Drug Information - Opium Addiction
What is Opium?
Opium is the crudest form and also the least potent of the Opiates. Opium is
the milky latex fluid contained in the un-ripened seed pod of the opium poppy.
As the fluid is exposed to air, it hardens and turns black in color. This dried
form is typically smoked, but can also be eaten. Opium is grown mainly in
Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Afghanistan.
Today opium is sold on the street as a powder or dark brown solid and is
smoked, eaten, or injected.
Opium is highly addictive. Tolerance (the need for higher and higher doses to
maintain the same effect) and physical and psychological dependence develop
quickly. Withdrawal from opium causes nausea, tearing, yawning, chills, and
sweating.
As long ago as 100 AD, opium had been used as a folk medicine, taken with a
beverage or swallowed as a solid. Only toward the middle of the 17th century,
when opium smoking was introduced into China, did any serious addiction
problems arise. In the 18th century opium addiction was so serious there that
the Chinese made many attempts to prohibit opium cultivation and opium trade
with Western countries. At the same time opium made its way to Europe and North
America, where addiction grew out of its prevalent use as a painkiller.
Brief Description:
To harvest opium, the skin of the ripening pods is scored by a sharp blade. The
slashes exude a white, milky latex, which dries to a sticky brown resin that is
scraped off the pods as raw opium.
Street Names:
Skee, joy plant, pen yan
Effects:
Being of similar structure, the opiate molecules occupy many of the same
nerve-receptor sites and bring on the same analgesic effect as the body's
natural painkillers. Opiates first produce a feeling of pleasure and euphoria,
but with their continued use the body demands larger amounts to reach the same
sense of well-being.
Malnutrition, respiratory complications, and low blood pressure are some of the
illnesses associated with addiction.
What is the history of Opium?
Excavations of the remains of neolithic settlements in Switzerland (the
Cortaillod culture, 32002600 B.C.), have shown that Papaver was already being
cultivated then; perhaps for the food value in the seeds (45% oil), which we
know as poppy seeds. The slightly narcotic property of this plant was
undoubtedly already known then.
The milky fluid extracted from the plant's ovary is highly narcotic after
drying. This is then opium. The writings of Theophrastus (3rd century B.C.) are
the first known written source mentioning opium. The word opium derives from
the Greek word for juice of a plant, after all, opium is prepared from the
juice of Papaver somniferum.
The Arabic doctors were well aware of the beneficial effects of opium and
Arabic traders introduced it to the Far East. In Europe it was reintroduced by
Paracelsus (14931541) and in 1680 the English doctor Sydenham could write:
'Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve
his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.'
In the eighteenth century opium smoking was popular in the Far East and the
opium trade was a very important source of income for the colonial rulers the
English, the Dutch, with even the Spanish getting their share in the
Philippines. Although opium was readily available in Europe at that time, its
use was not problematical.
Opium contains a considerable number of different substances, and in the
nineteenth century these were isolated. In 1806 Friedrich Serturner was the
first to extract one of these substances in its pure form. He called morphine
after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep. Codeine (Robiquet, 1832) and papaverine
(Merck, 1848) followed. These pure substances supplanted the use of raw opium
for medical purposes. Like opium they were frequently used as painkillers and
against diarrhea. The invention of the hypodermic in the midnineteenth century
lead to widespread use of morphine intravenously as a painkiller.
In the United States opiate use rose greatly in the last century, partly
because of the opiumsmoking Chinese immigrants, and partly because many of
those wounded in the Civil War were given it intravenously. In addition many
'patent medicines' contained opium extract: laudanum, paregoric, etc. It was
partly due to this that morphine also became fashionable as a 'remedy' for
opium addiction; for if the doctor gave an opium addict morphine, he was no
longer interested in opium so he was cured.
This was also the case in Europe and although its use was at that time much
more widespread than is now regarded as acceptable for medical purposes, it led
to few problems.
At the end of the last century, the United States started to try to curb the
nonmedical use of opium, especially in China, and later tried to prohibit it.
American interest here was twofold: they wanted an economically strong China as
a market for their own products, and the moral element played a major role. As
a result of the SpanishAmerican War, the Philippines became American and the
new rulers were confronted with a widespread problem.The American bishop of the
Philippines, Charles Henry Brent, carried on a moral crusade in the US against
the opium trade and opium addiction, and found widespread support. And not only
because he was riding on the waves of Prohibition, for as we have already seen,
unlike the European countries, the US also had a domestic opium problem.
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