Short answers, pulled from the story.
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the seed capsules of Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy. Approximately 12 percent of opium is the analgesic alkaloid morphine; the latex also contains codeine, thebaine, papaverine, and noscapine.
The Mediterranean region holds the earliest archaeological evidence of opium poppy use, dating to before 5000 BCE. The first known cultivation was in Mesopotamia around 3400 BCE, by Sumerians who called the plant hul gil, the joy plant. A burial site in Spain, the Cueva de los Murciélagos, containing poppy seed capsules has been carbon-14 dated to 4200 BCE.
The First Opium War began in 1840 after Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed approximately 2,660,000 pounds of British-owned opium in Guangzhou in 1838. Britain, unwilling to replace cheap opium with silver to balance trade, went to war and won Hong Kong along with trade concessions under the Unequal Treaties.
Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner first isolated morphine from the opium poppy in 1804 and published his results in 1817 after thirteen years of research. Morphine sales commercially began in 1827 through Heinrich Emanuel Merck of Darmstadt.
From 1898 to 1910, Felix Hoffmann's discovery at the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. By 1902, heroin sales made up 5 percent of Bayer's profits, and reports of what was called heroinism had begun attracting media attention.
In 2006, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated Afghanistan produced 6,100 tons of opium, representing 82 percent of world supply. By November 2023, a UN report found that Taliban-led campaigns had reduced poppy cultivation across Afghanistan by over 95 percent, including a 99 percent reduction in Helmand Province.