commonly as early as the 1830s and 40s about the phenomenon of withdrawal. Um, it was recognized that if a person had been taking laudanum, for example, for about two weeks and then suddenly tried to quit taking laudanum, that that would cause withdrawal symptoms. The vocabulary to express the concept of addiction was very different than our vocabulary today. We have a kind of medicalized approach to addiction. We use the word addiction. We often describe addiction also as opioid use disorder. Before the Civil War, that wasn't so much of a thing. It was Described more often as a kind of character flaw. And so the idea was that not all folks were prone to getting addicted to these drugs, but they could be addictive under the right circumstances. In fact, one of the more shocking discoveries, from my perspective, that I uncovered in the book was the knowledge that Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the kind of framers of the United States, he wrote about and even treated cases of opioid addiction himself, including among the first families of Virginia, such as the Washingtons. So really, really known. The idea of addiction was known, but of course, it was sort of relegated to the margins of society. It wasn't yet seen as an epidemic problem. In part, that's because the cases, the numbers of addiction were relatively low before the Civil War compared to after. That's one of the big transitions that occurs in the book. Addiction becomes more widespread during and after the Civil War, but the concept of addiction was always there throughout the 19th century.
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B
Okay, that's helpful to understand the framing because it could be thought of as, like, oh, well, they just didn't know. It was like, no, no, no, they knew, but it was sort of conceptualized in a different way. And we're going to see, I think, how that changes as we go through the time period you focus on in the book. So obviously, the next thing to talk about is the Civil War. Really massive conflict, really violent, impacted a lot of people. So opium was used for painkilling, right? Like, is that the main thing it was used for? Is that why it was so widely a part of the conflict?
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A
Great question. This was a surprise to me. I'll fully admit that I expected in the same way that opioids today, including morphine, you know, a drug that we have in hospitals today, also a drug available back in the 1860s. I assumed that it would be used in the same way today. It's a painkiller back then. It must have been a painkiller. What I actually found is the most common use of opioids during the Civil War were actually as anti diarrheales. And this is super gross, so kind of apologies to readers who are eating or about to eat lunch. But diarrheal ailments, dysentery, a disease that was another disease that was called back then, chronic diarrhea. These things were prolific in Civil War camps and, you know, barracks and hospitals. And so opioids were some of the only known remedies that could counteract diarrh. A prolific use of the drugs for that purpose. Of course, they were also used as painkillers. Soldiers Would oftentimes dose themselves with opioids, knowing that they would kind of numb pain. More often, surgeons would come up with creative ways to administer opioids to bring about really speedy pain relief, to deal with some of the catastrophic, unprecedented wounds that come out of the civil war.
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B
Okay, that's very important to understand. Given then, as you said, the catastrophic levels we're talking about in terms of physical impact. How quickly did we start to see addiction be an issue for these soldiers and veterans?
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A
Immediately, a lot of the. So for the book to kind of explain my approach, I identified a sample of 200 Civil War veterans who struggled with addiction and in their post war lives. And so for these individuals, I tried to trace the origin point. For many of the folks that I write about in the book, it began during the civil war. For example, I write about a man called Perry Bowser, who was a union infantryman, Kind of a typical case in 1864, again, super gross. But he contracted chronic diarrhea. It was so significant that it effectively paralyzed him and kept him from returning to duty. And so he was actually hospitalized in a military hospital in Vicksburg, Mississipp, Mississippi, for. For several months, where he was treated with opium. He, you know, about 50 years later, appears in the medical documents from a veterans home, a place where disabled veterans could go and find food and board and shelter kind of in their. Their old age. And he described this is in the early 1900s. He described how his addiction traced all the way back to 1864. He had been addicted for decades at that point, stemming directly out of the military, the medical care that he received when he was in the military. So for a lot of folks, it surfaced during the civil war. Just as often, many individuals returned home from the civil war with lingering medical effects. So folks would often return home missing an arm or a leg or suffering from what might today be called post traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, hallucinations. Even more often, people returned home with kind of the gastrointestinal effects of living in squalid civil war camps, which could linger on for years and years and years and be really debilitating. And so these folks are kind of acculturated to the idea that opioids work for a variety of conditions. They treat pain, they treat diarrhea, they treat nightmares. And so they, almost instinctually, even years after the civil war, reach for a bottle of opium or morphine. And that, in some cases, sort of launched their path down the trajectory of addiction. So it's a kind of a mixed bag. Some during the Civil War, some after. But in those cases, we can trace many of the ailments that brought on opioid use back to Civil War medical care.
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B
Yeah. There's the whole range there of medical issues. That definitely helps make sense of kind of why this was such a massive problem. Was it perceived as one? Was it seen as just kind of like, oh, this is a thing that happened because of the war, or was it seen as sort of its own catastrophe?
