Photo by Armin Schoch

March, 2008

In the history of mankind, no forbidden substance has so profoundly affected the fortunes of Asia quite in the way opium has. This ‘milk of paradise’, has becalmed Roman emperors, accompanied Pharoahs into their tombs, built colonial fortunes and brought a dynasty to its knees. Wars were fought over it, financed by it and ended by its eradication. And over the centuries distinguished writers have consumed opium in copious quantities, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote Kubla Khan [quoted below] in a dream-like trance while under its influence.

Referred to as ‘a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories’ in Homer’s Odyssey, and famously called ‘God’s own medicine’ by Sir William Owsley, opium has been both a medicine and menace to the world for more than 2000 years. Egyptian pharaohs were entombed with opium artefacts by their side and the substance could also readily be bought on the street-markets of Rome during the empire’s zenith. Even a 7th Century BC bas-relief from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud in modern day Syria, shows poppy capsules. And in the Ancient Indian medical treatises, The Shodal Gadanigrah and Sharangdhar Samahita, opium is mentioned as a cure for diarrhoea and sexual debility. In fact, it was popularly used for its anaesthetic value well into the nineteenth century and even today is legally cultivated to produce morphine.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, opium disappeared in Europe for two hundred years during the Holy Inquisition when anything from the East was linked to the devil. However, it began reappearing in medical journals during the Reformation. Then in the sixteenth century opium’s use and popularity took a huge leap forward. The pompously named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim discovered a process he termed ‘Laudanum’ (literally meaning: something to be praised), which nowadays is known as ‘freebasing’. This allowed the opiate to be more efficiently extracted into the substance morphine, which acted more as anaesthetic and pain-killer and less as a hallucinogenic agent. It would also later be used to reduce opium into the far more potent substance heroin, increasing its street value, per weight, ten-fold. With the Age of Exploration in full swing, returning Portuguese sailors popularised its recreational use in Europe.

Opium certainly was the drug of its time, appearing in many famous literary works from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aforementioned Kubla Khan, to the writings of Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater – 1821) and even helped, it is claimed, influence Lewis Carroll into dreaming up Alice Through the Looking Glass. Keats was another who used but never wrote about it. It also corresponded with the arrival in Asia of Dutch, Portuguese and other traders in the 17th century. Until then opium had mainly come overland through the Middle East, but with colonisation the supply increased dramatically. At the time, most of the cultivation took place in Northern India, and it was the Dutch East India Company that first saw the profitability in exporting and trading in opium. The English, who would play the largest role in its geo-political development, did not enter the trade for another century. When they did however, it was to shake Asia to its very core and bring down the largest dynasty the continent had seen since the rise of Ghengis Khan.

It all started with their invasion of Bengal from their enclaves of Calcutta and Bombay. Local barons had a monopoly on opium production and the British wanted to get their hands on it. As the 18th century drew to a close their control was almost complete and opium became fashionable among the royal courts and wealthy households of Europe. This occurred along with another important new Asian commodity that was to become inextricably linked to the rise of opium use – tea. At the time, 240 tons of this fashionable new drink was arriving in England each year and was so important to England’s trade that it was symbolically dumped into Boston Harbour by disgusted American colonists in 1773. This lucrative new commodity had, however, created a massive trade debt with the principle production country – China. Opium was already heavily used in China as a recreational drug and in 1799 it was banned by the Imperial Chinese court. But the English, with ambitions in the region, ignored the moral implications and forced the trade. When Qing Emperor Tao Kwang failed in his petition to Queen Victoria, he ordered the confiscation of some 20,000 barrels of opium and detainment of foreign traders. The British reaction was swift and the port-city of Canton promptly attacked. This signaled the beginning of the First Opium war, which ended in 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking required China to cede Hong

Kong to the British. They gained a hugely influential foothold in the South China Sea – and opened five new ports to foreign trade. However, China refused to legalise opium, resulting in a second war which effectively saw the downfall of the Quin Dynasty and demise of China as a wealthy world power for the next 150 years. It also had a significant effect on the population, creating a large number of useless addicts as imports soared to 4,810 tons by 1858. British emissary, Lord Elgin, succeeded in forcing the Chinese to legalise opium imports and although opium now accounted for as much as 15 per cent of the colonial income, the monopoly would soon be broken by American trading clippers. In due course moral attitude shifted and opium trade declined. By this time Britain’s own opium imports had risen from a brisk 91 tonnes in 1830 to an astonishing 280 tonnes in 1860.

The British eventually left Hong Kong in 1997, 67 years after China had successfully convinced them to dismantle the India-Opium trade. By then opium was a scourge of the streets where the much more devastating heroin derivative had become a problem worldwide. Heroin originally appeared in 1898 as a substitute remedy for morphine which was first isolated from opium in 1805 by a German pharmacist Wilhelm Sertürner. He named it morphium _ after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, and it went on to become an important painkiller, still widely used today. Almost a century later the German pharmaceutical company Bayer mixed it with acetic acid to produce diacetylmorphine (with the complex compound structure C17H17NO (C2H3O2)2), which eliminated the side effects of morphine, and they named it heroin. In the 25 years until its banning by the then U.S. Treasury Department's Narcotics Division in 1923, it gained the notorious distinction of being the company’s biggest seller ever. It left behind a bunch of addicts that guaranteed an insatiable demand.

With supply channels from India and Afghanistan cut off during World War II, the French began encouraging Hmong hill farmers in Indochina to produce opium for fear of losing their monopoly. At the time a powerful Corsican mafia had succeeded in creating a cartel with immigrants in New York City using Turkish opium, giving rise to the first major international smuggling ring where previously it was openly traded. In fact, many distinguished early Americans grew Papaver somniferum. Thomas Jefferson cultivated opium poppies at his garden in Monticello. As a nice touch, the poppies and seeds were sold at the gift-shop of Thomas Jefferson Centre for Historic Plants right up until 1991, until a drug-bust at the nearby University of Virginia prompted the board of directors to destroy the plants!

Thailand entered the opium trade after the War as production was stepped up by hill tribes – historically skilled at poppy cultivation – in the Golden Triangle area of the country’s north. By the time of the Vietnam War the CIA were clandestinely encouraging the trade and even set up a quasi airline, Air America, to ship the opium out and use the proceeds to fund covert operations in Laos. A middle ranking DEA agent at the time dubbed the area ‘The Golden Triangle’ and the name stuck. Opium was the principal cash crop among the poor ethnic minorities, with poppy cultivation well suited to the hilly landscape and climate. But a concerted eradication effort began in 1969 under the supervision of His Majesty’s Royal Project. Sustainable and profitable crop substitution and a push by the military to drive drug barons across the border into Burma gradually killed production. In its place is a world class museum at the Golden Triangle which tells the story of opium, while the majority of opium now comes from Afghanistan. Strictly illegal, highly addictive, grossly destructive yet undeniably seductive, opium and its derivatives continue to burn their way into history.

As to why this is so, we might take insight from Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater when he revealed;

“the opium eater...feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of majestic intellect...."