The Rise and Fall of Laudanum: The Drug That Built The Gilded AgeThis is the untold story of America's first opioid crisis—and how Purdue Pharma copied the exact same playbook 120 years later. The corporate tactics, the targeting of women, the media manipulation, the blocked regulations. Every strategy that created the modern opioid epidemic was perfected in the Gilded Age, which was the period from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, which occurred between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era.
