The earliest evidence of human interaction with the opium poppy dates back to before 5000 BCE, found in Neolithic settlements across Switzerland, Germany, and Spain. These ancient cultures did not merely cultivate the plant for its seeds; they placed large numbers of poppy seed capsules at burial sites, such as the Cueva de los Murciélagos in Spain, which has been carbon-14 dated to 4200 BCE. The Sumerians, who began cultivating the plant around 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia, called it hul gil, the joy plant, and described the collection of poppy juice in the morning on tablets found at Nippur. This ancient practice was not limited to agriculture but extended into ritual and medicine, with the Egyptians cultivating opium thebaicum in famous poppy fields around 1300 BCE. The plant was so significant that it was traded by the Phoenicians and Minoans to destinations around the Mediterranean Sea, including Greece and Carthage. In Crete, a figurine of a goddess dated to around 1300 BC contains three hairpins shaped as poppy capsules, all with slits suggesting the Cretans knew the method of extracting opium. The goddess's smile and parting lips suggest she may be in a state induced by the drug, leading some scholars to call her the goddess of ecstasy. This early use was deeply embedded in the spiritual life of the Mediterranean, where initiates of the cult of Demeter likely took opium to forget their grief, and the Greek gods Hypnos, Nyx, and Thanatos were depicted wreathed in poppies.
The Golden Age of Medicine
As the Roman Empire declined, the lands to the south and east of the Mediterranean Sea became incorporated into the Islamic Empires, where opium continued to be a central part of medical practice. The physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, known as Rhazes, maintained a laboratory and school in Baghdad and used opium in anesthesia and recommended its use for the treatment of melancholy. The Persian physician Abū 'Alī al-Husayn ibn Sina, or Avicenna, described opium as the most powerful of the stupefacients in his classic text The Canon of Medicine, which was translated into Latin in 1175 and remained authoritative until the 19th century. Avicenna listed medicinal effects of opium such as analgesia, hypnosis, and antitussive effects, while also referring to its potential as a poison. In the 16th century, Paracelsus introduced laudanum to Western medicine, a tincture of opium in ethanol that became a standard treatment for pain, sleeplessness, and diarrhea. Thomas Sydenham, the father of English medicine, recommended laudanum in the 1660s, stating that among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium. By the 18th century, opium was readily available and extensively used in Europe, especially England, where it was considered a benign alternative to arsenic, mercury, or emetics. It was prescribed for rheumatism, insomnia, and nervous disorders, and medical textbooks even recommended its use by people in good health to optimize the internal equilibrium of the human body. The standard medical use of opium persisted well into the 19th century, with US president William Henry Harrison being treated with opium in 1841, and the Union Army using 175,000 lb of opium tincture and powder during the American Civil War.
The British demand for Chinese tea and the Chinese Emperor's lack of interest in British commodities other than silver led British traders to resort to trade in opium as a high-value commodity for which China was not self-sufficient. The English traders had been purchasing small amounts of opium from India for trade since Ralph Fitch first visited in the mid-16th century. The British East India Company established a strict monopoly on the cultivation, manufacture, and traffic of opium to China, with Bengal opium commanding twice the price of the domestic Chinese product. Despite drastic penalties and continued prohibition of opium until 1860, opium smuggling rose steadily, sucking out 11 percent of China's money supply between 1814 and 1850. In response, the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests of opium in Guangzhou in 1839, leading to the First Opium War in 1840. The British queen Victoria, not willing to replace the cheap opium with costly silver, began the war, winning Hong Kong and trade concessions in the first of a series of Unequal Treaties. The opium trade incurred intense enmity from the later British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, who called it most infamous and atrocious and felt in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China. After China's defeat in the Second Opium War in 1858, China was forced to legalize opium and began massive domestic production. By 1906, China was producing 85 percent of the world's opium, some 35,000 tons, and 27 percent of its adult male population regularly used opium.
The American Addiction
Recreational use of opium in the United States began in the late 19th century and was largely associated with Chinese immigrants, who brought with them the Chinese manner of opium smoking and the social traditions of the opium den. The San Francisco Opium Den Ordinance, which banned dens for public smoking of opium in 1875, was a measure fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and the perception that whites were starting to frequent the dens. By 1919, anti-Chinese riots attacked Limehouse, the Chinatown of London, and Chinese men were deported for playing keno and sentenced to hard labor for opium possession. In the United States, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, passed in fulfillment of the First International Opium Convention of 1912, nominally placed a tax on the distribution of opiates but served as a de facto prohibition of the drugs. The act put taxes and restrictions on the sale and prescription of opium, as well as trying to stigmatize the opium poppy and its derivatives as demon drugs. This act and the stigma of a demon drug on opium led to the criminalization of people that used opium-based products. Between 150,000 and 200,000 opiate addicts lived in the United States in the late 19th century, and between two-thirds and three-quarters of these addicts were women. Opium addiction in the later 19th century received a hereditary definition, with Dr. George Beard proposing his theory of neurasthenia, a hereditary nervous system deficiency that could predispose an individual to addiction.
The Chemical Revolution
Globally, opium has gradually been superseded by a variety of purified, semi-synthetic, and synthetic opioids with progressively stronger effects. This process began in 1804, when Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner first isolated morphine from the opium poppy. The great advantage of purified morphine was that a patient could be treated with a known dose, whereas with raw plant material, if soporifics are weak they do not help; if they are strong they are exceedingly dangerous. Morphine was the first pharmaceutical isolated from a natural product, and this success encouraged the isolation of other alkaloids. Heroin, the first semi-synthetic opioid, was first synthesized in 1874, but was not pursued until its rediscovery in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann at the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany. From 1898 to 1910 heroin was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. Because the lethal dose of heroin was viewed as a hundred times greater than its effective dose, heroin was advertised as a safer alternative to other opioids. By 1902, sales made up 5 percent of the company's profits, and heroinism had attracted media attention. Oxycodone, a thebaine derivative similar to codeine, was introduced by Bayer in 1916 and promoted as a less-addictive analgesic. A range of synthetic opioids such as methadone, pethidine, and fentanyl have been introduced, and each is preferred for certain specialized applications. Nonetheless, morphine remains the drug of choice for American combat medics, who carry packs of syrettes containing 16 milligrams each for use on severely wounded soldiers.
The Golden Triangle and the Taliban
Afghanistan was formerly the primary producer of the drug, having regularly produced 70 percent of the world's opium. In 2000, the Taliban imposed a ban on opium production, cutting production by 94 percent to 74 tons per year. A year later, after American and British troops invaded Afghanistan, removed the Taliban and installed the interim government, the land under cultivation leapt back up, with Afghanistan supplanting Burma to become the world's largest opium producer once more. Opium production increased rapidly in Afghanistan from that point, reaching an all-time high in 2006. According to DEA statistics, Afghanistan's production of oven-dried opium increased to 1,278 tons in 2002, more than doubled by 2003, and nearly doubled again during 2004. In late 2004, the U.S. government estimated that 206,000 hectares were under poppy cultivation, 4.5 percent of the country's total cropland, and produced 4,200 metric tons of opium, 76 percent of the world's supply. For farmers, the crop can be up to ten times more profitable than wheat. In November 2023, a U.N report showed that in the entirety of Afghanistan, poppy cultivation dropped by over 95%, removing it from its place as being the world's largest opium producer. Besides Afghanistan, smaller quantities of opium are produced in Pakistan, the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia, particularly Burma, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. In 2023, Burma overtook Afghanistan and became the world's largest producer of opium, producing 1080 metric tons according to the UN Southeast Asia Opium Survey report.