An alternative Turkish opium from Constantinople was a redder brown and sold in small lens-shaped cakes covered with poppy leaves whilst Persian opium from Yezd and Isfahan, where the Persian trade was centred, was usually dark brown and came in the form of sticks wrapped in grease-proof paper and tied about with cotton twine, or cones weighing grams.
Egyptian opium was formed into round, flattened cakes like ice hockey pucks, was reddish in colour and quite hard. Aficionados, dealers, merchants and users were expert at assessing quality and strength in each and every variety and cargo. Opium was judged with all the finesse of a tea or coffee blender, the pertinent factors being its colour, weight, density, water content and granularity.
Many traders could identify and judge the quality of individual samples just as experienced wine tasters can tell the vintage of a bottle of claret and from which vineyard it comes. When and how man first discovered the potency of opium is hard to ascertain: he has been familiar with it since prehistoric times.
The nineteenth century botanist, George Watts, suggested man came upon the poppy's secret by stages of gradual awareness. Watts conjectured that humans aesthetically appreciated the poppy for its flower before they came to use it as a vegetable: certainly, it was eaten in salads in India as recently as the s, although this may have been for its medicinal qualities.
The juice was then found to make a refreshing drink when diluted with water and, eventually, the neat juice would be discovered to have narcotic effects inducing feelings of contentment and capable of numbing pain. However that first discovery might have been made, today it is known that opiates can be swallowed, smoked, injected, sniffed, inhaled or absorbed through mucous membranes.
How it is taken affects the intensity and speed with which it has an effect upon the brain and the whole body. Historically, there have been only two basic ways to indulge in opium: one was to eat it, the other to smoke it.
Opium eating refers, in effect, to the general swallowing of it for as well as eating it in solid form it is also possible to drink raw opium dissolved in a variety of liquids. Opium in solution might well have been the first common method of taking it as, before the technique of cutting the pods to allow the sap to ooze out, the whole poppy head was crushed and mixed with wine or honey and water.
Such a solution served more than one purpose for raw opium has a bitter taste and eating it neat would not have been easy: indeed, raw opium can induce severe vomiting. Despite this, it was taken orally in India for over years, the dictum going that efficacy improved with unpalatability. In , it was recorded the Turks ate opium for pleasure but disguised the bitterness with nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon or mace and served it with saffron or ambergris. Even then, it was essentially a medicine and regarded as an aphrodisiac.
In Europe, opium was mixed with wine or wine and sugar or honey. It had to be concentrated before it could be used. A method of preparing opium for smoking was published in the British Pharmacopoeia in the early nineteenth century:.
Once the extract was produced, the opium mass had been reduced by about 50 per cent, the concentration more or less doubled. Known in China as chan du, the pills were round, pea-sized, dark-coloured and stiffly malleable. A traditional opium pipe was quite unlike that used by tobacco smokers. There were variations but basically it consisted of a broad tube often made of a length of bamboo about 5 centimetres in diameter and perhaps 50 centimetres long with a smaller, usually metal, tube protruding about two-thirds of the way down, ending in a tiny cup or bowl up to 2 centimetres across.
In typical Chinese pipes, the bowl was a hollow chamber with a tiny hole in the roof. The would-be smoker reclined on his side and held the pipe in one hand. With the other he took a thin metal spike or needle about 15 centimetres long, impaling the pill of opium on the end.
This task of preparing the pill was traditionally carried out in opium dens by small boys who were, on occasion, also catamites. If the pill was too moist, it was dried over the flame of a small, specifically designed spirit lamp which produced a fierce hot spot above a toughened glass cowl.
With the desired consistency achieved, the opium was spread around the base of the bowl or placed over the hole of the hollow bowl by inserting the spike into the hole and pulling it free, the index and second fingers of the pipe hand holding it in place.
The bowl was then inverted over the spirit lamp until the opium pill melted and began to vaporise. At this moment, the smoker took a very deep breath and sucked air rich with opium fumes through the main tube. Some early Chinese pipes were similar to hookahs, the fumes drawn through water or scented liquid before inhalation. The action was ideally done in one large inhalation for the opium was quick to vaporise: a pipe took between fifteen and thirty seconds to run its course. The pipe characteristically whistled while the opium was drawn in.
