On My Mind #20: What do William Burroughs, Frida Kahlo, and I Have in Common?

Demerol!

Dear Readers,

Raise your hand if you’ve taken Demerol!

If you’ve been following along here at History on Drugs, you know I’ve been looking into the demise of the term “opiate” and the concurrent rise of the word “opioid.” In a few days I’ll offer more details on the origins of the latter term along with some hypotheses on why it has achieved lexical hegemony over the last half century.

But in the course of that investigation I got interested in Demerol, the world’s first true opioid, and I came across some stuff I thought you might find interesting. For example, here’s William S. Burroughs mentioning Demerol in a 1954 letter to Allen Ginsburg:

Ritchie was supposed to show with supplies at noon. He didn’t show. I have never suffered anything to compare with the next 6 hours. Finally rolling around biting the bed and beating the wall, and so wrung a shot of demerol out of the nurse. I don’t know what I would have done without a shot. It was literally intolerable. Then Ritchie shows. So I was cheated out of the fix of a lifetime, it would have been pure relief. Instead I am half fixed with demerol, and miss a vein, so I don’t feel the fix as such, but I am fixed now.

Burroughs was in the hospital for some sort of procedure and thus apparently didn’t have his normal access to heroin. Ritchie was an old drug friend (fiend?) who was supposed to fill the gap. Later, Lou Reed would of course eloquently sum up this all-too-common situation suffered by drug addicts: “He’s never early, he’s always late. First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait.”

Burroughs [Image: NPR]