Opium

OPIUM

papaver somniferum, the air-dried, milky juice obtained from incisions to the unripe seed pods of the poppy plant.

Opium is a powerful analgesic of mixed blessings. It is one of the richest sources of many useful medicinal alkaloids, such as codeine, morphine, and papaverine. But repeated and extensive use of it and its derivatives—most notoriously heroin—are known to cause severe addiction.

The poppy plant grows wild just about everywhere in the plains of Asia and the Mediterranean, and by the late medieval period there are references to opium use in various parts of the Middle East, as both a medicine and a narcotic. The escalation of opium production and trade seems to have been closely linked to burgeoning European colonial and commercial interests in Asia, and official international controls of opium trafficking, cultivation, and consumption are a twentieth-century phenomenon. The United States spearheaded this effort with an international conference convened by President Theodore Roosevelt in Singapore in 1909. This was followed by a series of conventions held in The Hague, culminating in the convention of 1912.

Despite international initiatives undertaken during the twentieth century, Middle Eastern countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey still produce a substantial portion of the world's opium supply. In Afghanistan in particular, precarious living conditions and geopolitical developments caused its production of opium to skyrocket during the 1990s, making it the world's largest opium producer. As of 2003, most of the drug of Afghan origin is reportedly distributed northward through the neighboring countries of Central Asia, with Europe as its final destination.

Bibliography

Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues. "The World Geopolitics of Drugs: 1998/1999 Annual Report." April 2000. Available from <http://www.ogd.org/2000>.

karen pinto
updated by ana torres-garcia