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The Hidden Epidemic: Opiate Addiction And Cocaine Use In The South, 1860-1920, David T. Courtwright

David T. Courtwright

One of the many memorable characters in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is an aged morphine addict, Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose. Mrs. Dubose was a cantankerous widow who lived in Maycomb, a small, fictitious Alabama town. She had been addicted many years before by her physician, who gave her morphine to ease her pain. Informed that she had only a short while to live, she struggled to quit taking the drug, for she was determined "to leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody."There were tens of thousands of real-life Mrs. Duboses scattered throughout the postbellum South. With …