Milk of Paradise

by Lucy Inglis

  From that compound or jungle gate, in some of the poorest countries in the world, heroin will fan across the globe in a constantly churning cycle of cash and consumption.

  Four years after beginning to write this book, the reality I live in is altered immeasurably. Last week, my husband watched me watching two men and a woman order a drink at a small bar in the south of France. With gaunt, lantern-jawed faces, stilted, mannered language, and hands that raked their itchy skin, they placed their glasses down with elaborate care as they passed the time. ‘That’s heroin,’ he said. ‘I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, and thought of those Afghan compounds and farm gates, as the woman in the group took a naked baby from a pushchair containing not bedding but only a plastic liner, and sat him on her lap, touching his spine with the absent, gentle care of petting a cat, half stroke and half scratch. They sat and talked, full of conversation and communal affection for the fractious child. A smartly dressed man came to sit with them and ordered a drink: the local doctor. He lit a cigarette before asking them how their days had been.

  ‘It’s everywhere, isn’t it,’ my husband remarked, to no one in particular, looking out into the sunny street.

  ‘Yes,’ I said again.

  As we sat and watched, the very ordinariness of it all made me remember the reasons I so badly wanted to write this book: that addictions of all kinds surround us, making us neither good nor bad, nor less human. They make us who we are. Our petty daily tallies, the small triumphs in the face of finality, are measured out in teaspoons for the billionaire and the street addict alike.

  Our reality is that humanity is yoked to opiates for the foreseeable future, whether we are casualties of war, surgery, chronic illness or pain; whether we are facing up to a compromised life or death itself. The mode of delivery may differ, but in every form, from a patch to a pill or an intravenous driver, we are all seeking the key that fits the lock in our bodies, minds and hearts. And this won’t end, nor should it. To struggle, to endure and to survive is all we can do, and it is as noble an endeavour as any. The natural world has offered humanity a compound that has evolved to ease our worst fears, and soothe horrendous physical torment. This single fact pulls social, economic, scientific and humanitarian factors into a churning morass of bliss, horror, luxury, depredation, good and evil. The gross crimes concerning opiates committed by gangsters, and by governments in the name of commercial freedom or human rights over the last two centuries, reveal the utter hypocrisy of those who purport to rule their kingdoms. Just as addicts seek to absent themselves from reality and physicians seek to doctor, businesses seek to profit and governments attempt to control. Within all of these parameters, economies are built, both legal and illegal, petty and international. And whether they be sidewalk dope dealers or pharmaceutical giants, merchants know no country, just as the search for even a glimpse of paradise is constant and without end.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The writing of this book has been a long process, the final form of which inevitably changed as the opioid crisis in America exploded. Huge thanks go to my editor, Georgina Morley, for her patience, encouragement and wisdom. Thanks also to David Milner, Laura Carr and everyone at Pan Macmillan for their great efforts on this book’s behalf. As ever, thanks to my agent Kirsty McLachlan, and all the team at David Godwin. Andy Johnston and Lucy Fisher have very kindly given me more professional and expert advice than they needed to, and certainly more of their time. The London, Wellcome and British Libraries have been, again, havens of knowledge and warmth, both human and physical. The London Library remains precious for its dedication to protect its community of writers, and their often precious hours.

  Thanks to the team of friends who are always looking out for and taking care of me: Fiona Kirkpatrick, Rory Maxwell, David Child and Clementine Fletcher.

  I must also thank Benno Grotz, finest of all neighbours, for his endless kindnesses great and small, and his Bavarian food. Richard Courtney and Kaye Michie have been wonderful cheerleaders and staunch allies. And many thanks to my oldest friend, Max Johnstone, soldier and trekker, because if at half past two on a Friday afternoon my phone rings, I know who it is.

  Thank you to my mother, Irene, and my sister, Sally, who have been invaluable sounding boards, and their faith in me and the manuscript has seen me through some very long Lincolnshire days and nights.

  Last and first, all my love and thanks to Richard, Mr Inglis, who has supported me through the writing of this book as he always does; with humour, stoicism and stern advice. Without him, it could not have been written.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Khan Bacha, poppy farmer, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, as reported by Associated Press, 14 November 2013.

  Chapter One: The Ancient World

  1. Mark Merlin, On the Trail of the Ancient Opium Poppy (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), pp.53–4.

