Poppy, the miracle plant

Opium, one of the most important substances in the medicinal history of mankind (Part 1)
Poppy (Papaver somniferum) is one of the oldest medicinal plants in the Afro-Eurasian world.
It is an annual herbaceous plant that grows naturally in Asia Minor and in other regions of the Near and Middle East. Its seeds are edible and are not psychoactive.
However, when the capsule is scratched, a milky, rubbery material comes out which, when hardened, turns brown. This substance, which has very special properties, is called opium.
The poppy was domesticated in ancient times. There are Sumerian records in Mesopotamia (6,000 or 7,000 years ago) that mention poppy, and Assyrian medicinal tablets refer to its healing power. In the 17th century B.C. an Egyptian medical treaty prescribed opium for children who cry, just as, many centuries later, the
Babysitters of the Victorian era would use opiates to calm babies.
Historically, opium was not smoked, but rather was drunk with wine or swallowed as pills. It was used to calm the pain, achieve a state of euphoria or as an aphrodisiac.
In ancient Crete the poppy was planted since Minoan times (third and second millennium before the common era).
There are ceramic jugs of the year 1,500 a.e.c. from Cyprus showing stylized incisions in the shape of poppy capsules18. Ivory pipes from the 12th century BC have also been found. in a temple on the same island that is thought to be used to inhale the vapors of opium (one of the few examples of "smoking pipes" that has been reported in the Mediterranean, before the European expansion in America).
The Greek female deity Demeter, the Mother Goddess, was at the same time Goddess of grains and poppies.
In Greece and Rome, opium was usually administered as a pain reliever. To that end it was recommended by the founders of European medicine: Hippocrates (c.400 BC), Dioscorides and Galen (130-200 AD).
It is thought that the potion that Helena de Troya prepared in the Odyssey of Homer "to silence the pain and grief and bring oblivion to every malaise" was prepared based on the opium of poppy. Similarly, some argue that the vinegar mixed with "gall" that was offered to Christ on the Cross (Matthew 27:34) also contained this substance. It is symptomatic that in the ancient Hebrew language, the word used to designate "gall", rôsh, was also used to refer to opium.
From the seventh and eighth centuries, opium medicine was also part of the Islamic civilization. Arab traders spread opium in Persia, India, the Malay country and finally China.
In 1530 the Swiss-German physician Paracelsus19 developed a new type of medicine that, in a way, integrated classical and medieval practices.
Paracelsus was an admirer of the opium powers he called "the stone of immortality" that he always carried on "the saddle knob."
The opium-based medicine that had the greatest significance was the laudanum tincture that is prepared by dissolving opium in alcohol. This recipe from Paracelsus was uniquely successful, spreading rapidly throughout the European continent. For more than three centuries the laudanum was "the" medicine that could not be missing in any medical kit. Its consumption extended to the wealthy classes in all the states of the continent, to the society clubs of London and Paris and to the high political and military spheres. During most of the nineteenth century most of the aristocrats had become fond of laudanum, that is, opium with alcohol.
The Muslim advance took the consumption of opium to India, a country that, over time, would end up being the world's largest poppy producer. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mughal monarchs owe the soldiers opium, and Emperor Shah Jahan himself, builder of the Taj Mahal, drank opium in his wine. Even today, in that country, construction workers and farm laborers put a small ball of opium in their mouths ingesting it with their tea. However, in the Hindu subcontinent, opium consumption never reached the social dimension that it would later reach in China, especially during the Eleventh century.
(continued in Part 2)
Reproduced from the book "Peoples, drugs and serpents", Danilo Antón, Piriguazú Ediciones.