History of Opium

Alcohol may have been the most frequently consumed drug history, but the most effective medicinal drug available before the dawn of the twentieth century was opium obtained from the poppy, Papaver somniferum L. – one of the oldest cultivated species known.

The use of opium dates back further than written history.

The first people known to have used opium are the Sumerians who lived in lower Mesopotamia, now western Iraq, in 3500 BC. The Sumerians are best remembers as the culture that invented writing.

The Sumerian used opium medicinally. Some historians contend that opium was not used recreationally.

By 1300 BC the Egyptians were cultivating poppies for the production of opium. The opium they produced was an extremely popular commodity. They traded it as far away as Greece and central Europe.

The Egyptians listed opium along with approximately 700 other medicinal compounds in the famous Ebers Papyrus.

Claims that opium was used in the Neolithic period should be viewed with extreme caution.

They are based in the finding of seeds of the closely related P. somniferum subsp. Setigerum in Germany at the Danubian settlements, the location of the first central European farms around 4400 – 4000 BC.

Much greater quantities of poppy seeds have been found in northern France and farming settlements on the shores of lakes in Switzerland and surrounding areas, which date back to 3700 – 3625 BC.

Both P. somniferum and its species setigerum produce morphine and related narcotic compounds, though the former generates greater amount.

However, the seeds of both plants contain insufficient amounts of active alkaloids to produce any narcotic effect.

The seeds from the Neolithic period were probably used for the production of oil, as they certainly were in later times.

The first mention of opium by the Greeks was made around 330 BC by Hippocrates the father of medicine, about opium’s usefulness in curing a number of diseases, especially diarrhea.

A small portion of the current opium crop (possibly 5%) is used for pharmaceutical medicines; most opium is destined for the illegal drug trade, but the nonmedical.

Opium was always the most essential in both Eastern and Western medical prescriptions until the US government began strictly enforcing its worldwide prohibition during the 1940s.

By then approximately eighty percent of all medications sold in America and Europe contained some form of opium or opium derivative.
History of Opium