Opium (4 page)

Around 3400
BC
, the opium poppy was being cultivated in the Tigris–Euphrates river systems of lower Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, the world's first civilisation and agriculturists, used the ideograms
hul
and
gil
for the poppy, this translating as the ‘joy plant'. Their invention of writing spread gradually to other societies and it is from them the Egyptians probably learnt the skill: it follows they may also have learnt of opium. It may be reasoned, therefore, that the Sumerians not only gave humankind literacy but also one of its greatest problems.

By the end of the second millennium
BC
, knowledge of opium was widespread throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Poppy juice is mentioned in seventh-century
BC
Assyrian medical tablets contained in the royal library of the Babylonian King Asurbanipal, although these are thought to be copies of earlier texts. Doctors of the time considered opium a cure for almost every ailment, sometimes mixing it with liquorice or balsam: of 115 vegetable concoctions mentioned, 42 concern opium which was collected early in the morning by women and children who scraped the congealed sap off wounds in the poppies with a small iron scoop.

Yet the earliest find of opium itself comes from Egypt where a sample was discovered in the tomb of Cha, dating to the fifteenth century
BC
. At around the same time, the Egyptian city of Thebes was so famous for its poppy fields that Egyptian opium was known as Thebic opium. The alkaloid, thebaine, obtains it name from the city. In the
Therapeutic Papyrus of Thebes,
dated 1552
BC
, and in other sources such as the
Veterinary and Gynaecological Papyri
from Kahun, dated between 2160 and 1788
BC
, opium is prominently, listed with other natural remedies and drugs: in the former – sometimes known as the
Papyrus of Ebers
after its discoverer, Georg Moritz Ebers – opium is included in 700 remedies, one chapter specifically prescribing it as a paregoric to calm fractious children. The prescription demanded opium be mixed with fly droppings, pulped, sieved and taken for four days.

For the Greek civilisation, opium was a commonplace. In the third century
BC
, Theophrastus referred to the sap of the pod as
opion
whilst he called poppy juice
meconion,
obtained by crushing the entire plant. This is an interesting fact for it suggests he had a specific knowledge that the sap contained a substance and that he may have been acquainted with separating it out although, at the time, the general method of taking opium was to crush the pod in wine or a honey and water solution. The method of incising the pod to gather the sap, developed by the Assyrians and used to this day, was lost until the technique was re-invented or rediscovered about
AD
40 by Scribonius Largus, physician to the Emperor Claudius.

In
AD
77, Dioscorides wrote that opium was best obtained by the careful grazing of the pod, although he was just as familiar with other applications of the poppy. He recorded:

Poppies possess as it were a cooling power, therefore the leaves and head when boiled in water bring sleep. The decoction is also drunk to remedy insomnia. Finely powdered and added to groats, the heads make an effective poultice for swellings and erysipelas. They must be crushed when still green, shaped into tablets then dried for storage. If the heads themselves are boiled in water until the liquid is reduced to half then boiled with honey until a syrup forms, they may make a sweetmeat with an anodyne action.

Both Dioscorides and Theophrastus, whilst noting opium induced sleep and numbed pain, did not consider its effects upon the brain which were generally disregarded although the philosopher Diagoras of Melos was cognisant of the drug's snare. Living in the third century
BC
, he declared it was better to suffer pain than to become dependent upon opium, a view shared earlier in the fifth century
BC
by Erasistratus who advocated the complete eschewal of opium.

Apart from its medicinal use, opium also served the Greeks in a spiritual or occult capacity. It was most likely employed by initiates to the cult of Demeter for there is a legend which decrees that, in her search of her daughter Persephone, the goddess came to Sicyon, at one time called Mecone (the city of poppies), in the fields of which she picked the flowers and cut open their unripe pods. Tasting the gum which exuded from them, Demeter forgot her sorrows. Statues and portraits of the goddess frequently show her grasping a poppy instead of a sheaf of corn whilst the flower decorates her altars. There is a further suggestion: in her rites conducted at Eleusis, opium was taken to aid in the forgetting of the sadness of the death of the year, the short drug-induced sleep being a symbol for the passage of winter before the rejuvenation of spring. The medical priests of Aesculapeius administered opium to those who visited Epidaurus to seek a cure for illness. The sick slept in the sanctuary of the temple, the priests procuring healing dreams for them.

