A former journalist for Time in New Delhi and Hong Kong, his writing has been published in Vice, Public Books, American Heritage, and the Christian Science Monitor.
Siegel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers, and shared the following:
Page 99 of Markets of Pain finds us in the laboratories of nineteenth-century Germany, where a remarkable industrial pivot is underway. Dye companies like Bayer — flush with profits from coloring the textiles of imperial Europe — are turning their chemical expertise to a new product: pharmaceuticals. German chemists, backed by enormous state investment in research, are isolating newly-discovered alkaloids like codeine, quinine, cocaine, and ephedrine, and transforming pharmacy from a speculative craft into something closer to a science. But even as they master laboratory synthesis, these firms remain dependent on a global supply of exotic plants: ipecacuanha from Brazil, cinchona bark and coca from Peru, and opium from wherever they can source it. The page closes on a small moment with large consequences: in 1898, Bayer's scientists discover how to transform morphine into a new compound. They call it heroin, and market it as a non-addictive substitute for morphine, particularly useful for coughs.Visit Benjamin R. Siegel's website.
The Page 99 Test works, but only partly. A reader here would catch something essential about this book: that the power of modern pharmaceuticals was built by organizing raw organic materials from around the world into marketable commodities, along supply chains first forged under empire. They'd see the global reach of the story, and they'd meet one of its great ironies — a German firm introducing heroin as a cure for the addiction its own products had helped create.
What they'd miss is almost everything else. Markets of Pain is really a prehistory of the American opioid crisis — not the Sacklers, not Appalachia, but the longer global story of how opioids and pharmaceuticals helped build the power of modern states, and the United States in particular. Most of the book follows American firms in the twentieth century as they took these German methods and bore them down upon opium, reshaping the lives of farmers in Rajasthan and Anatolia, middlemen in Istanbul and New Delhi, and regulators in Washington. Page 99 shows the industry learning to reach across the world, and the rest of Markets of Pain is about what happened when it did.
--Marshal Zeringue
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