68
" What gave the morphine molecule its immense power, he said, was that it evolved somehow to fit, key in lock, into the receptors that all mammals, especially humans, have in their brains and spines. The so-called mu-opioid receptors—designed to create pleasure sensations when they receive endorphins the body naturally produces—were especially welcoming to the morphine molecule. The receptor combines with endorphins to give us those glowing feelings at, say, the sight of an infant or the feel of a furry puppy. The morphine molecule overwhelms the receptor, creating a far more intense euphoria than anything we come by internally. It also produces drowsiness, constipation, and an end to physical pain. Aspirin had a limit to the amount of pain it could calm. But the more morphine you took, Coop said, the more pain was dulled. "
― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
72
" Out on the northwest side of Nashville, Tennessee, Judge Seth Norman has come to expect phone calls to start pouring in around late January every year. “The legislature comes back in session in January,” Norman said. The calls come from state legislators, each with the same problem: an addicted son, a daughter, a brother-in-law. “‘Um, uh, my nephew down in Camden, you think maybe you might be able to help?’ I get those kinds of calls,” he told me while we sat in the office adjacent to his courtroom. Most of the country’s twenty-eight hundred drug courts are set up to divert drug abusers away from jail and prison and into treatment somewhere. Seth Norman runs the only drug court in America that is physically attached to a long-term residential treatment center. He takes addicts accused of drug-related nonviolent felonies—theft, burglary, possession of stolen property, drug possession—and puts them in treatment for as long as two years as an alternative to prison. Down the hall from his court are dorms with beds for a hundred people—sixty men and forty women. I "
― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic