Milk of Paradise Read online

  Milk of Paradise

  A History of Opium

  LUCY INGLIS

  To the memory of my father, and his indefatigable curiosity.

  And his delight in reading the closest thing to hand, whether that was his trigonometry, cereal boxes, the telephone book or the old newspapers when he should have been lighting the fire. But never this book.

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Introduction

  PART ONE: Ópion, afyūn, opium

  1. The Ancient World

  2. The Islamic Golden Age to the Renaissance

  3. The Silver Triangle and the Creation of Hong Kong

  PART TWO: In the Arms of Morpheus

  4. The Romantics Meet Modern Science

  5. The China Crisis

  6. The American Disease

  PART THREE: Heroin

  7. A New Addiction, Prohibition and the Rise of the Gangster

  8. From the Somme to Saigon

  9. Afghanistan

  10. Heroin Chic, HIV and Generation Oxy

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. A white opium poppy (public domain)

  2. A photo of scarified opium poppy heads during the harvest in Kandahar, Afghanistan (© Scott Nelson/Getty Images)

  3. The terracotta figurine of the Poppy Goddess (© Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

  4. A fresco detail from the House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii (© Private Collection/Accademia Italiana, London/Bridgeman Images)

  5. The medical school at Salerno, showing the arrival of Robert, Duke of Normandy (Library of the University of Bologna [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  6. The Mercator projection (Gerardus Mercator [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  7. An engraving of Thomas Sydenham (© Wellcome Collection)

  8. An engraving of Paracelsus (© Wellcome Collection)

  9. The Engel-Apotheke of Friedrich Jacob Merck (Unknown [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  10. A portrait of Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive of Plassey (© Powis Castle, Wales, UK/National Trust Photographic Library/Bridgeman Images)

  11. ‘The Stacking Room’ of the British East India Company’s opium factory (© Contraband Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

  12. The British East India Company’s iron steam ship Nemesis (© Edward Duncan [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  13. An early image of Hong Kong, c.1850 (© Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA, USA/Bridgeman Images)

  14. Signing of the Treaty of Tientsin, 1858 (Unknown [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  15. A trade card depicting Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, 1887 (© Private Collection/J. T. Vintage/Bridgeman Images)

  16. A photo of Alexander Wood’s hypodermic syringe (© Wellcome Collection)

  17. A scene in an opium den depicting a Chinese man offering a pipe to an American woman (© Bettmann)

  18. Studio portrait of Fee Lee Wong with his family (Courtesy Deadwood History, Inc., Adams Museum Collection, Deadwood, SD)

  19. Molecular diagram of diacetylmorphine (NEUROtiker (own work) [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  20. Songs of the Temperance Movement and Prohibition (M. Evans; Gray, M., San Francisco, 1874, monographic [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  21. An advert for Bayer Pharmaceutical Products, c.1900 (Unknown [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  22. A painting of the Battle of Manila (© akg-images/Science Source)

  23. A photograph of Du Yuesheng as a young man (© akg-images/Pictures From History)

  24. A photo of the opium man of Mehrangarh Fort (courtesy of the author)

  25. A mugshot of Lucky Luciano (© akg-images/Science Source)

  26. A photo of Frank Lucas wearing a chinchilla coat and hat outside Madison Square Garden (© Wil Blanche/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)

  27. A photo of a wounded marine during OP Prairie, South Vietnam (© Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Image)

  28. First Lady Nancy Reagan speaking at a ‘Just Say No’ rally, 1987 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

  29. An ambulance at Camp Bastion, April 2011 (Sergeant Alison Baskerville RLC/MOD [OGL – http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/1/], via Wikimedia Commons)

  30. US Marines walk through a poppy field in Helmand Province, 2011 (© BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images)

  31. An image of OxyContin tablets (© Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘The only thing that is good is poppies. They are gold.’1

  In mankind’s search for temporary oblivion, opiates possess a special allure. For a short time, there is neither pain, nor fear of pain. Since Neolithic times, opium has made life seem if not perfect, then tolerable, for millions. However unlikely it seems at this moment, many of us will end our lives dependent upon it.

  Indefensible but as yet indispensable, the opium poppy, and now its chemical mimics, endure and multiply. They cross continents, religions, cultures, languages and time. Milk of Paradise attempts to address this long history and the current, often galling compromises to be made as the world moves towards a model that is based increasingly upon the control of natural resources and expanding alternative economies. It is a journey from the ancient world to present-day America, along routes of legal and illegal commerce that belt the globe.

  This book charts the evolution of one drug, although others feature in cameo roles. It seeks to provide a non-partisan view of this remarkable substance, and to dispel at least some of the myths surrounding opiates and the uses we put them to, and why. It began, in part, in London’s Farringdon Station, in 2002, when I was forced by necessity to avail myself of the desperately squalid public convenience there at the time. As a child of the Reagans’ ‘Just Say No’ campaign, the filthy, fluorescent-lit and heavily graffitied single cubicle was the stuff of bad dreams, only to be used in a dire emergency. By the sink, staring into the mirror, was a grubby young woman in baggy clothing who, startled by my urgent entrance, dropped what she was holding into the sink with a clatter. The obligatory tiny wrapped parcel, the spoon and syringe were there, and also a rubber band. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said immediately, flustered, and began to gather up her precious stuff. Pushing past me, out into what was not the gleaming commuter hub visible today, but at the time a grim focus for central London’s flotsam of homeless and addicts, she apologized again. It wasn’t me she was apologizing to.

