“The bottle of morphine is wrapped up and passed to the child over the counter,” a Tennessee doctor wrote. Doctors and pharmacists had little compunction about dispensing narcotics. “Young women cannot go to a ball without taking a dose of morphine to make them agreeable,” a druggist said in 1876. A North Carolina doctor claimed he had given one patient between 2,500 and 3,000 shots over eighteen months “and so far see no signs of the opium habit.”
