Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.
-Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS (27)
In 3400 B.C, the opium poppy blooms bright red and is cultivated by the Summerians in ancient Mesopotamia. Hul Gil, “the joy plant,” grows best in temperate climates. Trade routes, war, and British imperialism carries opium and addiction across the world for the next thousands of years.
When you slice an unripe opium poppy pod, a milky liquid flows from the wounds. The liquid is dried into a sort of gum which is then modified into powders and other substances. Opioids.
In the 1600’s, the English East India Company sailed along the Connecticut River. Spices and tea and china and opium ripple across its waters.
Opioids are found in morphine, prescription drugs, heroin.
May 15th 1971.
It’s raining in New York City and the New York Times runs an article claiming “the use of heroin by American troops in Vietnam has reached epidemic proportions.”
American soldiers needed drugs to stay awake and fight in the war. Heroin, cocaine, morphine, and opium become odorless, discreet ways to serve their country.
1975
Two years later, 34% of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam war were using heroin regularly. By the end of the Vietnam war, in 1975, there were an estimated 750,000 heroin addicts in the U.S.
It is estimated that 2,000,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed in the Vietnam war. How many Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were heroin addicts?
According to Addiction Center.com, 75% of people suffering from PTSD become addicted to alcohol or drugs. After The Vietnam War, PTSD inflicted 30% of U.S veterans.
How many Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had PTSD?
1990’s
Purdue Pharma aggressively and falsely markets Oxycontin as a painkiller with a less than one percent chance of addiction. Opioid overdoses emerge in Connecticut as prescriptions for these drugs boom
Oxycontin, Vicodin, can be prescribed to teenagers who get their wisdom teeth pulled.
2000
Kentucky OxyContin Task Force report.
2002
“Trevor was put on OxyContin after breaking his ankle doing dirt bike jumps in the woods a year before I met him. He was fifteen” (174).
In a study about Vietnamese refugee families in Norway, it was discovered 30% of families had a parent with “elevated psychological distress.” Accordingly, their parent’s PTSD proved a direct correlation with Vietnamese “youth’s engagement in serious acts of violence.”
…[T]he Oxy and coke, the way they made the world smolder at its tips? And then the rust-red Chevy?….How it’s windows were already blue-streaked and its tires smooth as human skin by the time we blasted through the corn, going fifty-five as Trevor shouted crazy, a patch of fentanyl hot on his arm, the liquid melted through its edges and dripping down his bicep like sick sap. Cocaine in our noses, our lungs, we laughed, in a way.
(112)
The intimacy between Little Dog and Trevor is inherently violent. When Trevor crashes his dad’s car when him and Little Dog are both high, their act of recklessness can be categorized as “engagement in [a] serious ac[t[] of violence.” For Little Dog, his relationship with Trevor (in addition to the cocaine and destroying the car) is part of this act. One aftermath of the Vietnam war, like opioids.
You would look past the branches, past the rusted light splintered through the brambles, the needles falling, one by one, as you lay your god eyes on them. You’d trace the needles as they hurled themselves past the lowest bough, toward the cooling forest floor, to land on the two boys lying side by side, the blood already dry on their cheeks.
(75)
Trevor is introduced through the aftermath of the car crash, which is told before the accident is described. Vuong makes it clear from the very beginning that Trevor and Little Dog’s relationship will be defined by addiction. When they lay underneath the falling needles, “the blood already dry on their cheeks,” the needles are not just pine needles. They are symbolic of the drugs Trevor will use, his future already “falling, one by one” onto their bodies.
Also 2002
Oxycontin earns more than $3 billion in sales.
We had decided, shortly after we met, because our friends were already dying from overdoses, to never tell eachother goodbye or goodnight.
(169)
For low income communities and people of color, their addiction is how pharmaceutical companies, such as Purdue, profit. Just like how American soldiers in the Vietnam war use opioids to fight, Little Dog and Trevor’s “American sadness”— and their subsequent addiction—becomes their own civilian duties in serving their country.
Take a right, Ma. There’s the lot behind the bait and tackle shack where one summer I watched Trevor skin a raccoon he shot with Buford’s Smith & Wesson. He grimaced as he worked the thing out of itself, his teeth green from the drugs, like glow-in-the-dark stars in daylight. On the truck bed the black pelt rippled in the breeze. A few feet away, a pair of eyes, ingrained with dirt, stunned by the vision of their new gods.
(184)
The imagery in this in this scene starkly contrasts common portrayals of Connecticut and New England. There are guns, animal pelt, and rotting teeth. A rugged sense of masculinity and rage. But whose eyes are Little Dog referring too? His own, or the raccoons? And in that case, who are the gods?
2009
“Trevor was alone in his room when he died, surrounded by posters of Led Zeppelin. Trevor was twenty-two. Trevor was” (178).
“The official cause of death, I would learn later, was overdose from heroin laced with fentanyl” (178).
I never did heroin because I’m chicken about needles. When I declined his offer to shoot it, Trevor, tightening the cell phone charger around his arm with his teeth, nodded toward my feet. ‘Looks like you dropped your tampon.’ Then he winked, smiled—and faded back into the dream he made of himself.
(182)
Works Cited
Addiction Center. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Addiction. Retrieved from
Burks, Ishmon F. (2000). “OxyContin Task Force Recommendations.” Commonwealth of
Kentucky. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6562756-14-Purdue-Docs-2-81-to-88.html.
Drug Enforcement Administration Museum. Cannabis, Coca, Poppy: Nature’s Addictive Plants.
Retrieved from https://www.deamuseum.org/ccp/opium/production-distribution.html.
Esri. Drugs in the Vietnam War. Retrieved from
Humphreys, Keith. (2018). “Opioid epidemic is deadlier than the Vietnam War in ’68, study
says.” The Washington Post.
Lange, Amanda (2006). “The Connecticut River Valley & The China Trade.” Incollect.com.
Our Amazing World. “Purdue Pharma Oxycontin Commercial.” YouTube.
PBS, Frontline. Opium Throughout History. Retrieved from
Rich, Jacob J. (2018). “The opioid crisis—this generations Vietnam?” The News-Herald.
Sangalang, C. C., & Vang, C. (2017). Intergenerational Trauma in Refugee Families: A
Systematic Review. Journal of immigrant and minority health, 19(3), 745–754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-016-0499-7.
Shuster, Alvin M. (1975). “G.I Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” The New York Times.
Vuong, Ocean. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
