History
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The phenomenon of drug addiction has occurred to some degree throughout recorded history (see "Opium"). Modern agricultural practices, improvements in access to drugs, advancements in biochemistry, and dramatic increases in the recommendation of drug usage by clinical practitioners have exacerbated the problem significantly in the 20th century. Improved means of active biological agent manufacture and the introduction of synthetic compounds, such as methamphetamine are also factors contributing to drug addiction.
Read more about this topic: Substance Dependence
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)