As long as opium was in the hands of priests it was regarded as a metaphysical substance. This supernatural attitude, however, was dismissed by Hippocrates (460–357
BC
). Considered the father of medicine, he disassociated himself from the magical attributes of opium which he mentioned was useful as a cathartic, hypnotic, narcotic and styptic. A reasoned and logical thinker, Hippocrates concluded diseases were naturally caused and were, therefore, cured by natural remedies. Opium was, for him, one of the latter, which he believed required study and understanding rather than being imbued with miraculous powers. He suggested drinking hypnotic meconion (white poppy juice) mixed with nettle seeds to cure leucorrhea and ‘uterine suffocation'. Like Diagoras, Hippocrates was of the opinion it should be used sparingly and under control, a stipulation which exists to this day in the Hippocratic oath which states, ‘I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel.'

It was not long before opium began to appear in literature. In the
Odyssey,
Homer writes of ‘nepenthe', the drug of forgetfulness, which was an opium preparation. When Telemachus visited Menelaus in Sparta, the memory of Ulysses and the other warriors lost in the Trojan War so saddened the gathering a banquet was commanded for which Helen prepared a special cordial:

Helen, daughter of Zeus, poured a drug, nepenthe, into the wine they were drinking which made them forget all evil. Those who drank of the mixture did not shed a tear all day long, even if their mother or father had died, even if a brother or beloved son was killed before their own eyes by the weapons of the enemy. And the daughter of Zeus possessed this wondrous substance which she had been given by Polydamma, the wife of Thos of Egypt, the fertile land which produced so many balms, some beneficial and some deadly.

Homer's noting opium came from Egypt is hardly surprising: not only had this source been known of for centuries but Egyptian doctors were renowned. Even Moses shared their secret as was recorded in the Bible, Acts 7, verse 22: ‘And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.'

For a long while, scholars assumed nepenthe was hashish but this is incorrect. What is plainly described is the effect of opium which, especially once established as a habit, promotes indifference towards everything except the ego and a calm euphoria in which anger and sorrow are suppressed. Hashish, on the other hand, usually produces a delirious excitement.

Homer's description was not a matter of poetic licence. He was writing about an everyday experience undergone by those addicted and it is almost certain the poet had taken opium, even if he was not habituated. Furthermore, a solution of opium in alcohol was used by the Greeks as a tranquilliser, to banish fear, anguish and hateful memories: it might also have been used to promote Dutch courage in warriors going into battle. The tradition of opium as an antidote to sorrow lingers to the modern day: in some places in the Middle East, iced poppy tea is traditionally served to mourners at funerals.

When the Greek civilisation was usurped by the Empire of Rome, more than works of art and treasure were plundered and brought to Italy. So, too, came learning, including the knowledge of opium, spread by military men returning from foreign campaigns (including those in Egypt and the Middle East), priests, physicians, intellectuals and Greek slaves many of whom were educated and employed in Rome as tutors and administrators.

Galen, in the first and second centuries
AD
, was the last of the great Greek physicians. Although he considered it to be influenced by the occult, he did not claim direct magical properties for opium but he did afford it the omniscient properties of a glorious panacea, claiming it resisted poison and venomous bites and cured, amongst other things, headaches, vertigo, deafness, epilepsy, apoplexy, poor sight, bronchitis, asthma, coughs, the spitting of blood, colic, jaundice, hardness of the spleen, kidney stones, urinary complaints, fever, dropsy, leprosy, menstrual problems, melancholy and all other pestilences. It was he who popularised the use of one of the famous early opium concoctions,
mithridate,
the invention of which is accorded to Mithridates the Great. Galen advocated it to all his patients amongst whom were numbered Marcus Aurelius and the Emperors Commodus and Severus. Yet, for all his apparent quackery, Galen was a serious scientist. He studied and published his findings on the toxic effects of opium and understood the concept of tolerance – that is, the ability of the body to withstand larger and larger successive doses, requiring increasing doses to gain the same effect as time goes by.

