A North Carolina man was arrested last month when police discovered an acre of opium poppies growing in his yard. Use of opium as a cure-all was reflected in the formulation of mithridatium described in the 1728 Chambers Cyclopedia, which included true opium in the mixture. While opium is rarely used recreationally in the UK today, it has a long and colourful history of use worldwide – see below. Methods of use

Legal opium production is allowed under the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and other international drug treaties, subject to strict supervision by the law enforcement agencies of individual countries. The leading legal production method is the Robertson- Gregory process, whereby the entire poppy, excluding roots and leaves, is mashed and stewed in dilute acid solutions. The alkaloids are then recovered via acid-base extraction and purified. The exact date of its discovery is unknown, but it was described by Wurtz in his Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliquée published in 1868. [135]

In 2021, the International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded that opium is a Group 1 (sufficient evidence) human carcinogen, causing cancers of the larynx, lung, and urinary bladder. [154] Slang terms [ edit ] Somogyi AA, Larsen M, Abadi RM, Jittiwutikarn J, Ali R, White JM: Flexible dosing of tincture of opium in the management of opioid withdrawal: pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2008 Nov;66(5):640-7. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2125.2008.03277.x. [ Article]

Hanes, W. Travis; Sanello, Frank (2002). Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another. Sourcebooks. ISBN 9781402201493. . popular history. a b Marshall, Jonathan (1976). "Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–1945". Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. 8 (3): 19–48. doi: 10.1080/14672715.1976.10404414. The standard medical use of opium persisted well into the 19th century. US president William Henry Harrison was treated with opium in 1841, and in the American Civil War, the Union Army used 175,000lb (80,000kg) of opium tincture and powder and about 500,000 opium pills. [1] During this time of popularity, users called opium "God's Own Medicine". [36]Heroin, the first semi-synthetic opioid, was first synthesized in 1874, but was not pursued until its rediscovery in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann at the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany. From 1898 to 1910 heroin was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. Because the lethal dose of heroin was viewed as a hundred times greater than its effective dose, heroin was advertised as a safer alternative to other opioids. [104] By 1902, sales made up 5 percent of the company's profits, and "heroinism" had attracted media attention. [105] Oxycodone, a thebaine derivative similar to codeine, was introduced by Bayer in 1916 and promoted as a less-addictive analgesic. Preparations of the drug such as oxycodone with paracetamol and extended release oxycodone remain popular to this day. [ citation needed] Baumler, Alan (2007). The Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse Than Floods and Wild Beasts. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0791469538. 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. Lowes, Peter D. (1966). The Genesis of International Narcotics Control. Librairie Droz. ISBN 978-2-600-04030-3. Heydari, M; Hashempur, M. H.; Zargaran, A (2013). "Medicinal aspects of opium as described in Avicenna's Canon of Medicine". Acta medico-historica Adriatica. 11 (1): 101–12. PMID 23883087.

a b c d e f g h i j Paul L. Schiff Jr. (2002). "Opium and its alkaloids". American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. Archived from the original on October 21, 2007 . Retrieved May 8, 2007. In the 16th century the Portuguese became aware of the lucrative medicinal and recreational trade of opium into China, and from their factories across Asia chose to supply the Canton System, to satisfy both the medicinal and the recreational use of the drug. By 1729 the Yongzheng Emperor had criminalised the new recreational smoking of opium in his empire. Chen P, Braithwaite RA, George C, Hylands PJ, Parkin MC, Smith NW, Kicman AT: The poppy seed defense: a novel solution. Drug Test Anal. 2014 Mar;6(3):194-201. doi: 10.1002/dta.1590. Epub 2013 Dec 12. [ Article] 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

Drinks Menu

a b Hevia, James Louis (2003). "Opium, Empire, and Modern History" (PDF). China Review International. 10 (2): 307–326. doi: 10.1353/cri.2004.0076. ISSN 1527-9367. S2CID 143635262. Smoking of opium came on the heels of tobacco smoking and may have been encouraged by a brief ban on the smoking of tobacco by the Ming emperor. The prohibition ended in 1644 with the coming of the Qing dynasty, which encouraged smokers to mix in increasing amounts of opium. [1] In 1705, Wang Shizhen wrote, "nowadays, from nobility and gentlemen down to slaves and women, all are addicted to tobacco." Tobacco in that time was frequently mixed with other herbs (this continues with clove cigarettes to the modern day), and opium was one component in the mixture. Tobacco mixed with opium was called madak (or madat) and became popular throughout China and its seafaring trade partners (such as Taiwan, Java, and the Philippines) in the 17th century. [47] In 1712, Engelbert Kaempfer described addiction to madak: "No commodity throughout the Indies is retailed with greater profit by the Batavians than opium, which [its] users cannot do without, nor can they come by it except it be brought by the ships of the Batavians from Bengal and Coromandel." [20] The first problem for do-it-yourself growers is that it would be hard to plant enough poppies to make an appreciable amount of drug without being noticed, Wankel said. The plants can grow more than 3 feet (0.9 meters) tall and are topped with brightly colored flowers that look a bit like frilly tulips. Any reasonably sized plot of these flowers would easily stand out in terrestrial or aerial surveys done by law enforcement agencies, Wankel said. The protein binding of the alkaloids that form opium, such as morphine and codeine, can range from 20-60% depending on the specific alkaloid. The highest binding proteins for opium alkaloids are albumin and beta-globulin II. 5 Metabolism Liu HC, Ho HO, Liu RH, Yeh GC, Lin DL: Urinary excretion of morphine and codeine following the administration of single and multiple doses of opium preparations prescribed in Taiwan as "brown mixture". J Anal Toxicol. 2006 May;30(4):225-31. [ Article]

Imports of opium into China stood at 200 chests annually in 1729, [1] when the first anti-opium edict was promulgated. [2] [3] By the time Chinese authorities reissued the prohibition in starker terms in 1799, [4] the figure had leaped; 4,500 chests were imported in the year 1800. [1] The decade of the 1830s witnessed a rapid rise in opium trade, [5] and by 1838, just before the First Opium War, it had climbed to 40,000 chests. [5] The rise continued on after the Treaty of Nanking (1842) that concluded the war. By 1858 annual imports had risen to 70,000 chests (4,480 long tons (4,550t)), approximately equivalent to global production of opium for the decade surrounding the year 2000. [6] Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (841–926)". Saudi Aramco World. January 2002 . Retrieved January 12, 2008.

United States Congress Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Communist china and illicit narcotic traffic. 1955年: United States Government Printing Office. OCLC 6466332. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location ( link) Opium is most commonly smoked but can also be eaten raw, made into a pill or made into a tincture for drinking. Law Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine: a note on pharmaceutics" . Retrieved June 6, 2007.