History of Opium

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:

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.