  2. A. M. Niggorski, ‘Polypus and the Poppy: two unusual Rhyta from the Mycenean Cemetery at Mochlos’ in P. Betancourt, V. Karageorgis, R. Laffineur and W. Niemer (eds.), Meletemata: Studies in Aegean Archaeology Presented to Malcolm H. Wiener as He Enters His 65th Year (Université de Liège, 1999), pp.537–42.

  3. Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2012), p.16.

  4. Niggorski, pp.537–42; Daniel, Zohary, Domestication Of Plants In The Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe, and the Nile Valley (Oxford University Press, 2001), p.109.

  5. Merlin, p.28.

  6. Susan McCarter, Neolithic (Routledge, new edn, 2007), p.xii.

  7. Andrew Moore, Gordon Hillman and Anthony Legge, Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra (Oxford University Press, 2000).

  8. Juliet Clutton-Brock, ‘Origins of the dog: domestication and early history’ in James Serpell (ed.), The domestic dog: its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.11.

  9. Ofer Bar-Yosef, Avi Gopher, Eitan Tchernov and Mordechai Kislev, ‘Netiv Hagdud: An Early Neolithic Village Site in the Jordan Valley’, Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp.420–1.

  10. Disciplinary Committee Inquiry of the Greyhound Board of Great Britain, 13/10/2015, p.1.

  11. Jordi Juan-Tresserras and María Josefa Villalba, ‘Consumo de la adormidera (Papaver somniferum L.), en el Neolítico Peninsular: el enterramiento M28 del complejo minero de Can Tintorer’, Il Congrés del Neolític a la Península lherica SAGVNTVM-PLAV, Extra-2 (1999), pp.397–404.

  12. Robert Kunzig and Jennifer Tzar, ‘La Marmotta’, Discover, November 2002.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ferran Antolín and Ramon Buxó, ‘Chasing the traces of diffusion of agriculture during the Early Neolithic in the Western Mediterranean Coast’, Congrés Internacional Xarxes al Neolític – Neolithic Networks Rubricatum. Revista del Museu de Gavà, 5 (2012), p.96.

  15. Nicholas Postgate, Bronze Age Bureaucracy: Writing and the Practice of Government in Assyria (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p.112.

  16. Mark Golitko and Lawrence H. Keeley, ‘Beating back ploughshares into swords: warfare in the Linearbandkeramik’, Antiquity, 81 (2007), pp.332–42.

  17. Jan Harding and Frances Healy, A Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscape in Northamptonshire: The Raunds Area Project (English Heritage, 2008), p.36.

  18. Mark Robinson, ‘Macroscopic Plant Remains from The Wilsford Shaft, Wiltshire’, Ancient Monuments Laboratory Report, 55/88, pp.1–11.

  19. Jane McIntosh, Handbook of Life in Prehistoric Europe (Oxford University Press USA, 2009), p.107, and for details of the bodies, Gerald Brenan, South From Granada (Penguin, 2008), p.189.

  20. Trocki, p.16.

  21. R. Campbell Thompson, Assyrian Medical Texts From The Originals In The British Museum (Oxford University Press, 1923), p.112.

  22. Charles E. Terry and Mildred Pellens, The opium problem, For the Committee on Drug Addictions in collaboration w
ith the Bureau of social hygiene, inc. (New York, Bureau of Social Hygiene, 1928).

  23. Dr Erica Reiner, Assyriologist and philologist, Oriental Department, University of Chicago, quoted in Abraham D. Krikorian, ‘Were the Opium Poppy and Opium Known in the Ancient near East?’, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), p.102.

  24. Elena Marinova and Soultana-Maria Valamoti, ‘Crop Diversity and Choice in Prehistoric Southeastern Europe: Cultural and Environmental Factors Shaping the Archaebotanical Record of Northern Greece and Bulgaria’ in Alexandre Chevalier, Elena Marinova and Leonor Pena-Chocarro (eds.), Plants and People: Choices and Diversity through Time (Oxbow, 2014), p.72.

  25. Merlin, p.184.

  26. S. Marinatos, ‘The Volcanic Destruction of Minoan Crete’, Antiquity (1939), 13, pp.425–39.

  27. Joan Aruz, Sarah B. Graff and Yelena Rakic, Cultures in Contact: From Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean in the Second Millennium BC (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), pp.40–1.

