Book: Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium “And close your eyes with holy dread, Two words off topic. Just a couple!! Born in Devonshire in 1772, Coleridge was introduced to opium at a premature age. He was doubtless given laudanum at eight when he suffered from an unembellished fever or later, as a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital, when he contracted jaundice and rheumatic fever. What is definite is his being prescribed ‘laudanum’ for rheumatism when an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1791. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are the two most celebrated of Coleridge’s many opium-influenced poems, although a brutal debate about the role of opium in the writing of the former has raged for decades. Back to the book. In her Introduction, Lucy Inglis says, “In mankind’s search for temporary oblivion, opiates possess a special allure. For a short time, there is neither pain, nor fear of pain. Since Neolithic times, opium has made life seem if not perfect, then tolerable, for millions. However unlikely it seems at this moment, many of us will end our lives dependent upon it.” Opium has been used by man since antediluvian times and was perhaps the first drug to be discovered. Being naturally occurring, it almost positively predates the discovery of alcohol which requires knowledge of fermentation. It has long been suggested that the knowledge of opium spread from Egypt through Asia Minor to the rest of the Old World but the Swiss discoveries cast this theory into doubt. What is as prospective is that the stealth of opium originated in the eastern reaches of Europe – in the Balkans or around the Black Sea – and spread south and west from there. The opium poppy is botanically classified as Papaver somniferum. The genus is named from the Greek noun for a poppy, the species from the Latin word meaning ‘sleep inducing’: it was Linnaeus, the father of botany, who first classified it in his book Genera Plantarum in 1753. Like many of his colleagues, and generations before him, he was well aware of its proficiencies. The plant has a hesitant history. Some horticulturists consider it evolved naturally, but there are others who claim it is a cultivor developed by century upon century of careful human cultivation.
Author: Lucy Inglis
Format: Kindle Edition
Publisher: Picador; Main Market edition (9 August 2018)
Language: English
File size: 26617 KB
Print length: 465 pages
Price: 461/-
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise….”
Another theory is that it is a naturally mutated plant which evolved because of a quirk of climate or altitude.
This is not far-fetched for plants will take on atypical forms in unique conditions: the cannabis trees of Bhutan prove the point. No one can be certain.
Around 3400 BC, the opium poppy was being cultivated in the Tigris–Euphrates river systems of lower Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, the world’s first civilisation and agriculturists, used the ideograms ‘hul’ and ‘gil’ for the poppy, this translating as the ‘joy plant’.
Their invention of writing spread progressively to other societies and it is from them the Egyptians perhaps learnt the skill: it follows they may also have learnt of opium.
With the proviso that opium was in the hands of priests it was viewed as a metaphysical substance. This supernatural attitude, however, was dismissed by Hippocrates (460–357 BC). Considered the father of medicine, he disentangled himself from the enchanted attributes of opium which he mentioned was useful as a cathartic, hypnotic, narcotic and styptic.
A reasoned and logical thinker, Hippocrates concluded diseases were logically caused and were, therefore, cured by natural remedies.
Opium was, for him, one of the latter, which he believed required study and understanding rather than being imbued with miraculous powers. He suggested drinking hypnotic meconion (white poppy juice) mixed with nettle seeds to cure leucorrhea and ‘uterine suffocation’.
Like Diagoras, Hippocrates was of the view it should be used parsimoniously and under control, a stipulation which exists to this day in the ‘Hippocratic oath’ which states, ‘I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel.’
It was not long before opium began to appear in literature.
In the Odyssey, Homer writes of ‘nepenthe’, the drug of amnesia, which was an opium preparation. When Telemachus visited Menelaus in Sparta, the memory of Ulysses and the other warriors lost in the Trojan War so saddened the gathering a banquet was commanded for which Helen prepared a special cordial:
Helen, daughter of Zeus, poured a drug, nepenthe, into the wine they were drinking which made them forget all evil. Those who drank of the mixture did not shed a tear all day long, even if their mother or father had died, even if a brother or beloved son was killed before their own eyes by the weapons of the enemy.
And the daughter of Zeus possessed this wondrous substance which she had been given by Polydamma, the wife of Thos of Egypt, the fertile land which produced so many balms, some beneficial and some deadly.
It may be reasoned, therefore, that the Sumerians not only gave humankind literacy but also one of its greatest glitches.
Few nouns can be more reminiscent than opium. Derived from the ancient Greek for the sap of the poppy pod, it has moved a long way from its original innocent meaning.
It simultaneously conjures up exotic images of murky drug dens filled with besotted addicts, white slavers and Fu Manchu-like fiends, maudlin and tubercular Romantic poets and, by association, alleyways across the cities of the world littered with discarded hypodermic needles, trained sniffer dogs going over airline baggage, haggard youths shooting up heroin in public lavatory cubicles.
Yet for all these disadvantageous aspects, opium has a benevolent side.