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A
That's the thing that was a big puzzle to me for the longest time when I was doing this research, you know, I had discovered that addiction and other scholars have have had written sort of tangentially about this. But I knew by the Time that I got to the Civil War, part of the research, that addiction was an old problem, that it predated the war, that some of the ideas about addiction had been discussed in medical circles for decades. And so it made me wonder, like, do people connect? Did people in the 1860s and 70s kind of connect the carnage of the war to a surge in opioid cases, or did they see the two as unrelated? And what I found is that the first part of that was true, that people really clearly linked Civil War medical care to opioid addiction to a surge in addiction cases as early as the late 1860s. In fact, around 1870, 1872, there was a survey of Boston doctors and pharmacists that was done by the Massachusetts Board of Health, a kind of public health body in the gilded age. And they asked pharmacists and doctors, you know, where do we trace the origins of this problem of addiction? And one pharmacist replied to that survey saying that, quote, veteran soldiers as a class are addicted. And so there was an obvious link to many observers between the war and surging rates of addiction. So they definitely linked the two.
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B
Okay, that's interesting to understand because it definitely, as you said, like, there were other ways it could have been framed, so that's good to know. But this framing matters not just in terms of wider society. You also talk about it matters in terms of like actual tangible, what the veteran's life is afterwards, not just in terms of pain, but in terms of, for example, veterans benefits or pensions. How was opium addiction sort of involved in that?
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A
Yeah, yeah. And here's where we get into the kind of cultural perception of, of opium users and people addicted to opioids. Some of the ideas that we mentioned a moment ago, kind of coming out of the early 19th century about who got addicted to opium and who didn't. Who was able to just kind of use the medicines as one offs and then go about the rest of their lives without becoming dependent. They explained why some folks became addicted by pointing to supposed, you know, racial or other kind of characteristics, but they also pointed to a person's moral qualities. And so there was this kind of widespread perception coming out of the Civil War, dating back to the antebellum era, that if a man, you know, used opium excessively in kind of scare quotes there or was dependent on morphine, that there must be something wrong with them more than just the medical condition that brought on the use of the painkiller or the anti diarrheal. And so because of that reason, because opioid users were seen as kind of like bad people, unmanly men, immoral, intemperate, et cetera, et cetera. When it came time for veterans to engage with the growing welfare state that kind of comes up out of the Civil War through the form of soldiers homes and pension programs, oftentimes a person's ability to kind of cash in on those benefits of their military service was contingent on whether or not they were seen as a bad person. And so for opioid users, where the rubber kind of hit the road is that if a person was known to be addicted to opium, they were unable to gain access to their veterans benefits. And if we add up kind of like what life was like for wounded and disabled Civil War veterans, there are already many of them on the, you know, skating by on the thinnest of financial terms. These are people oftentimes who had been farmers before the Civil War, but now they're disabled, so they can't kind of do the same kinds of manual labor that they had done before the war. They have to pay for opioids, which could be relatively expensive in late 19th century terms. And they were counting on these pensions. They were counting on kind of free room and board at soldier's homes to get by. When they're shut out of these systems, it capitulates a crisis for a lot of veterans. And so really, really grim outcomes kind of in a tangible way for veterans that stemmed back to these older kind of moralizing and gendered conceptions about who used opium to the point of becoming addicted.
- [22:50]
B
That is definitely a change from what you were telling us about before the war. And so very interesting to see kind of how the conflict has had this sort of transformational effect on perceptions and really kind of makes the case for why veterans would not want to be addicted to opium, why this would be really something they try to avoid or stop if they could. What were some of the methods they tried in order to attempt this?