  Since that encounter, I have witnessed and experienced diamorphine used in medical surroundings, where everything is clean and warm, and I trusted those administering the drug. As a carer for dying family members, I have juggled my charges’ morphine doses, wondering whether five milligrams more will mean we can just make it home, or through the night without incident, and drunk liquid morphine to prove that ‘Come on, it’s really not that bitter.’ It really is that bitter. I have also watched as diamorphine induced respiratory failure in those people, over a period of hours and days, as their lives came to an end as peacefully as possible. And I have been impossibly grateful for a drug that allowed them to continue to live well, even as they were in the process of dying.

  The research this book has entailed, although set in motion by personal experience and a cursed curiosity, has been both desk- and field-based. The former attempts, in the main, to reduce opiates, and now opioids, to a numbers game: kilograms seized, hectares burned, numbers arrested. The latter contains the human stories of addiction and recovery, of war, and treatment from both ends of the doctor–patient spectrum,
but above all, the existential needs that drive humanity to seek the temporary relief opiates provide. It has been a transformative experience: exposing me to the reality of a global economy I had only a vague notion of before, and a redrawing of the world map not only in terms of borders, but a lack of them. Organized crime, in its purest form, is simply another economy, borderless and amoral. The importance of personal relationships and credit lines are not only mechanisms in the legal economy, they are equally if not much more powerful in illegal economies. These networks operate increasingly on efficient corporate models of collaboration and middle management. Notions of what is transgressive, illicit and ultimately illegal have changed dramatically over time, and continue to change as the world’s governments and drug-enforcement agencies fight turf battles in an international war.

  Milk of Paradise is divided into three parts: the stories of opium, morphine and heroin. Part One is a history of the opium poppy, its earliest relationships with mankind, and its transformation into one of the first commodities traded between the West and the East. Part Two concerns the isolation of morphine from opium, and the revolutionary scientific and political changes, as well as chemical discoveries that transformed the West in the nineteenth century, and set us on a course that, as it accelerated, changed the face of the world, from Tombstone, Arizona to the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan. The third and final part covers the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the first years of commercially available heroin, the associated growth of Big Pharma and the present-day US opioid crisis, and charts the successive global wars on and involving drugs, as well as treatment, prohibition and attempts at the suppression of the trade in heroin and its derivatives. Because of the major roles they have played in the establishment and continuation of the opiate trade, the book focusses mainly on Britain, Europe and America.

  Ultimately, Milk of Paradise is a tale of the many interwoven human stories that make up the history of our relationship with this fascinating compound. Taken together, they show us how opium has developed and how it will go forward. Historically, it is central to the advances in modern medicine, and the Eastern Triangular Trade, along with tea and bullion. The Opium Wars in the middle of the nineteenth century helped lay the foundations of Hong Kong, and of modern China. The drug has played a key role in conflicts from the American Civil War, to Vietnam and to Afghanistan, where Camp Bastion was a pioneering field hospital in the middle of the world’s largest illicit poppy plantations. Scientifically, opium and its many derivatives lie at the heart of the surgical and pharmaceutical industries. Socially, the drug is both a tremendous force for good and an indescribable evil. It gives comfort to millions daily as part of a lucrative healthcare system, yet it creates addictions that fuel the worst kinds of degradation and exploitation, and plays a major role in all layers of worldwide crime. Our relationship with opium is a deep-seated part of our human history, and a critical part of our future.

  Therefore, perhaps it is fitting that I write this introduction in Fort Cochin, an old colonial outpost on the Malabar Coast of southern India, which was once a great trading port with ties as far away as Mexico. An even greater one, Muziris, dominated by Jewish, Arab and Chinese traders and lost since 1346, has just been rediscovered by archaeologists some twenty miles up the coast. Once one of the world’s greatest hubs for exotic goods and spices, the only map of Muziris – if it can be called a map at all – is a copy of one that may be as early as the fourth century AD, which resides in a museum in Vienna and which is itself a copy of a first-century BC map by Agrippa.

