narcotic
Meaning of narcotic: The legal meaning and the medical one no longer match, and some drug laws classify cocaine as a narcotic though it is not an opioid.
Definition of narcotic
Narcotic is an older word for a drug that dulls the senses and relieves severe pain. In medical use it covered opium, the substances drawn from it, and later compounds built to act the same way. Medicine has largely replaced the word with opioid, which names the group by how it acts rather than by where it came from.
Opiate, opioid or narcotic?
| Word | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Opiate | Substances obtained directly from the opium poppy, such as morphine and codeine |
| Opioid | Everything acting at opioid receptors: natural, semi-synthetic, fully synthetic, and the body's own endorphins |
| Narcotic | Historically the same ground as opioid, but now largely a legal and law enforcement term |
Opioid is both broader and more precise, which is why it displaced narcotic in clinical writing. Every opiate is an opioid; the reverse does not hold.
How do they relieve pain?
Opioid receptors sit on nerve cells throughout the brain, the spinal cord and the gut, and the body makes its own molecules that bind there, endorphins and enkephalins among them. A drug in this group occupies the same sites. In the spinal cord it weakens the pain signal being passed upward. In the brain it changes how that signal is interpreted, which is why people frequently report that the pain is still there but no longer distressing. The same receptors elsewhere account for the rest of the picture: slowed breathing, which is the danger in overdose; constipation, because the gut slows; nausea; drowsiness; and, through the reward pathways, a sense of well-being that underlies misuse. Repeated use brings tolerance, so more is needed for the same effect, and physical dependence, so stopping produces withdrawal.
Why has medicine dropped the word?
Two reasons. The first is precision. Narcotic came from a Greek root meaning numbness and was applied loosely to anything sedating, which at various points took in alcohol and sleeping drugs that have nothing to do with opioid receptors in the nervous system. Opioid names the mechanism and therefore draws a clean line around the group. The second reason is the legal usage that survives. In some drug control laws narcotic is a scheduling category rather than a pharmacological one, and cocaine, a stimulant with no opioid activity at all, is classified inside it. A record using the word can therefore mean a strong medicine for pain, a controlled substance in the legal sense, or an illegal drug in ordinary speech, and only the surrounding context separates them.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
The medication record listed a narcotic prescribed for postoperative pain management.
Good to know
Narcotic has largely been replaced by opioid in medical usage, since opioid describes a substance by its action at opioid receptors rather than by its origin in opium, and narcotic survives in drug law with a wider and different meaning.
Word origin
Where “narcotic” comes from
From Greek narke, meaning numbness or torpor, describing the sedating effect associated with these substances.