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A
Yeah, that's a great question. People like you said, really, really did not want to be outed as a secret opium user. And so most of the folks that I studied in my sample of 200, very few of them were open about their opioid use. The vast majority of them tried to hide their daily use of opium or morphine from their families, like let alone agents of the pension bureau or doctors. And so, you know, with that said, veterans also felt that they were in a bind, like they couldn't tell anybody that they were addicted for fear of repercussions, but they Also didn't want to. Many of them didn't want to continue consuming opium because they believed that as their tolerance mounted, they would need more and more and more of the drug and they might die of an overdose. And so, again, kind of in a bind, kind of between a rock and a hard place. So they tried, many of them, really desperately and in some ways that we could see as kind of shady, to get away from addiction, to stop using opioids. Some of them tried. Many of them actually tried what we would today call the cold turkey method. They tried to just quit taking opium. Almost universally, this method failed. The, the. The, you know, withdrawal is a tremendously painful process. It can actually cause death in a roundabout way. And so not a very successful approach there. And when folks, you know, tried to quit through kind of manly willpower and failed, that made them feel even worse about themselves because they weren't able to kind of live up to these sort of cultural ideas about manliness that Civil War veterans are expected to live up to. Some of the other ways really blew my mind. Today in the 21st century United States, the opioid addiction kind of industry is tremendously profitable also. That was the case after the US Civil War, when new forms of addiction care were basically invented to help deal with this broad epidemic of addiction that included Civil War veterans. In the late 19th century, veterans could buy these things called patent medicines through the mail. The idea was that you could send off a few dollars to a company. They would mail you a vial of a drug that promised to miraculously, you know, cure you of. Of opioid addiction if you took it for a month or three months or three years. The thing about these medications is that some people felt that they worked, but the reality is that they often secretly contained morphine. And so, um, it's a kind of a complicated picture there. But either way, they were tremendously expensive, and so they could kind of further that crisis of poverty that stems out of addiction. For a lot of veterans, what I find particularly fascinating about these patent medicines is that they were totally unregulated. So it gives us kind of a glimpse into what the effects like. When we combine an addiction epidemic with an unregulated medical marketplace, we can see kind of how that spirals out of control for a lot of victims in this. This epidemic. After the Civil War, some veterans were also subjected to a kind of imprisonment for their addiction. This is a little bit kind of off the wall for us to think about, but at the time, really, until the early decades of the 20th century, there were no laws that criminalized opioid possession or opioid use. And so one could be addicted without being thrown in jail. And so the Gilded Age state, however, had a tremendous kind of, like, incentive to police addicted people to try to control them, to try to punish them in a way. And so in the absence of laws that would send someone to jail for being an opium user, a lot of times folks were deemed insane and they were sentenced to life in asylums. Is kind of a way that I think about it. So really negative outlooks kind of across the board for a lot of the folks that I write about in the book.
- [27:24]
B
Yeah, that is, I think, not usually part of our picture for how we think about the end of the US Civil War. So that alone changes our ideas about kind of what the aftermath looks like. Is there anything further you want to tell us about how your thinking on the legacies of the conflict have changed by figuring all this out?
- [27:43]
A
Yeah. I was surprised by the amount of sympathy that some individual veterans were eventually able to garner. Veterans when they were, like, when they were outed. Right. When they were discovered as secret opium users, when they were accosted by pension agents or asylum doctors or their families. A lot of times veterans said, you know, my opioid use dates back to the Civil War. It's not my fault. It's the surgeon's fault. And so that line, when it was reiterated over and over and over by thousands of people, really generated a lot of introspection among some doctors. Doctors kind of had a panic. They were like, oh, my gosh, we've precipitated this addiction crisis. You know, we are not doing the best that we could for our patients. And if we doctors, you know, physicians, are seen as the culprits behind addiction, what does that do to our esteem as a profession or our profitability in terms of medical business? And so in the 1880s and 1890s, there was actually a movement among some doct, including many doctors that had served in the Civil War as surgeons, to move away from opioids. And so one of the kind of unexpected legacies of this crisis is that opioids had been so important in American medicine and healthcare going into the Civil War. They remained important throughout the war and for a couple of decades after. But because of the addiction crisis that the war helped spawn, doctors began moving away from opioids and turning to other supposedly less addictive drugs. And so we actually see opioid prescription rates plummet during the 1880s and 90s. It's really kind of shocking turn of events, I will say. Some of those other drugs which are going to be familiar to us kind of in our own world of the 21st century, were thought to be less addictive. It didn't turn out that way. Cocaine was seen as. It's kind of laughable. Right. But it was a serious issue back then. Cocaine was seen as a good substitute for morphine. For a few years there, it was supposed to not be addictive. Other kinds of like sedatives and things like that. And so, yes, they're moving away from opioid prescriptions. They're starting to kind of replace those with other unsavory kinds of drugs. But the doctors tried to sort of reform the practices that they were doing that contributed to addiction. So that really surprised me. I would also say that the label I mentioned a moment ago, some of the kind of vocabulary of addiction in our times is a lot more medicalized. Back in the Civil War era, the word addiction was around, but it was not so commonly used. And so most veterans, most people kind of witnessing this addiction crisis unfold, actually adopted some of the kind of causes of the Civil War as a label for the opioid addiction crisis. And so that's where the title of the book, which is called Opium Slavery comes from. That was the most common way that veterans described their addiction. They said that they were enslaved to opium. So it was a really kind of an eye opening turn of phrase for me.
- [30:59]
B
Yeah, I can see why you chose it as the title of the book. Like, it really grabs one's attention of like, oh, okay, is that. And then to read in the book that that wasn't. You didn't make up that title. Right. That was a thing that was being talked about at the time with all sorts of, as you're telling us, clear impacts on the veterans, but also far beyond that. And especially these changes in kind of American medical practice more broadly are really interesting too. Are there any political legacies of all of this?
