Darke S, Zador D (December 1996). "Fatal heroin 'overdose': a review". Addiction. 91 (12): 1765–72. doi: 10.1046/j.1360-0443.1996.911217652.x. PMID 8997759. John Richards (May 23, 2001). "Opium and the British Indian Empire" . Retrieved September 24, 2007. Stephen Harding; Lee Ann Olivier & Olivera Jokic. "Victorians' Secret: Victorian Substance Abuse". Archived from the original on May 31, 2007 . Retrieved May 2, 2007. Despite drastic penalties and continued prohibition of opium until 1860, opium smuggling rose steadily from 200 chests per year under the Yongzheng Emperor to 1,000 under the Qianlong Emperor, 4,000 under the Jiaqing Emperor, and 30,000 under the Daoguang Emperor. [61] The illegal sale of opium became one of the world's most valuable single commodity trades and has been called "the most long continued and systematic international crime of modern times". [62] Opium smuggling provided 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire's revenue and simultaneously caused scarcity of silver in China. [63] Auerbach, Sascha. Race, Law and 'The Chinese Puzzle' in Imperial Britain. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009.

Nye, Gideon (1873). The morning of my life in China: comprising an outline of the history of foreign intercourse from the last year of the regime of honorable East India Company, 1833, to the imprisonment of the foreign community in 1839. Senlis Council (September 26, 2005). "The Kabul International Symposium on Drug Policy". Archived from the original on March 13, 2007 . Retrieved May 4, 2007.Professor Arthur C. Gibson. "The Pernicious Opium Poppy". University of California, Los Angeles. Archived from the original on October 20, 2013 . Retrieved February 22, 2014. Between 400 and 1200 CE, Arab traders introduced opium to China, and to India by 700. [19] [1] [12] [20] The physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi of Persian origin ("Rhazes", 845–930 CE) maintained a laboratory and school in Baghdad, and was a student and critic of Galen; he made use of opium in anesthesia and recommended its use for the treatment of melancholy in Fi ma-la-yahdara al-tabib, "In the Absence of a Physician", a home medical manual directed toward ordinary citizens for self-treatment if a doctor was not available. [21] [22] Opium timeline". The Golden Triangle. Archived from the original on April 20, 2009 . Retrieved September 13, 2009.

Bradley, James (2009). The Imperial Cruise: a secret history of empire and war. Little, Brown and Company. pp. 274–275. ISBN 978-0-316-00895-2. a b c M J Brownstein (June 15, 1993). "A brief history of opiates, opioid peptides, and opioid receptors". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 90 (12): 5391–5393. Bibcode: 1993PNAS...90.5391B. doi: 10.1073/pnas.90.12.5391. PMC 46725. PMID 8390660. Opium smoking began as a privilege of the elite and remained a great luxury into the early 19th century. However, by 1861, Wang Tao wrote that opium was used even by rich peasants, and even a small village without a rice store would have a shop where opium was sold. [47] Opium contains two main groups of alkaloids. Phenanthrenes such as morphine, codeine, and thebaine are the main psychoactive constituents. [153] Isoquinolines such as papaverine and noscapine have no significant central nervous system effects. Morphine is the most prevalent and important alkaloid in opium, consisting of 10–16 percent of the total, and is responsible for most of its harmful effects such as lung edema, respiratory difficulties, coma, or cardiac or respiratory collapse. Morphine binds to and activates mu opioid receptors in the brain, spinal cord, stomach and intestine. Regular use can lead to drug tolerance or physical dependence. Chronic opium addicts in 1906 China [48] consumed an average of eight grams of opium daily; opium addicts in modern Iran [154] are thought to consume about the same.Though "opium poppy and poppy straw" are listed in Schedule II of the United States' Controlled Substances Act, P. somniferum can be grown legally in the United States as a seed crop or ornamental flower. [32] During the summer, opium poppies can be seen flowering in gardens throughout North America and Europe, and displays are found in many private plantings, as well as in public botanical and museum gardens such as United States Botanical Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, and North Carolina Botanical Garden. Opium was for many centuries the principal painkiller known to medicine and was used in various forms and under various names. Laudanum, for example, was an alcoholic tincture (dilute solution) of opium that was used in European medical practice as an analgesic and sedative. Physicians relied on paregoric, a camphorated solution of opium, to treat diarrhea by relaxing the gastrointestinal tract. The narcotic effects of opium are mainly attributable to morphine, which was first isolated about 1804. In 1898 it was discovered that treating morphine with acetic anhydride yields heroin, which is four to eight times as potent as morphine in both its pain-killing properties and its addictive potential. The other alkaloids naturally present in opium are much weaker; codeine, for example, is only one-sixth as potent as morphine and is used mainly for cough relief. Since the late 1930s, various synthetic drugs have been developed that possess the analgesic properties of morphine and heroin. These drugs, which include meperidine (Demerol), methadone, levorphonal, and many others, are known as synthetic opioids. They have largely replaced morphine and heroin in the treatment of severe pain. Ahmad, Diana L. The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-century American West (University of Nevada Press, 2007). Drugs and Racism in the Old West.

