Were doctors the first addicts? Where could addicts on the street get needles 100 years ago? I know in parts of the world people have smoked opium for a long time, but I wonder how the idea first got spread around to shoot it? Did this practice start in one particular culture or country? If so, why? or was there a particular reason it happened this way? or was it just the desire to get higher, faster?
I don't know if this question has been asked before. I tried searching a couple different ways, but the question could be worded so many ways that there was no way to know for sure if I was repeating something. Also, I don't know if it's possible to answer this but my SO asked me so I turned to this site to see if I could get any help. Thanks.
When we're talking about the history of intravenous drugs, the pioneer was heroin. Its use established many of the procedures common for other intravenous drugs. The first addicts were not doctors, but rather doctors' patients. While other opiates had been orally ingested or inhaled, the pharmaceutical firm Bayer invented heroin as a clean, medical alternative for opium and morphine. Aside from Civil War veterans, the typical nineteenth century opium user in the West was a middle-class, middle-aged white woman. Bayer saw heroin as a better means of pain management and there was a degree of over-prescription. This legal use of heroin was enough to establish it as an illicit substance (the historian Eric Schneider draws parallels to the abuse of Oxycontin today). A physician typically administered the injections for pain management.
As various governments began cracking down on pharmacies and regulating their prescription of opiates, the heroin trade moved underground by the 1910s and 20s. This meant that heroin became diluted from its purer form as it could be easily adulterated by dealers. Syringes became the best way to intake heroin as heroin ingested orally or inhaled not only doesn't produce as intense of a high, but it also destroys the human tissue it comes into contact with over prolonged use. Syringes emerged with their own black market, some dealers would rent them others were sold on the black market. It's important to realize that while 21st century syringes are mass produced and disposable, earlier generations were more robust and lent themselves better to reuse (this is not to say it wasn't a health risk, it surely was).
Sources
Schneider, Eric C. Smack: Heroin and the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Scott, Ian. "Heroin: A Hundred-Year Habit." History Today. Volume: 48 Issue: 6 1998.