Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium

"Lucy Inglis is a brilliant writer. We’ve had quite a few books on a single subject, going back to Cod by Mark Kurlanksy. There have been many inferior versions of this method, where a person just takes a thing and then writes what is often quite a predictable history around it. That’s absolutely not the case with this book. This history of opium has two things which are really important in history at the moment: geographical and chronological depth. It goes right back to the Neolithic period where, in a place near Barcelona, there is some evidence of opium use. It’s unclear whether it’s for medical or religious purposes or maybe a combination. She looks at opium in its various forms: poppy seeds, morphine and heroin and, in doing so, it becomes a genuinely global history. What I found particularly interesting were the medical advances in the Arab world, with people like al-Razi and al-Kindi. She looks at its use as an anaesthetic and as an analgesic. It was actually used in Baghdad in the form of pills to treat, amongst other things, leprosy. Al-Kindi, who was an important physician in Basra, had a table whereby he could calculate the dosage, what quantities worked with different ailments and how much was dangerous and an overdose. That was extraordinary and I hadn’t read that before. It was also used as medicine during the plagues that affected Europe and Asia. “She looks at opium in its various forms: poppy seeds, morphine and heroin and, in doing so, it becomes a genuinely global history.” But then there was a shift. It was the Mughals who were among the first people—or at least the first people recorded—to use opium for pleasure. There’s a Mughal emperor, Jahangir, who is basically incapable of doing anything after he’s had his combination of opium and wine. So we start seeing opium addiction. There’s a phrase she quotes: ‘There is no Turk who would not buy opium with his last penny.’ As far as Europe is concerned, the turning point seems to be in the mid-seventeenth century. That’s when Thomas Sydenham creates laudanum, which becomes the means of taking opium for pleasure rather than medicinal purposes. There’s still a medicinal element there, but now people are taking it for intoxication. You have things called ‘Paregoric’ and ‘Dover’s Powder,’ which are ways of selling opium in a commercial form and people like Coleridge taking it. In terms of modern heroin addiction, I was quite surprised to find it wasn’t until the 1940s, when there was concern about a heroin epidemic in Chicago. There’s Charlie Parker and people who become addicted to it and it spreads through urban conurbations in the United States . It’s still feeding into this rich cultural source with the Beat Generation. The most famous poet—if you want to call him that—is William Burroughs in the Naked Lunch . He’s an addict right up to his death really, in his 80s, and he becomes this bard of heroin. There’s a romanticization of heroin—albeit a gritty romanticization—that continues with the Keith Richards figure and heroin chic. That’s perhaps abated in recent years, but was certainly there in the seventies and eighties. Absolutely. It’s that thing of ‘only connect’, and she’s just so good at making connections. It’s a very, very wide-ranging book and it’s beautifully written. Despite the subject matter, you never feel overburdened by it. It’s always fascinating and she’s got a very good turn of phrase. She’s one of the best. If only all historians could write like Lucy Inglis."