“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!”
—Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)
Opium has held a preeminent role in the treatment of disease since the earliest days of recorded history. The medical writings of the ancient Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans extolled its wondrous properties for the relief of pain and inducement of sleep. Islamic traders introduced opium to China in the ninth century, and it was used for the next 800 years for the treatment of diarrhea resulting from dysentery. Even until the turn of the twentieth century, it was one of the few truly effective and reliable drugs available. Harvard Medical School professor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) noted that, with the exception of opium and anesthesia, “I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica [medical drugs], as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.”
Opium is obtained from the poppy, Papaver somniferum, a plant historically cultivated in southeastern Asia, Iran, Turkey, and now primarily (more than 90 percent) in Afghanistan. Atop the plant’s main stalk are five to eight egg-shaped capsules. Ten days after the poppy blooms, incisions are made into the capsule permitting a milky fluid to ooze out. This gummy mass is scraped off the capsule and pressed into cakes of raw opium, from which some twenty alkaloids are obtained. The two most important of these are morphine and codeine, which are responsible for opium’s effects. Heroin is readily synthesized from morphine.
Long before heroin was abused, English traders began shipping opium into China from India. In an attempt to curb the widespread opium-smoking habits of its nationals, the Manchu government seized the opium cargo of a British ship. Two Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) ensued, with disastrous defeats of the Chinese that led to, among other onerous concessions, legalization of opium importation, loss of the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain from 1842 to 1997, and the opening of China to Western trade and influences.
SEE ALSO Laudanum (1676), Morphine (1806), Alkaloids (1806), Codeine (1832), Heroin (1898), Opioids (1973).
These seemingly harmless balloon-like opium poppies have had a profound effect on society for good and evil. Opium was among the earliest medicines that physicians relied on. It is the source of morphine and a starting material for heroin synthesis, sparking the Opium Wars and China’s subsequent interaction with the West. More recently, opium has functioned as a cash crop, supporting the wars in Afghanistan.