As the smoker inhaled, he sometimes manipulated the opium with a needle-like probe to keep an air-hole open and to force the opium into the chamber of the bowl. Unvaporised opium, or vapour which had not been inhaled, solidified on the interior of the pipes: needless to say, old pipes had a value because they were coated with a residue of raw opium which could be recycled. Known as 'dross', it was a mixture of charcoal, empyreumatic oil and opium and was sold as pills to the poor or mixed with tobacco, tea or some other material smoked by them.
The inhaled fumes were retained as long as the smoker could hold his breath, exhalation made only through the nostrils to gain the best advantage of the fumes: what the lungs did not absorb, the nose might take in. A first-time user was usually nauseated by his pipe but this effect passed after two or three further pipes, diminishing with each. Experienced smokers would take three or four pipes in quick succession, a pipe consisting of one pill.
His smoking over, the smoker fell into a deep but not refreshing sleep which could last from fifteen minutes with one pipe to several hours. Upon waking, there were no after-effects, such as a hangover. The smoker was subdued and calm, in a state of extreme lassitude. The habit of reclining to smoke opium had its origins in China but was not essential: it was, however, convenient for the smoker would quickly fall asleep after his pipe, the effects of which were quite rapid.
As Jean Cocteau, the French writer and opium addict, observed: 'Of all drugs "the drug" is the most delicate. The lungs instantaneously assimilate its smoke. The effect of a pipe is immediate. The method of smoking opium has not changed and, in the few places were it is still smoked today, such as the Shan states of north-east Burma now called the Union of Myanmar , China, Laos and Thailand, the technique and paraphernalia survive.
Opium smoking is in fact legal in some countries, notably in the Middle East, where it is sold as sticks about the size of a hot dog sausage. One does not have to be an addict, or an eater or smoker, to come under the effect of opium: passive consumption is possible. Walking through a field of incised pods can induce mild effects and poppy farmers can tell when the time to harvest is nigh because they wake in the morning with severe headaches and even nausea.
Harvesters may absorb opium through their skin and excise officers and traders who come into frequent contact with it can also be affected. Opium is still consumed by the traditional means of eating and smoking in Third World countries, especially in those where it is produced, but in more technologically advanced nations opium is not widely used today. Its derivative, heroin, is the main opiate of addiction and there are several ways in which that drug can be taken.
Unlike opium, heroin is rarely swallowed because this is an ineffectual method of consumption but it is frequently smoked, either mixed with tobacco in a hand-rolled reefer or 'joint', or inserted into a cigarette filter tip. Smoking is, however, a relatively inefficient way of taking heroin and requires a high purity to be effective. The best non-injectable way to use heroin is to sniff it in powder form through the nostrils - a method known as 'snorting' - which allows absorption into the bloodstream through the nasal mucous membranes.
The quickest, most effective way to take heroin is to inject it. This requires certain equipment: a cooker usually a large spoon , a source of flame and a hypodermic syringe. And with the identification of this gene, scientists now know all the genes needed to engineer a single strain of yeast to produce opiates like morphine.
Graham predicts that within the next year, someone will be able to engineer yeast to undergo the entire process, but echoes Smolke that it will be a while before opiate production in yeast will be commercially viable. For now, let the poppies keep blooming. Contributor Twitter. Are they orange? I told him that mine were both lavender and red.
About two feet tall, came with the house. I called several experienced gardeners, hoping to get a clearer picture of the risk involved. Both stories sounded apocryphal, but they turned out to be true.
I phoned a radio call-in gardening show, asking the resident expert whether I needed to worry about the opium poppies growing in my garden. No one had heard of an actual bust, and most of the gardeners I spoke to seemed blithely unconcerned when I apprised them of the theoretical peril.
Some treated me carefully, as though it was paranoid of me to worry. For my first poppy was on the verge of bloom. It was the first week of July when I noticed at the end of one slender, downward-nodding stem a bud the size of a cherry, covered in a soft, hairy down. By the following morning the stem had drawn itself up to its full four-foot height and the petals—five deltas of rich red silk freaked with black—had completely unfurled, casting off their calyx and fuming to face the sun.
That solitary exquisite bloom was followed the next day by three more equally formidable dabs of pigment, then six, then a dozen, until my poppy patch was a terrific, traffic-stopping blur of color, of a red so red as to be platonic.
The lavender blooms of another variety followed a few days later, a cooler but no less pure jolt of color. When the sun stood behind them, toward evening, the petals were as luminous as stained glass.
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