Opium and Poppy Plants

Danilo Antón                                                                                                
 “Oh, just, ethereal and mighty opium!
You, that both to the heart of the poor and the rich
bring a soothing balm
for those wounds that never heal
and anguish inducing the spirit to rebel ...
Only you give to man these treasures
Only you possess the keys of paradise
Oh, just, subtle and powerful opium!"

Artificial paradises, Charles Baudelaire  

Poppy ( Papaver somniferum ) is one of the oldest medicinal plants of the Afro-eurasian world.
It is an annual herbaceous plant that grows naturally in Asia Minor and other regions of the Near and Middle East.  Its seeds are edibles and are not psychoactive. However, when the capsule is scratched, a milky, rubbery material seeps out which upon hardening turnsbrown. This substance, which has very special properties, is called opium .
Poppy was domesticated in ancient times. There are tablets in Sumer in Mesopotamia (6,000 or 7,000 years ago) that mention the poppy, and medicinal Assyrian tablets relate to its healing power. In the seventeenth century BC Egyptian doctors prescribed opium for children crying, just as many centuries later, the Victorian nannies would use opiates to calm babies.
Historically, opium was not smoked, but rather was drunk with wine or swallowed as pills. It was (and is) used to relieve pain, achieve a state of euphoria or as an aphrodisiac.
In ancient Crete poppy was planted from Minoan times (third and second millennium before the common era).
There are ceramic jars dating 1,500 bd in Cyprus showing stylized incisions in poppy capsules 18   .  Ivory pipes XII century BC were also found in a temple of the same island as they think were used to inhale the fumes of opium (one of the few examples of “smoking pipes” that it is reported in the Mediterranean before European expansion in America).
The Greek feminine deity Demeter, the Mother Goddess, was both goddess of grain and poppies.
In Greece and Rome opium was usually administered as a pain reliever. To this end it was recommended by the founders of the European medicine: Hippocrates (c.4000 BC), Dioscorides and Galen (130-200 AD).
It is thought that the potion that prepared Helen of Troy in Homer’s Odyssey “to quell the pain and sorrow and bring oblivion every discomfort” was prepared based on the opium poppy. Similarly, some argue that the vinegar mingled with “gall” offered to Christ in the cross (Matthew 27:34) also contained opium. It is symptomatic that in ancient Hebrew, the word used to designate the “gall” Rosh , referred also to opium.
From the seventh and eighth centuries, medicine opium was also part of the Islamic civilization. Arab traders spread the opium in Persia, India, the Malay region and finally China.
In 1530 the German-Swiss physician   Paracelsus 19 developed a new type of medicine that somehow integrated classical and medieval practices. Paracelsus was a fan of the powers of opium which he called “the stone of immortality” and always carry it with him.
The opium-based drug that had more significance was the tincture laudanum. It was prepared by dissolving opium in alcohol.  Paracelsus had great success with this recipe spreading rapidly throughout Europe.
For more than three centuries laudanum was “the” medicine that could not miss in any medical kit.  Its use spread to the affluent classes in all the states of the continent, to the clubs of London and Paris and to high political and military spheres. For most of the nineteenth century most of the aristocrats had become fans of laudanum (ie opium and alcohol).
The Muslim advance carried opium consumption to India, which, over time, would end up being the largest producer of poppy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mogul monarchs gave opium to their soldiers, and emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, drunk opium in his wine.
Even today, in India construction workers and agricultural laborers a small ball of opium into their mouths ingiriéndola with their tea. However, in the Indian subcontinent, opium consumption never reached the social dimension which would then reach into China, especially during the nineteenth century during the Opium War.
From "Peoples, Drugs and Serpents", Danilo Anton, 2016, Piriguazu Ediciones