  28. Mari tablet ARMT 21.432, 4–12, quoted in A. Bernard Knapp, ‘Spice, Drugs, Grain and Grog: Organic Goods in East Mediterranean Bronze Age Trade’ in Bronze Age Trade in the Mediterranean, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, 90 (P. Astroms Forlag, 1991).

  29. Helen Askitopoulou, Ioanna A. Ramoutsaki and Eleni Konsolaki, ‘Archaeological Evidence On The Use Of Opium In The Minoan World’, International Congress Series, Volume 1242 (December 2002), p.3.

  30. P. G. Kritikos and S. P. Papadaki, ‘UNODC – Bulletin On Narcotics – 1967 Issue 3 – 003’, Unodc.org. N.p., 2015. Web. 6 June 2015.

  31. C. Pedro Behn, ‘The Use of Opium in the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean’, Listy filologické / Folia philologica, Roč. 109, Čís. 4 (1986), p.195.

  32. V. Karageorghis, ‘A Twelfth-century BC Opium Pipe from Kition’, Antiquity (1976), p.125.

  33. Kritikos and Papadaki, ‘UNODC . . .’.

  34. Askitopoulou, Ramoutsaki and Konsolaki, pp.23–9.

  35. Ferribyboats.co.uk, ‘Information On The Possible Performance Of The Ferriby Boats’. N.p., 2015. Web. 6 December 2015.

  36. Hadjisavvas Sophocles, The Phoenician Period Necropolis of Kition, Volume I, Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications (2013), p.1.

  37. Behn, p.194.

  38. Silvia Ferrara, Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions: Volume 2: The Corpus (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.81, 126–7.

  39. Karageorghis, p.125.

  40. Behn, p.195.

  41. Giorgos Papantoniou, Religion and Social Transformations in Cyprus: From the Cypriot Basileis to the Hellenistic Strategos (Brill Academic Publishing, 2012), p.265.

  42. Kathryn Eriksson, ‘Cypriot ceramics in Egypt during the reign of Thutmosis III: the evidence of trade for synchronizing the Late Cypriot cultural sequence with Egypt at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age’, Proceedings of a Colloquium held in the Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, Stockholm, May 18–19, 2000, p.63.

  43. Behn, pp.193–7.

  44. Ibid.

  45. L. Kapoor, Opium Poppy: Botany, Chemistry, and Pharmacology (CRC Press, 1997), pp.2–3.

  46. Cynthia Clark Northrup, Encylopedia of World Trade From Ancient Times to the Present (Routledge, 2015), p.292.

  47. Merlin, p.213.

  48. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray (Loeb, 1995), Vol.1, p.135.

  49. P. G. Kritikos and S. P. Papadaki, ‘The history of the poppy and of opium and their expansion in antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean area’, Journal of the Archaeological Society of Athens, 1967, pp.17–38.

  50. Amelia Arenas and Hippocrates, ‘Hippocrates’ Oath’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 2010), pp.73–4.

  51. Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (Penguin, 1983), p.262.

  52. Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (Routledge, 1998), pp.118–19.

  53. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sleep.html, Part 3.

  54. John Scarborough, ‘Theophrastus on Herbals and Herbal Remedies’, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1978), pp.370–1.

  55. Trudy Ring (ed.), International Directory of Historic Places, Vol.3: Southern Europe (Dearborn Fitzroy, 1995), p.374. Opium and hemlock mixture: Valerius Maximus. II 6. 8, and Gabriel Welter, ‘Aristeides, Lawgiver of Keos’, Archaeological Journal, 1953–4, Vol. III, pp.158–9, as quoted in Kritikos and Papadaki, ‘The history of the poppy . . .’, pp.17–38.

  56. Flavia Frisone, ‘Norms and Change in Greek Funerary Rituals’, Construction of Consensus (Macmillan, 2011), pp.179–99.

  57. Zohara Yaniv and Nativ Dudai (eds.), Medicinal and Aromatic Plants of the Middle East (Springer, 2014), p.308.

  58. Wilhemina Jeemster Jashemski, The Natural History of Pompeii (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.139.

  59. John Scarborough, ‘Theophrastus on Herbals and Herbal Remedies’, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1978), p.372.

  60. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. Philemon Holland (1601); Edward Hamilton, The Flora Homeopathica, Vol. 1 (H. Balliere, 1852), p.293.

  61. J. Scarborough and V. Nutton, ‘The Preface of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica: Introduction, Translation and Commentary’, Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Vol.4, No.3 (1982), p.195.

