The W.o.D, The Little Three
The W.o.D Morphine
The W.o.D The Big Three
Opium
Suggestions as to the geographical origins of the opium poppy have been all over the map, from southwestern Europe to western China. Mark David Merlin’s careful review of the evidence indicates that the most likely route of dissemination was from central Europe down into the eastern Mediterranean from about 1600 B.C.
Neolithic peoples in the Swiss Foreland and adjacent areas may have discovered opium as a weed species growing in dump heaps dividend its cultivators. Opium may have spread to the southeast either accidentally, in contaminated grains, or deliberately, as an exotic trade good.
In either case it became well known in Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, and throughout the eastern Mediterranean littoral. Opium was uniquely suited to treat the ills of civilized peoples: anxiety, boredom, chronic fatigue and pain, insomnia, squalling babies in close quarters, and, not least, diarrheal diseases, ubiquitous and often deadly affections inherent to concentrated populations.
Infections spread by faecal discharges did not much trouble wandering bands. Settled populations without sanitary facilities—practically non-existent before the nineteenth century—were plagued by them. Greek and Roman physicians skilfully employed opium preparations to combat gastrointestinal and other ailments.
Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 a.d., habitually took opium to sleep, to cope with the ardours of military campaigns, and perhaps, as one historian has speculated, to wall himself off emotionally from the world he famously de spiced.
Suicides Disease
Roman suicides swallowed the drug to end life cum valet udo imperialises odium vitae necessity, when unbearable disease had rendered it hateful. Some scholars believe that the wine with “gall” offered to Jesus as he hung on the cross contained opium.
His refusal to partake was analogous to a stoic soldier declining a blindfold or a cigarette before execution Opium figured prominently in Arab medicine, and it was Arab traders who took the drug to Iran, India, and China during the eighth century. All three lands ultimately became important centres of production and consumption.
A century ago, Sir William Moore, a British physician with long experience in India, set out to explain why opium use was so widespread in the East. With a few publications, his analysis still commands respect.
Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Moore’s first point was proximity to supply. Though opium poppies have been grown experimentally on every settled continent, sustained commercial production requires ample water, good soil, manuring, and, most critically, ready access to skilled peasant labour.
Harvesters equipped with special tools score the unripe seed capsules and collect the exuded sap—“opium” (opinion) means poppy juice in Greek. Because opium is collected in small amounts by hand, with daily yields per worker measured in ounces, the labour must be cheap as well as careful.
Turkish harvesters
Turkish harvesters in the early twentieth century earned 30 to 50 cents for a 14-hour day. The densely populated peas ant societies of South and East Asia offered an abundance of this sort of labour. Though much of the opium they produced was exported, some of it leaked into the local market, even when authorities tried to prevent this.
Another reason for opium’s popularity in the East was religious: Islam frowned upon alcohol. Opium was a more acceptable alternative. It was also medically imperative. Victims of diarrhoea, so common in India that it was known as morbus bengalensis, resorted to opium. So did those wrack ed by malarial fevers, endemic to the warm and damp regions of India, western China, and Southeast Asia.
The marshy English Fens, as Moore shrewdly noted, featured a similar pattern of heavy opium use to combat malaria. Moore thought climate was significant in another way. The prevailing heat had made easterners more “indolent” than westerners and hence better suited to opium. The remark seems at first a classic piece of High Imperialist nonsense.
Yet, if one digs deeper, the idea that people use opium in response to the debilitating effects of climate is neither wrong nor racist. It has a long history of more sympathetic exposition in both western and Arabic medicine.
“People who live in the tropics or hot climates, especially those in Mecca,” wrote Al-Biruni (973–1048), “get into the habit of taking opium daily to eliminate distress, to relieve the body from the effects of scorching heat, to secure longer and deeper sleep, and to purge superguides and excesses of humours. They start with smaller doses which are increased gradually up to lethal dosages
In contrast, individuals whose use of drugs is criminalized are often, and addicted. They cannot freely respond to incentives. Much can be said regarding the shift in public opinion regarding the criminalization of drug use. As noted, when the War on Drugs was first proposed, public opinion strongly supported the criminalization of possession of nominal quantities of lower-level drugs.
In contrast, most people now take it as a given that those struggling with a drug addiction are a threat to themselves, not others, and should be offered treatment, not punished Significantly, the impact of the War on Drugs has been deeply heterogeneous.
Those who bore the brunt of it were already marginalized. Traditionally marginalized groups, such as African Americans, are disproportionately likelier be targeted, arrested, and sentenced for drug-related offences.
While African Americans represent some percent of the United States population, they represent percent of drug offenders in state prison systems. (Drug use rates are very similar amongst African Americans and the rest of the population.)
Persons of colour already makeup percent of the prison population – for all offences. Persons of colour make up an even greater proportion of those convicted of charges involving a mandatory minimum sentence.
For drug-related offences, a mandatory minimum sentence is more likely to be sought, and post-sentencing relief is less likely to be granted. Wealth and other factors which make individuals vulnerable to overlapping forms of discrimination are intimately intertwined. African Americans own significantly fewer assets than other racial groups.