  European and Middle Eastern travellers have been borne to this coast for millennia, albeit now by Boeing rather than across the ocean by the monsoon winds. Fort Cochin is a romantic place, at once familiar and exotic. Every few minutes the precarious passenger ferry spears up to the wharf and tips out a hundred or so commuters and a dozen auto-rickshaws from the mainland. People rush to go about their business against the backdrop of the huge, cantilevered fishing nets, introduced to this spot by Chinese traders in the fourteenth century. On a new, half-built rubble quay, day-labourers sit and drink whisky. Others sleep nearby, despite or perhaps because of the early hour. Cochin is like any large port: an amalgam of those it trades with, and Cochin has been trading for centuries. European influences, namely Portuguese, Dutch and British, are everywhere, from the tomb of legendary navigator Vasco da Gama and the church that houses it, just visible from my vantage point, to the quasi-British lanes of houses behind. A mosque and a synagogue – where a gravestone dating from 1268 bears the inscription ‘Here Lies Sarah’ – sit only a short walk apart. One Dutch writer of the 1660s recorded how the inhabitants of the coast lived well, eating from coconut cups, drinking coconut toddy, the soldiers eating opium for strength, which the Dutch, of course, attempted to ban. Later, from a dusty pavement, I will stop and stand outside the wall of a school and hear the girls singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ over the noise as they clear their steel thali plates away from lunch. A few minutes after that, I ask at the government, female-run pharmacy for a legally contentious cough medicine I know contains morphine, and some codeine pills. The neat, stern pharmacist will tut at me, and then point to another pharmacy across the road, where men sit outside, and what I ask for is readily available, for the equivalent of around £1.80. The elderly man next to me has enough coins for a strip of generic beta-blockers and two blue low-dose morphine pills, which he dry-swallows immediately. Just down the road, the government beer and wine shop is doing a roaring trade, even as this part of India edges towards alcohol prohibition.

  But for now, I look out towards the vast new port under construction on the other side of the river: Vallarpadam. Financed from over 1,700 miles away by the royal family of Dubai, it will be the largest-capacity container port in the world when the third phase of construction is complete. Unable to resist, I begin to scribble down rough, outrageous estimates of the amount of heroin that will pass through the port annually, based on comparable and laughably inadequate figures from Rotterdam. Thousands and thousands of kilos, billions of dollars, figures so large that zeros become redundant. In illegal opiates alone, Vallarpadam will be a city state to rival fifteenth-century Venice. As I write, the labourers continue to drink and sleep, and the passenger ferry arrives again with its cargo of office workers, housewives and hawkers. Behind it, colossal vessels come and go, fore and aft declaring their various origins across the world; but as Thomas Jefferson observed, ‘Merchants know no country’.

  Fort Cochin, February 2017

  PART ONE

  Ópion, afyūn, opium

  Chapter One

  THE ANCIENT WORLD

  Origins

  There is no such thing as a wild opium poppy.1 Its ancestor originated on the Anatolian coast of the Black Sea and no longer exists.2 Papaver somniferum is a domesticated species and, along with coca, tobacco and the earliest wheat and barley cultivars, represents one of mankind’s earliest attempts at genetic engineering, over 5,000 years ago.3

  The origins of Papaver somniferum are elusive, and opinion remains divided on whether cultivation of the opium poppy began in the western Mediterranean, or in the Near East. Botanists and biogeographers believe the closest existing relative to the opium poppy is the wild, dwarf variety Papaver setigerum, widespread in the western Mediterranean for millennia.4 The wild poppy, however, although it does contain small amounts of alkaloids in the latex (the milky liquid contained inside the head), does not contain them in sufficient levels to be of any medicinal or recreational use. Taxonomists around the world even vary on how many poppy species exist, identifying between 250 and 470.5 In lieu of concrete evidence, all that remains is to trace botanical and archaeological clues to the use of the opium poppy through the ancient world.

  Somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, prehistoric man started to move away from the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the past, towards a more settled culture. People began living in villages, domesticating pla
nts and animals, and building social structures and religious models that are the foundations of the societies we live in today. The earliest known of these Neolithic sites lie between Greece and Iran, and stretch to the Black Sea in the north and the Sinai peninsula in the south.6 A crescent of fortuitous agricultural conditions existed in Egypt, spreading east through modern Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, then down through southern Iraq to the Persian Gulf. On ancient maps these were Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia. This area had long been the meeting point of two different societies: the mountain people of the north, and the nomadic tribes who wandered the grasslands in shifting patterns of cultivation. Within both societies were many different tribes, making war and unrest a constant cycle.

  This Fertile Crescent is often also called the Cradle of Civilization, referring to the development of the first cities, writing, and the study of history, trade, science and organized religion. It is an area of tremendous importance to the history of the modern human race.

  The Natufians of the Levant were among the first settled people. Tell Abu Hureyra, their earliest known village, lies in Syria, where an abundant crop of wild cereals was turned into a farmed one perhaps as far back as 13,000 years ago. The site was excavated extensively, if rapidly, in 1972–3, before it was flooded to create Lake Assad. The Natufian community grew from a few hundred people hunting gazelle and foraging for food, into a large village of perhaps 2,000 individuals who kept sheep as well as cultivating the land.7 They were not only coalescing into structured communities, but they were also forming relationships with the world around them: one of the earliest discoveries relating to human domestication of dogs was found at Ain Mallaha in Israel, sixteen miles north of the Sea of Galilee, where around 12,000 years ago an elderly human was buried with a puppy.8 Modern man was becoming someone we could recognize today.