Opium: A History [Hardcover]

Booth writes a truly fascinating and detailed history of opium's influence on the world's history, economies, and cultures. According to the author, opium has been used by man since prehistoric times. It was already under cultivation in Mesopotamia by 3400 B.C. He describes the wars that have been fought to control the opium trade, and nowadays the multi-billion dollar heroin industry. Nor does he neglect the social implications of an addicted population:

"For many addicts, heroin is favoured because, whilst allowing them to maintain full consciousness, they can withdraw into a secure, cocoon-like state of physical and emotional painlessness. Heroin is seen as an escape to tranquility, a liberation from anxiety and stress: for the poor, it is a way out of the drudgery of life, just as laudanum was for their forebears two centuries ago."

If much of your recent reading has been driven by current events, this book will open your eyes to the cultivation and processing of `papaver somniferum' throughout the `Golden Crescent' - a geographical area from Turkey to Tibet that includes the mountains of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Here is what the author has to say about growing poppies in the Mahaban Mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border:

"It is perfect poppy country with suitable soil, steep and well-drained hillsides, long hours of sunshine and the right amount of rainfall. There being no other forms of income apart from agriculture, it follows that the opium poppy provides an ideal cash crop."

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (10/03/2001) the drug trade is the primary income source for Afghanistan's ruling Taliban. U.S. State Department intelligence information on drug trafficking in the region indicates that the Taliban has collected at least $40 - $50 million this year through a tax it imposes on the opium poppy crop.

There are hazards to cultivating the poppy. "...Farmers can tell when the time to harvest is nigh because they wake in the morning with severe headaches and even nausea. Harvesters may absorb opium through their skin and excise officers and traders who come into frequent contact with it can also be affected."

Booth gives his readers a very well-researched and fascinating look at the seductive flower whose pharmacological properties came to mean all things to all men: poets; farmers; soldiers; doctors; murderers; terrorists; kings; and cancer patients.

To those who would legalize the stuff and be done with it, I recommend the chapter on Britain in the Industrial Revolution. Mothers fed their babies "soothing syrups" purchased legally at the local apothecary. Such syrups contained laudanum or morphine in order to quiet the crying of babies and help them sleep. These things the syrups did, but they also addicted the children, so that by the age of three or four they resembled "little old men or (were) wizened like a little monkey".

Those who favor the get-tough methods currently in vogue in the US would do well to read of the ups and downs of the international traffic over the last two centuries. The odds of defeating a business as lucrative as heroin seem to be very slim indeed. The emperor of China couldn't do it, and neither have any of the US administrations. In fact, China seems to be one of the hotbeds of the trade, and US consumption is high. Booth doesn't make any recommendations, for it's not a public policy book, as is Jill Jonnes' equally excellent history, which recommends stigmatization of drug use and conducting a war against the trade. "Opium" rather shows where we've been (we being just about every society on the globe) and the current state of things. As for the future, Booth doesn't hazard a guess or push a solution. He doesn't have to. His illumination of the long and tortured history of humans and the poppy is enough to suggest a middle course, neither drug war nor drug festival.