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For thousands of years, humans have turned to opioids to relieve their pain. Morphine and its cousin compounds work so magnificently to blunt feelings of pain that, in 4,000 years of use, we have found nothing to top them. As the famous 17th-century physician Thomas Sydenham put it, “Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.” Today, physicians write more than 200 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers in the U.S. each year.
But it’s well known that opioids have a dark side. As good as the drugs are at stopping pain, they also arouse a hardwired reward network in the human brain, eliciting strong feelings of euphoria ...