The economies of some countries depend upon it, the opium harvest being all that stands between social stability and political overthrow, well-being and disease or starvation. Many a Third World peasant farmer regards opium as a steady, reliable, easily grown and harvested cash crop.
For the terminal cancer patient, opium and its derivatives afford a blessed relief from the tortures and indignities of pain. Even a passing headache can be eradicated by an opiate bought over the counter of many a pharmacist’s shop.
In other words, opium and its derivatives are all things to all men and have been so for centuries.
The story of opium goes back well before the 19th century invention of heroin, opium clippers riding the South China Sea, the discovery of morphine, poets habituated to laudanum, the rudimentary pharmacology of the Middle Ages and the political machinations of ambitious Roman murderers. It has its origins in the start of human society and its use almost certainly pre-dates civilisation. In fact, there seems little doubt that opium was one of the first medicinal substances known to mankind.
Milk of Paradise is divided into three parts: the stories of opium, morphine and heroin.
Part One is a history of the opium poppy, its earliest contacts with mankind, and its alteration into one of the first commodities traded between the West and the East. It is subdivided into three chapters:
1. The Ancient World;
2. The Islamic Golden Age to the Renaissance;
3. The Silver Triangle and the Creation of Hong Kong
Part Two concerns the isolation of morphine from opium, and the ground-breaking scientific and political changes, as well as chemical discoveries that transformed the West in the 19th century, and set us on a course that, as it accelerated, changed the face of the world, from Tombstone, Arizona to the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This part is subdivided into the following three chapters:
4. The Romantics Meet Modern Science
5. The China Crisis
6. The American Disease
The third and final part covers the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the first years of commercially obtainable heroin, the associated growth of Big Pharma and the present-day US opioid crisis, and charts the successive global wars on and involving drugs, as well as treatment, prohibition and attempts at the subdual of the trade in heroin and its derivatives.
Because of the major roles they have played in the establishment and continuation of the opiate trade, the book focusses mainly on Britain, Europe and America. The final four subdivisions are:
7. A New Addiction, Prohibition and the Rise of the Gangster
8. From the Somme to Saigon
9. Afghanistan
10. Heroin Chic, HIV and Generation Oxy
Ultimately, Milk of Paradise is a story of the numerous intertwined human stories that make up the history of our relationship with this charming compound.
The Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th century helped lay the foundations of Hong Kong, and of modern China. The drug has played a key role in conflicts from the American Civil War, to Vietnam and to Afghanistan, where Camp Bastion was a pioneering field hospital in the middle of the world’s largest illicit poppy plantations.
Not all the world’s opium trade is illegitimate. There is unquestionably a legal market for opium and its alkaloids for pharmaceutical use.
Present day legitimate production varies with projected sales, stocks and the international supply and demand situation. In line with UN Conventions, only enough crops are grown from one season to the next to meet current demand.
Scientifically, opium and its many derivatives lie at the heart of the surgical and pharmaceutical industries. Socially, the drug is both a tremendous force for good and an indescribable evil. It gives comfort to millions daily as part of a lucrative healthcare system, yet it creates addictions that fuel the worst kinds of degradation and exploitation, and plays a major role in all layers of worldwide crime.
The Romans viewed opium not only as a painkiller and religious drug but as a convenient poison. For the suicide, it was a pleasant means of enticing death. Hannibal was said to have kept a dose in a small chamber in his ring, finally ending his life with it in Libyssa in 183 BC.
Yet its main attraction was for the murderer. Being effortlessly obtained, straightforwardly disguised in food or dissolved in wine and bringing a seemingly innocent death as if in sleep, opium poisoning was an ideal assassin’s aid. According to the historian Cornelius Nepos, the son of Dionysius (the tyrant of Syracuse) arranged with the court doctors in 367 BC for his father to overdose on opium.
In AD 55 Agrippina, the Emperor Claudius’s last wife, put it into the wine of her fourteen-year-old stepson, Britannicus, so her own son, Nero, might inherit the throne.
From that day to this one -- the estimated world annual turnover of the drugs trade is up to $750 billion, a far larger sum than is used by all the terrorist movements on earth put together, not to mention being infinitely greater than the budgets of all the enforcement agencies. Such vast sums of money not only give the drug barons enormous economic and political power but also finance a horrifying amount of crime all over the world.
The native reader from India would be surprised to know that the main producer and only country in which the growing of opium poppies for their actual raw opium gum is still legal today is India. The centres for poppy farming are the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh: in all, approximately 13,000 hectares are dedicated to poppies and there are about 100,000 farmers in the licensed opium farming system which is carried out under strict government control. Most processing is carried out at the Government Opium and Alkaloid Factories in Ghazipur, the methods being essentially the same as they were two centuries ago.
Our relationship with opium is a deep-seated part of our human history, and a critical part of our future.
A pleasant read this one.