Like Homer, Virgil mentioned opium in his works: in both the
Aencid
and the
Georgics
it is mentioned as a soporific. His lines
spargens humida melle soperiferumque paparva
(giving dewy honey and soporific poppy) and
Lethaeo perfusa papavera somno
(poppies soaked with the sleep of Lethe) indicate very clearly the accepted capabilities of the drug. Pliny the Elder wrote that poppy seed (he was incorrect) was a useful hypnotic, whilst the poppy latex was effective in treating headaches and arthritis and in healing wounds.

For the Romans, the poppy was a powerful symbol of sleep and death. Somnus, the god of sleep, is frequently portrayed as a small boy or sprite carrying a bunch of poppies and an opium horn, the vessel in which the juice was collected by farmers, whilst another popular image is that of a figure bending over a woman and pouring poppy juice on to her closed eyes. The poppy also formed part of the mysteries of Ceres, the Roman goddess of fertility, who resorted to the drug to relieve pain: a famous statue shows her holding a torch and poppy pods. Indeed, the poppy was so well known a symbol that, in later years of the empire, it was to be found on Roman coinage.

The Romans viewed opium not only as a painkiller and religious drug but as a convenient poison. For the suicide, it was a pleasant means of enticing death. Hannibal was said to have kept a dose in a small chamber in his ring, finally ending his life with it in Libyssa in 183
BC
. Yet its main attraction was for the murderer.

Being easily obtained, easily disguised in food or dissolved in wine and bringing a seemingly innocent death as if in sleep, opium poisoning was an ideal assassin's aid. According to the historian Cornelius Nepos, the son of Dionysius (the tyrant of Syracuse) arranged with the court doctors in 367
BC
for his father to overdose on opium. In
AD
55 Agrippina, the Emperor Claudius's last wife, put it into the wine of her fourteen-year-old stepson, Britannicus, so her own son, Nero, might inherit the throne.

As a medicine, opium was taken in a number of concoctions but for leisure use – as what would now be termed a ‘recreational drug' – it was eaten often mixed with honey to suppress its bitterness.

The eating of opium increased as the knowledge of its beneficial properties became more widely known. In the second century
AD
, it was stated that Lysis could take 4 drachms of poppy juice without being incommoded. To be so tolerant of the drug suggests he was a well-established addict: such a quantity would have killed a first-time imbiber.

Curiously, neither the Greeks nor the Romans spread the use of opium throughout the whole of their domains and they did not regard opium as an international trading commodity.

However, the Arabs did. They had used opium as a painkiller since the time of the Egyptians and it was the Arabs who developed and organised the production of, and trade in, opium which has existed ever since.

By the ninth century, Arab scholars and medical men were publishing texts on
af-yum
(or
ufian
or
asiun
), as opium was known, and its preparations. The knowledge was spread by Arab traders and doctors such as the eminent Rhazes who lived in Baghdad but travelled throughout Africa, the Middle East and Moorish Spain.

The study of opium at the time reached its zenith in the person of the outstanding Muhammadan physician, Abu Ali al Husein Abdallah ibn Sina, known outside Islam as Avicenna, who lived much of his life in Persia, in a palace in Isfahan which was noted for its poppy growing. A poet and intellectual as well as a doctor, he was, by all accounts, something of a libertine who maintained a large number of concubines and drank wine in contradiction of the Koran: the prohibition of alcohol by the Prophet's teachings did not extend to drugs such as opium and hashish, thereby encouraging their use in lieu of wine. Avicenna took opium and was almost certainly addicted. His poetry sings the praises of the poppy and wine cup. It is said he died, aged fifty-eight, of an overdose of opium mixed with wine.

Despite his libidinous life-style, Avicenna was a much respected doctor and his
Canon of Medicine
was a standard text for five centuries. He particularly noted the value of opium in the treatment of dysentery, diarrhoea and eye diseases.