Opium and the Civil War

[KG_Soldier]

I found this quite interesting:

http://www.4thus.com/opium

[SouthernSteel]

Its transcription needs a good bit of tidying, which you should be able to appreciate. Seems odd that most of it is high speculation, though. If you'd like, I can give you some more primary source information on some of this. The plug of opium/plug of blue mass cure was from only very early on in the war. I think it's pretty false that the Confederates had access to all of these things through the end of the war. There was an article written in 1862, I believe, detailing the herbal and home-grown equivalents of many of the medicines the Confederate Armies needed (yes, one of them was poppies), but the hope was to encourage people to grow their own as supplies were far too paltry to meet demand.

I have to say that I didn't study this topic directly, so it likely has some merit, to be sure, but it seems very odd to me that most of this is somewhat unfounded speculation as to the causes of generals' behavior, and was still published as an article! Oh, for the days when the field was not so overly-saturated that any even half-decent work could be published!

[garyknowz]

While certainly interesting, it always irritates me when I see what is supposedly a scholarly piece yet bereft of citations.

[SouthernSteel]

it's just a simple transcription of the article, not meant to contain all pertinent footnotes. Still, the contextual information included around the quotes could prove useful enough to track down if it came to it.

You know how much "normal" people cringe at the sight of footnotes flooding across the bottom of every page. This was meant to put the article out there so people like soldier here could stumble across it and say "hmm, interesting." Job accomplished.