Opium: An Overview and Quick History
A valued ornamental plant, opium is a drug that has helped shape the world as we know it. Wars have been fought, countries have been taken hostage, and lives have been lost all because of this unassuming brown or black powder. Although sometimes sold in a sticky solid, this highly illegal drug can be eaten, drunk, or injected, but most of the time smoked because it enters the brain faster. For pure opium production, the farmers collect sticky brown resin from poppy tears made from scoring a ripening pod to bleed the white milky latex that drips from the side. This is usually sold to a merchant on the black market or refined into a morphine base for easier transport. Pressed into bricks and sundried, this can be smoked as is or processed into other forms like heroin, laudanum, herbal wine, opium syrup, and opium extract.
On the street, it is known as Bog O, dope, hop, midnight oil, and tar. Highly addictive, it can create the feeling of euphoria that can cause lifelong dependence that is difficult to cope with and more difficult to treat. Made from the dried latex from the opium poppy, other drugs such as heroin and morphine can be made from it, thus making it easier to inject via a needle.
An ancient drug, its origins can be traced as far as far as the prehistoric times. Traces of the opium poppy can be found in historical texts from 1500 BC and was mainly for medicinal use. Cultivated in the Middle East, it was traded through Egypt spreading to Greece and Europe, with traces of its use found in Switzerland, Germany, and Spain. It traveled from the Mediterranean through the Silk Road where it reached China, the scene for the Opium Wars in the 1800s. Britain began smuggling opium to China via India using the East India Company to create a high addiction rate among the Chinese to destabilize their government. Such is the effect of this originally innocuous drug.
Despite many restrictions and crack-downs on the illegal trade of this highly lucrative drug, it is still produced in Afghanistan whose mountainous areas connect with Iran and Pakistan and otherwise known as the Golden Crescent. Afghanistan is the main producer of opium and the poppies used in over 90 percent of the world’s heroin. Heavily protected by the Taliban, it is a source of income for the terrorist group with a massive increase in production since the occupation of Afghanistan by the United States between 2002 and 2014.
Opium is listed as a schedule 2 controlled substance (due to its potential for abuse), but it’s regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration because it predates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938. Grown legally in parts of Australia, India, and Turkey for medicinal uses, it is used to create morphine and codeine and is used traditionally as a sleeping aid or a pain reliever. Aside from drug manufacturing, the poppy seed which opium comes from is also used as a food source and added in cakes and pastries because of its delicious flavor. So know that when you are biting into your poppy seed bagel, it could come from the same farm that produces opium. Take that thought, put it in your pipe, and smoke it.
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