It’s been a week for thinking about the opiate-opioid distinction, not that it matters much. Opiate is the older term, for what you might call a natural substance that acts on your brain’s opioid receptors, most basically the old classic, opium, but more commonly morphine; opiates are narcotics directly derived from poppies. Opioid, on the other hand, is the broader term for all such activating substances, and contains synthetic analogues—cooked up in a lab to behave similarly to opiates. Either way, we made them; we did this to ourselves. Or, to be more honest, and once again borrow a great insight from C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man, some people did this to other people.
Opiates are in the news because Afghanistan produces almost all of them and Afghanistan is, obviously, in the...