Spring 2018

6 New Mexico Dental Journal, Spring 2018 By Shelly Fritz— New Mexico Dental Journal Editor Hul Gil, the joy plant, was cultivated in 3400 BC in the Sumerian Empirewhere Iraq is today. (It was probably usedway before this time, but this is the first written record of its use.) The unripe poppy pod (seed capsule) is lanced letting the resin/sap/liquid leak out for harvesting. The poppy because of its euphoric effects used in medicine, religious rites and for recreation was passed to the Assyrians to the Babylonians to the Egyptians. This took about 2,000 years. So by the time Thutmose IV, Akhenaton and Tutankhamen were in their reigns, the drug was traded by the Phoenicians and Minoans around the Mediterranean Sea to Carthage, Greece and the rest of Europe. In 460 BC Hippocrates describes its usefulness as a narcotic and in the treatment of diseases of women and for the eradication of epidemics. By 330 BC Alexander the Great imported opium to Persia and India. Arab traders from Egypt introduced opium to China around AD 400. Avicenna of Persia teaches that opium is “the most powerful of stupefacients” (great word). Indian medical texts discuss opium use for diarrhea and sexual disabilities in the 1200’s. There is no written record of opium during the medieval years in Europe because the Holy Inquisition labeled anything from the East was from the Devil. In the 1500’s, the Portuguese initiated the smoking of opium along the East China Sea while the Chinese considered the practice barbaric and subversive. In 1527 Paracelsus combines opium thebaicum, citrus juice and a little gold into a black pill, knownas ‘Stones of Immorality’ or laudanum, usedas apainkiller. The Persians in the 1600’s ate and drank opium concoctions for recreational use. Elizabeth I directed the purchase of the best Indian opium for use in England. The Indian Rajput soldiers in the mid 1600’s were given opium every day. And in 1637 opium became themain commodity of British tradewith China. Thomas Sydenham introduced his laudanum—opium, sherry wine and some herbs—in pill form for a remedy of numerous aliments. In the 1700’s the Dutch introduced smoking opium in a tobacco pipe to the Chinese because tobacco use was prohibited by the Emperor. Even though various Emperors prohibited the use of opium for recreational use, they eventually banned it. The British East India Company created an opium monopoly in India and continued to sell opium to China through contraband trade of silver smuggled out of China. In the 1800’s the British Levant Company purchased almost half of the opium coming out of Smynra, Turkey just for the importation to Europe and the US. In 1803 Friedrich Serturner of Paderborn, Germany dissolved opium in an acid and then neutralized it with ammonia creating morphine. In the early 1800’s, Boston smugglers and John Jacob Astor’s American Fur company traded in Turkish opium to Canton and then later sold it only to England increasing his fortune. E. Merck & Company in Germany commercially manufactured morphine. John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and other literary personalities used opium, and Thomas De Quincy wrote his autobiography of opium addiction, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . China ordered all foreign traders to surrender their opium. The British clashed, and the First Opium War began. By 1842 the Chinese were defeated and paid reparations of $21,000,000 to Queen Vitoria. This led to the Second Opium War and the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1856 after paying more money to the English. 150 years later in 1910 the Chinese convinced the British to dismantle the India-China opium trade. To this day China sees the Opium Wars as shameful and still wants to get back at the West. In1843Dr. AlexanderWood inEdinburghadministeredmorphine with a syringe and found the effects were instantaneous and three times more potent. An English researcher, C.R. Wright, synthesized heroin by boiling morphine over a stove. Britain passed the Opium Act (1878) reducing opium consumption to registered Chinese opium smokers and Indian opium eaters in Britain. The Bayer Company produced diacetylmorphine and named it ‘heroin’ and sold it three years later. In the early 1900’s medical journals and physicians discussed the side effects of using heroin as a morphine step down cure and argued that Opioids: Then and Now