Michot, Yahya. L’opium et le café. Traduction d’un texte arabe anonyme et exploration de l'opiophagie ottomane (Beirut: Albouraq, 2008) ISBN 978-2-84161-397-7 In the United States, opium poppies and poppy straw are prohibited. [43] As the opium poppy is legal for culinary or esthetic reasons, poppies were once grown as a cash crop by farmers in California. The law of poppy cultivation in the United States is somewhat ambiguous. [44] The reason for the ambiguity is that the Opium Poppy Control Act of 1942 (now repealed) [45] [46] stated that any opium poppies should be declared illegal, even if the farmers were issued a state permit. § 3 of the Opium Poppy Control Act stated: Meadway C, George S, Braithwaite R (August 31, 1998). "Opiate concentrations following the ingestion of poppy seed products—evidence for 'the poppy seed defence' ". Forensic Science International. 96 (1): 29–38. doi: 10.1016/S0379-0738(98)00107-8. PMID 9800363. The use of diethyl ether and chloroform for general anesthesia began in 1846–1847, and rapidly displaced the use of opiates and tropane alkaloids from Solanaceae due to their relative safety. [103]

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Recreational use of opium was part of a civilized and mannered ritual, akin to an East Asian tea ceremony, prior to the extensive prohibitions that came later. [44] In places of gathering, often tea shops, or a person's home servings of opium were offered as a form of greeting and politeness. Often served with tea (in China) and with specific and fine utensils and beautifully carved wooden pipes. The wealthier the smoker, the finer and more expensive material used in ceremony. [44] The image of seedy underground, destitute smokers were often generated by anti-opium narratives and became a more accurate image of opium use following the effects of large scale opium prohibition in the 1880s. [44] Prohibitions in China [ edit ] Opium prohibition in China began in 1729, yet was followed by nearly two centuries of increasing opium use. A massive destruction of opium by an emissary of the Chinese Daoguang Emperor in an attempt to stop opium smuggling by the British led to the First Opium War (1839–1842), in which Britain defeated China. After 1860, opium use continued to increase with widespread domestic production in China. By 1905, an estimated 25 percent of the male population were regular consumers of the drug. Recreational use of opium elsewhere in the world remained rare into late in the 19th century, as indicated by ambivalent reports of opium usage. [44] In 1906, 41,000 tons were produced, but because 39,000 tons of that year's opium were consumed in China, overall usage in the rest of the world was much lower. [48] These figures from 1906 have been criticized as overestimates. [49] A Chinese opium house; photographed in 1902 The Greek gods Hypnos (Sleep), Nyx (Night), and Thanatos (Death) were depicted wreathed in poppies or holding them. Poppies also frequently adorned statues of Apollo, Asclepius, Pluto, Demeter, Aphrodite, Kybele and Isis, symbolizing nocturnal oblivion. [1] Islamic societies (500–1500 CE) [ edit ] Opium users in Java during the Dutch colonial period, c. 1870