The war on People II
Their incomes are lower, and they are disproportionately less likely to see them grow. The War on Drugs has contributed, and continues to contribute, to the marginalization of African Americans and other groups that were already marginalized and overincarcerated. And criminalization significantly contributes to a cycle of marginalization.
Those with a criminal record will find it almost impossible to gain employment, especially in lower-paying industries Prof. Lisa Moore has noted that the impacts of criminalization can be wider ranging:
The challenges that lead a person to prison – drug addition, alcoholism, untreated mental illnesses, lack of employment opportunities – are not abated by incarceration; they are often worsened. Former inmates may have lost family and social ties. . ..
Zero tolerance laws prohibit people with drug-related felonies from using government assistance such as public housing and federal financial aid to attend college. However, violent felons are not excluded from these programs.
The next Part defines the concept of moral panic. The following Part draws upon the history of the War on Drugs and the data regarding its disproportionate impact on marginalized groups, as laid out in this Part, to argue that the War on Drugs is best conceptualized as an instance of moral panic.
Opium, finally, was a frugal drug. It enabled the poor to do with less food; tea being commonly taken for the same reason. And it cost less than alco Holik beverages or other recreational diversions.
A pipe of opium was one of the few comforts affordable to common labourers in the East, who lived without access to the music halls, parks, libraries, and other recreational diversions taken for granted by their western counterparts.
Of all the Asian lands in which opium use and cultivation became entrenched, the most significant was China. Chinese opium smoking began as an offshoot of tobacco smoking, introduced in the early seventeenth century.
At some point the Chinese began experimenting with Medak, a mixture of shredded tobacco and semifriend opium. Later, about 1760, they discovered how to prepare opium so that they could smoke it without tobacco.
#Smoking pure opium was initially a pastime of the wealthy. By the 1830s, however, it had spread among palace eunuchs, imperial officials, soldiers, and merchants.
By the 1870s it was common among chair-bearers, boatmen, and other labourers, and by the early 1900s, among the peasantry itself. In 1906, according to one recent estimate, 16.2 million Chinese (3.6 percent of the total population; 6.0 percent of the adult population) were dependent daily smokers of opium.
Perhaps half of the adult population smoked opium at least occasionally, to celebrate festivals or ward off disease. For opium use to have become so widespread required a huge increase in supply.
Here the stories of opium and tea intersect. Before they had their own tea plantations in India and Ceylon, the British depended on China for tea, Japan being closed to the West.
They also imported silk, porcelain, and sundry chinoiserie, creating a serious balance-of-payments problem. British as tendency in India after 1757 provided a solution.
#Though the British were by no means the first colonial power to export Indian opium, they perfected a monopoly system for its sale and manufacture.
The system proved so lucrative that it eventually furnished one-seventh of the total revenue of British In dia. The lion’s share of the crop, more than offsetting the cost of tea, went to China.
Though British merchants dominated the traffic, Americans also participated, especially during the three decades following the War of 1812. In some years Perkins & Company, a Boston concern, bought up half or more of the Turkish opium crop for shipment to China.
Warren Delano II—founder of the family fortune and grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—prospered as the head of Russell & Company, another leading American ªrm. “I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view,”
Delano wrote home from Canton, “but as a merchant I insist that it has been a fair, honourable and legitimate trade; and to say the worst of it, liable to no further or weightier objections than is the importation of wines, Brandies & spirits into the U. States, England, &c.” In Chinese eyes—and in the eyes of many historians—men like Matheson and Delano were criminals.
Delano’s rationalization omitted the inconvenient fact that imports of opium into China (unlike those of wine or spirits into the United States) were patently illegal. The opium trade had been explicitly forbidden by imperial edict since 1729.
When conscientious Ch’ing officials finally attempted to suppress the traffic, the British resorted to force, defeating the Chinese in the First Opium War (1839–1842). Cannon reduced Chinese fortresses to ruins; marines gathered up the bodies and dumped them into mass graves, leaving behind mocking, hand-lettered signs:
“This is the Rode to Gloury.” A second Anglo-Chinese conflict in 1856–1858 re salted in the complete legalization of the Indian opium trade. The volume of trade, already more than 6 million pounds of opium in 1839, peaked at over 15 million pounds in 1879.
It is tempting to view the worldwide diffusion of opium smoking as Chinese revenge for the primal narcotic sin of the Indian opium trade. The ac tual impact, however, varied from country to country.
The opium dens of London’s East End acquired an infamy out of all proportion to their number, thanks to the imaginative talents of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Sax Rohmer, and lesser literary lights.
However, opium smoking did spread widely in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s, becoming an important ritual in the white underworld and laying the groundwork for a criminal drug subculture Opiate use and addiction were also increasing rapidly in the upper and middle classes.
Per capita imports of medicinal opiates doubled in the United States between 1870 and 1890. “If it were possible to stop the sale of opiates today,” complained one journalist, “in a week’s time there would be raving maniacs, and people dropping dead on every corner of towns and cities.”
#The causes of the increase were the Civil War (a minor factor, who’s a tual influence has often been exaggerated), the ºnourishing patent medicine industry, and, most important, the vogue for the hypodermic injection of morphine
