Drug Abuse in the War

     "He removes a syringe from his hide bag and injects just a little of the medicine into his arm. Since being wounded in our raid, he has given up fighting the morphine. 'I'm just dabbling with it,' he likes to say with his English accent." (192) This quote is an example of drug use and abuse, a regular theme throughout the novel Three Day Road. The pull of the drug, morphine, is an example of one of the many struggles and battles in any war, but especially in the Great War, where morphine was so out in the open for anybody. The pull of the drug does not seem to do much to either Xavier or Elijah at the beginning of the war despite the fact that it is widely available and offered to them. However, as the novel continues we see Elijah get seriously injured and is forced to take morphine as a painkiller. As a result of this treatment, Elijah gets extremely addicted to the drug. He starts slow but eventually he becomes a full fledged addict and the effects of this drug abuse is wide spread.
     Xavier on the other hand has not taken morphine in the war yet and seems to hate the drug and that Elijah chooses to use it. We do know that Xavier does become very addicted to the drug and uses it once the war is over. I think that the reason Xavier is using the drug now is because he also has a serious injury. The doctors more than likely gave Xavier morphine as a painkiller when they were doing surgery on him. Another way Xavier may have become addicted to morphine is that Elijah slipped a needle into his arm while sleeping, because he thought that using the morphine was a good thing. Regardless of how Xavier came to use the drug, he uses it now and it is probably killing him.