Perhaps you are right, Watson. I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
The Wall Street Journal reports that drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30% last year. Most were due to abuse of fentanyl, the illegal opioid said to be 50 times more stimulating than heroin.
Sherlock Holmes would alarm Dr. Watson by injecting a mere seven percent solution of cocaine.
Imagine if he'd had access to fentanyl.
Public health officials blame last year's deaths on the hardship, dislocation, and isolation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.
I don't buy what the officials are peddling.
They spend too much time chumming with colleagues, too little with addicts.
Watson would often scold Holmes for using a narcotic the detective called "transcendently stimulating."
"Your brain may be roused and excited," Watson would say, "but it is a pathological and morbid process. You know what a black reaction comes upon you."
Dr. Watson knew better. He spent countless hours with an addict.
Watson understood it was Holmes' raging egotism that drove him to shoot up.
I've met enough people in recovery to know addicts' dependence stems from the drive to paper over character defects like pride, shame, hate, cowardice, and laziness.
Covid-19 didn't kill the 93,300 Americans who overdosed last year.
Neither did fentanyl.
Unresolved character defects did.
Above: Victorian syringe kit.
