Perspective: How to stop the opioid crisis
A sign welcomes visitors to the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 28 in New York. By Cynthia Wachtell Cynthia Wachtell is a research associate professor of American studies at Yeshiva University and editor of the recently published volume"The Backwash of War: An Extraordinary American Nurse in World War I," which includes the first biography of Ellen N. La Motte.
La Motte’s name may not be familiar in 2019, but she was one of the most highly accomplished people of her era. Born in 1873 into the extended duPont family, she was a trained nurse and pathbreaking public health administrator, who had volunteered during World War I as a nurse on the Western Front.
La Motte came home determined to eradicate the opium trade. In 1919 she published two new books: “Peking Dust,” a collection of her letters from China that resoundingly condemned the opium trade, and the ironically titled “Civilization: Tales of the Orient,” a collection of stories that underscored the hypocrisy of Western imperialism, especially with regard to opium.
Among those determined to address the opium crisis, La Motte was revered, but she butted heads with those who benefited from opium’s cultivation, manufacture and trade, namely colonial powers. Five such countries — Great Britain, Holland, France, Switzerland and Germany — dominated the League of Nations Opium Committee and banded together to prevent any meaningful attempts to eliminate or restrict the opium traffic.
There are clear parallels between La Motte’s fight and the challenges facing us today. In both eras, money ruled over the common good. Our current opioid epidemic stems from the mass overprescribing of addictive opioid drugs, most infamously OxyContin. But the fault belongs to more than just Big Pharma.
Just as the colonial powers put profit ahead of people, so too the opioid trade of our day allowed the Sackler family and others to put profit ahead of patients. The result was the vast over-prescription of opioids, which led to widespread addiction and our current opioid epidemic. To echo La Motte, the whole opioid crisis today can be summed up in two words: Bad faith.
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