Doctors as far back as Hippocrates have noted the powers of Papaver somniferum, the flowering opium poppy. Like many other cash crops throughout history, it has been bred and cultivated to improve its hardiness and potency, and generations of physicians, pharmacists, and black market profiteers have refined it to make it stronger, more curative, and sometimes more addictive, as Lucy Inglis explains in her new book, Milk of Paradise. She divides her narrative into three sections: opium, morphine, and heroin, displaying the historical trajectory of products derived from the opium poppy.
Great writers and philosophers have recognized the allure of opium since ancient times. Though it is more commonly associated with English Romantic poetry, the plant appears widely in antiquity’s epic poems. As Inglis notes, in the Odyssey a drug is conferred on Helen—one which many think to be opium from Egypt—with which she later drugs her guests. The ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism mentions a plant-based narcotic in its holy texts, thought to be either cannabis or opium. Aristotle and Galen wrote on the substance’s medicinal use; the latter’s patient, the venerable Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, would take a medicinal mixture of opium and other substances. So constant was his usage that “the nervous symptoms he displayed were those of a regular opiate user,” Inglis writes.
During the Age of Exploration, opium evolved from a medicine to a geopolitical lever, especially in Asia, where the British sought to trade their Indian-grown
