Opium: the denaturalization of a miracle medicine

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 other regions of the Near and Middle East. Its seeds are edible and are not psychoactive. However, when scratching the capsule a gummy, milky material comes out that turns brown when hardened. This substance, which has very special properties, is called opium.

The poppy was domesticated in very ancient times. There are Sumerian records in Mesopotamia (6,000 or 7,000 years ago) that mention the poppy, and the Assyrian medicinal tablets refer to its healing power.

In the 17th century B.C. An Egyptian medical treaty prescribed opium for crying children, just as, many centuries later, Victorian nannies were to use opiates to calm babies.

Historically, opium was not smoked, but was rather drunk with wine or swallowed as pills. It was used to ease 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 from the year 1,500 B.C. from Cyprus showing stylized incisions shaped like poppy pods. Ivory pipes from the 12th century B.C. have also been found. in a temple on the same island that is believed to have been used to inhale the opium vapors (one of the few examples of "smoking pipes" known in the Mediterranean, prior to the European expansion in America).

The Greek female deity Demeter, the Mother Goddess, was at the same time the Goddess of grains and poppies and was used as the main medicine in those of Aesculapius temples that were in ancient Greece.

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 B.C.), Dioscorides and Galen (130-200 A.D.).

The potion Helen of Troy prepared in Homer's Odyssey "to silence pain and sorrow and bring oblivion to every malaise" is thought to have been prepared on the basis of poppy opium. Similarly, there are those who maintain 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 the "gall", rôsh, was also used to denote opium.

From the 7th and 8th centuries, opium medicine was also part of the Islamic civilization. Arab traders spread the opium in Persia, India, the Malay country, and finally China.

In the year 1530 the Swiss-German physician Paracelsus developed a new type of medicine that, in a way, integrated classical and medieval practices. Paracelsus was an admirer of the powers of opium whom he called "the stone of immortality" that he always carried in "the pommel of the saddle".

The most important medicine based on opium was laudanum tincture, which is prepared by dissolving opium in alcohol. This recipe from Paracelsus was singularly successful spreading rapidly across the European continent.

For more than three centuries, laudanum was "the" medicine that could not be missing in any medical kit. Its consumption spread 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. For most of the 19th century, most aristocrats had become fond of laudanum, that is, alcoholic opium.

The Muslim advance took the consumption of opium to India, a country that, in time, would end up being the world's largest poppy producer. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mughal monarchs owed opium to soldiers, and the Emperor Shah Jahan himself, builder of the Taj Mahal, drank opium in his wine. Still today, in that country, construction workers and farm laborers put a small ball of opium in their mouth, swallowing it with their tea. However, in the Indian subcontinent, the consumption of opium never reached the social dimension that it would later reach in China, especially during the 19th century.

When the United States became independent, the United Kingdom lost control of the tobacco trade, for that reason realizing pragmatically that the military force did not allow them to recover their lost colonies, the British sought to reorient their production and trade.

For this, they had their new colonies in India. In the absence of tobacco, they took advantage of the existence of poppy plantations (opium could also be smoked), and began promoting markets for the new product in the Far East in particular] China.

The Chinese were not aware of opium, nor had they developed cultural modalities to control its consumption, and they were easy prey for cunning British merchants. Numerous "opium addicts" quickly appeared in China's major ports. "Opium dens" multiplied, leading to a cultural crisis in the gigantic country.

In the late 1830s, the emperor of China decided to ban the import of the substance. English merchants defied the imperial edict and introduced new shipments. The Chinese government replied by destroying the opium deposits near Canton.

As "retaliation" the English attacked China, in 1840 they took Dinghai and in 1842 they defeated the imperial army forcing the acceptance of a peace treaty (Nanking Treaty). This agreement established that the Chinese government would open the ports for foreign trade (especially for the trade in opium from the English colonies in India), and ceded control of the territory of Hong Kong to the British.

Opium consumption spread in European societies during the 18th and 19th centuries. During the last century mentioned it was transformed into a favorite medicine in the European royal houses. In the nineteenth century many artistic and intellectual personalities became fond of opiates: Goethe, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Goya among others regularly consumed it.

Without worrying too much about all the criticism and denunciations of opium and its addictive products, the big pharmaceutical companies continue to make succulent profits from their poppy plantations (which despite all the stereotypes and negative propaganda, are authorized, legitimized and promoted by the governments and international institutions).

The main industrial scale crops (controlled by two or three large pharmaceutical conglomerates) are found in India, which has been the traditional producer since the times when it was an English colony, on the island of Tasmania (Australia), and to a lesser extent in Turkey.

Indian plantations are tightly controlled. In them, workers must bathe before leaving the workplace so that not one microgram of opium "sticks" to the body. The safety standards of these establishments are analogous to those found at military sites where nuclear warheads are stored or at diamond deposits in South Africa.

The process of transnational and industrial control of the production of poppy and its derivatives is particularly visible in Turkey, which was for a long time a society traditionally used to its consumption. .

During the first half of the 20th century, as clandestine heroin trafficking developed, Turkey was the main supplier of opium to the Marseille processing market (the so-called "French connection").

The circuit collapsed in 1971 due to pressure from the United States. The Turkish government banned hash hash, greatly reducing France's supply of heroin.

Turkish peasants resented the ban, and political and social pressure forced the government to re-establish cultivation, albeit under very different rules.

First, the production of "not even a gram" of opium was further authorized, the (artisan) incision of the seed was strictly prohibited. In its place, gigantic alkaloid factories controlled by large pharmaceutical transnationals were established (particularly in Bolvadin, in Afyon province, on the eastern Anatolian plateau). These industrial plants process the dried poppy pods, which are crumbled and dissolved in stainless steel tanks. The process ends with the production of raw morphine concentrate. The product is then transported to the Izmir port for export. Most of it is transformed into codeine.

In this way, the peasants, and Turkish society in general, lost one of their oldest traditional agricultural resources. This passed into the hands of the transnational companies that manage their industrialization and trade. With clever excuses, the owners of the great global society of domination had seized another link in the chain of human culture.

Two of the world's main opium processing plants are in India in the cities of Ghazipur and Nimach. Thousands of opium "trays" (each containing 35 kilos) are prepared monthly at the Ghazipur plant, built by the English in 1820, for further export. India supplies about two thirds of all opiates required annually by pharmaceutical transnationals.

In Tasmania, the poppy is grown in huge computerized plantations, with poppy varieties that have been subjected to genetic manipulations of the most diverse nature, to increase their productivity and improve profits.