- [31:27]
A
Yeah, I think that there's a connection here that we can make to the 20th and 21st century war on drugs. The war on drugs in American history, of course, doesn't date back to the Civil War, but it's presaged by the way that Civil War veterans were treated with the kind of rise of the Progressive era state. The state implemented that. The government of the United States implemented all these different laws and apparatuses to kind of control narcotics and also, of course, alcohol. And so we see the criminalization of drugs kind of coming about in the 1910s, 1920s and 30s. That oftentimes, you know, that that story, when drug historians tell it, usually starts then in the Progressive era, again, the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. But what I have found, surprisingly for me, is that the impulse to punish addicted people was really something that was kind of honed and practiced on Civil War veterans. So the way that they were treated, the. The fact that they could be locked up to. For life in an asylum or denied pensions that they were entitled to by their military service, did a lot to set the tone for how future generations of drug users would be treated during the early phases of the war on drugs. So we have a connection outside of the Civil War to broader drug history in the United States. A really tragic connection.
- [32:55]
B
Tragic connection. An interesting connection as well, and definitely not something I was expecting to read about when I started your book. And that's clearly true for you too. You've mentioned a number of times through our conversation of like, oh, wait, I found this in the archive. And like, okay, so are there any other surprises that you want to tell us about before we conclude our discussion?
- [33:15]
A
Yeah, yeah, a couple on the theme, the kind of theme of the war on drugs. This is a really kind of well known story for drug historians. It's a story that historians have been writing about since the 1970s at least. And so what I, you know, when I started on this book, I didn't expect to find that connection between the Civil war and the 20th century war on drugs. But when I was kind of visiting some of the early congressional debates, for example, about regulating for the first time opioids and narcotics, this was occurring in the mid-1910s, I found a lot of references in Congress to Civil War veterans. Civil War veterans were front of mind for folks who were trying to construct a kind of criminalizing regime around drug use. And so the con. The clarity of the connection there really, really surprised me. I was also surprised by how much cultural stereotypes coming out of the antebellum era affected Civil War veterans. I expected there to be a kind of like a clear line separating pre Civil War drug users from Civil War veterans who used opioids. But what I found was the exact opposite kind of antebellum ideas. For example, this concept that, that one could be enslaved to opium that stemmed directly out of the antebellum slave trade and other kind of related developments. And so for the. The metaphor of being enslaved to drugs to actually survive in American culture longer than the institution of chattel slavery itself survived was really, really eye opening to Me, I found Civil War veterans describing themselves even as late as the early 20th, as opium slaves. One of the other things, I guess, kind of one of the final comments that I'll make is that we see that slavery metaphor sometimes surfacing in today's opioid crisis. I was just reading a news piece the other day where an opioid user described themselves as enslaved to modern opioids. And that was really eye opening for me. The history that I write about in the book is a century and a half old, but it still has direct legacies today.
- [35:31]
B
Yeah, very clearly, through some of that sort of public perception side of things. So thank you for excavating the history of the past, but also helping us understand the relevance to the present. What, may I ask, are you going to go be surprised about next? What's the project, I suppose currently on your desk?
- [35:49]
A
Yeah, that's a great question. I have two kind of projects that I'm working through right now, one related to this research and one that is not my second book, which kind of, again, a cliche here connects really clearly to my first book, opium slavery. This second project is a history of medical fraud in the Civil War era. This is an environment in the late 20th century that's almost devoid of really any kind of medical laws or regulations. And so I think of it as the kind of medical Wild West. And so if a person could promise to treat X condition or to cure this other ailment or whatever, they could sell that treatment to willing consumers who are desperate for care. And so the Civil War causes a proliferation of different medical frauds targeting Civil War veterans. And so I'm using that as kind of the foundation for my next book, which is tentatively called Great American Frauds. It's a reference to a progressive era journalist who wrote about the problem of medical fraud, but didn't directly connect it to the Civil War. So that's kind of the bigger project that I'm working on. The other project which is front of mind for me right now, I'm actively writing it, is a history of Civil War video games. This is going to kind of date me a little bit, but I grew up in the 90s playing a lot of history themed video games. US history themed video games in particular back then and today continue to be some of the best selling, like most widely played video games in the world. And so I kind of got really interested in the Civil War when I was a kid playing Civil War themed games. In revisiting some of those games in recent years, I realized that a lot of them are deeply implicated in the lost cause. Like, a lot of things get put in these games, but even more gets left out, like any kind of conversation about slavery, for example, the cause of the war. And so working on these two projects, the video game project is a passion project of mine, and so folks can watch for that in the near future. Hopefully, the second book will take a little bit longer.
- [38:00]
B
Yeah, fair enough. Sounds like a interesting, but also definitely a chewy project. So best of luck. Worth pursuing those. And of course, while you are doing that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Opium Civil War Veterans and America's First First Opioid Crisis, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [38:23]
A
Thank you for.