  62. Dioscorides, De materia medica, Book IV, 64, quoted in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, Drugs and Narcotics in History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.13.

  63. John Scarborough, ‘The Opium Poppy in Roman and Hellenistic Medicine’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, Drugs and Narcotics in History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.16.

  64. Dioscorides, quoted in Mojtaba Heydari, Mohammad Hashem Hashempur and Arman Zargaran, ‘Medicinal Aspects Of Opium As Described In Avicenna’s Canon Of Medicine’, Acta Medico-Historica Adriatica 11 (1) (2013), p.103.

  65. Nicander of Colophon (2nd century BC), quoted in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, Drugs and Narcotics in History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.16.

  66. Galen, Anatomical Procedures, IX; 10:10 (Oxford University Press for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, 1956), pp.226–36.

  67. Maud W. Gleason, ‘Shock and Awe: the performance dimension of Galen’s anatomy demonstrations’, in Christopher Gill, Tim Whitmarsh, John Wilkins, Galen and the World of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.103.

  68. Julius Rocca, ‘Galen and the Uses of Trepanation’, in Robert Arnott, Stanley Finger, Chris Smith (eds.), Trepanation (Taylor & Francis, 2005), p.259.

  69. Gleason, pp.103–4.

  70. Galen XIV, 4, quoted in Thomas W. Africa, ‘The Opium Addiction of Marcus Aurelius’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), p.99.

  71. Ibid.

  72. V. Nutton, ‘The Drug Trade in Antiquity’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 78 (1985), pp.138–45.

  73. Svetlana Hautala, ‘The Circulation of Pharmaceutical Recipes in Antiquity as a Kind of Folklore’, PhD dissertation, University of Siena, p.1.

  74. Nutton, p.145.

  75. Quoted in Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World (Abacus, 2013), p.194.

  Chapter Two: The Islamic Golden Age to the Renaissance

  1. Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin, Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany (University of California Press, 2013), p.243.

  2. Ilza Veith, Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wen; The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine (University of California Press, 1966), p.3.

  3. Herodotus, The Histories, Book 8: Urania (Simon & Schuster, 2015), p.99.

  4. R. Walz, quoted in Daniel Potts, ‘Bactrian Camels and Bactrian-Dromedary Hybrids’, Silk Road Foundation Newsletter, Vol. 3, No.1: www.silkroadfoundation.org.

  5. David Christian, ‘Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History’, Journal of World History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), p.5. />
  6. Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China (Columbia University Press, 1961), p.123.

  7. Subhakanta Behera, ‘India’s Encounter with the Silk Road’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 37, No. 51 (21–7 December 2002), p.5078.

  8. Watson, p.33.

  9. Seneca the Younger, Declamations Vol. I; Pliny the Elder quoted in Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford University Press, 2012), p.20.

  10. Eugene Hugh Byrne, ‘Medicine in the Roman Army’, The Classical Journal, Vol. 5, No. 6 (April 1910), p.271.

  11. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Vol.6 (Henry G. Bohn, 1855), p.18.

  12. Yulia Ustinova, ‘New Latin and Greek Rock-Inscriptions from Uzbekistan’, Hephaistos: New Approaches in Classical Archaeology and Related Fields, 18/2000, pp.169–79.

  13. Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton University Press, 1989), p.49.

  14. Lionel Casson, ‘Rome’s Trade with the East: The Sea Voyage to Africa and India’, Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974–), Vol. 110 (1980), p.32.

  15. R. N. Frye, The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol.4: The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljugs (Cambridge University Press, 1975), p.396.

  16. Firdausi, Shanameh, quoted in Cyril Elgood, A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.298.

  17. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/haoma-ii.

  18. Example of botanical argument for haoma ingredients: George Erdosy (ed.), The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, Vol.1 (Walter de Gruyter, 1995), pp.385–9; Mark Merlin, ‘Archaeological Evidence for the Tradition of Psychoactive Plant Use in the Old World’, Economic Botany 57(3), 2003, p.302.

  19. Chronicon ad Annum Christi 1234 Pertinens: 1.237, quoted in Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword (Abacus, 2013), p.3.

  20. L. D. Kapoor, Opium Poppy: Botany, Chemistry and Pharmacology (Haworth, 1995), p.7.

  21. Qur’an, 5:90.

  22. J. Edkins, Opium: Historical Note, or The Opium Poppy in China (American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1899), p.6.