I covered the earlier years of opium history on an earlier blog. I found it really interesting to research and write about. I always thought that the opium problems were introduced by the Chinese. I was very mistaken. Lets explore some more of the history of Opium.

If you will remember Queen Elizabeth the first ordered her Navy to find the besty opium they could for trade a bit earlier. Then in 1780-1800 The British East India Company works very hard to create a near monopoly on the opium trade in India and China, mostly this is due to its political influence.

It was in 1803 a scientist ,Friedrich Sertuerner, isolates morphine from opium. It was named after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep.
1821 Thomas DeQuincey publishes Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

1827 The German chemical company E. Merck & Company became the first.
commercial manufacturer of morphine.

1839 All foreign traders are ordered to give up their opium by the Imperial Commissioner of China . The arrival of British send warships is the beginning of the First Opium War. The war went on until 1841 when the Chinese lose the First Opium War; the British take over Hong Kong at this point.

1843 Dr. Alexander Wood invents thehypodermic syringe It has the first hollow needle.

1852 finds that the British are importing opium to Burma.

1856 The Second Opium War is started and ended. At this time, opium becomes legal in China.

Opiates form such a large amount of our addictive drugs. I thought I would do an article on the history of opium. It has a very long history; in fact back to the stone age. In this article I will cover only up to the 1800s. Watch for part two of this history in later blogs. Contrary to common belief the Chinese were not behind the worlds opium problems at the start.

Ready for Harvest

In lower Mesopotamia Hul Gil or “Joy Plant” was in evidence as early as c.3400 B.C. Opium poppies were cultivated in lower Mesopotamia. The Sumerians passed the plant to the Assyrians as well as the euphoric effects of the plant. Poppy culling continued from the Assyrians to the Babylonians who passed their knowledge of the plant on to the Egyptians

In c. 1300 B.C. in Thebes the cultivation of opium thebaicum by the Egyptians was grown in their poppy fields. During the reign of King Tut and Thutmose IV, and Akhenaton, the opium trade flourished. The trade route included the Phoenicians and Minoans who transported opium across the Mediterranean Sea to Greece, Carthage and Europe.

On the Island of the Cyprus the people designed surgical quality culling knives to harvest the opium in about c. 1100 B.C. They would cultivate and trade opium and also made use of smoking opium before the fall of Troy.

Hippocrates who is considered the father of medicine didn’t think much of the attributes of opium and dismisses it as magical in about c. 460 B.C. but acknowledges it as a useful narcotic and a styptic in treating internal diseases and epidemics

Alexander the Great introduces the drug to the people of Persia and India in about 330 B.C.

It is in A.D. 400 that Opium from the Egyptian fields is first introduced to China by Arab traders.