Customer Reviews

Opium: A History

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The Washington Post reviewer above got it right. Opium: A History is bursting with curious facts about a curious drug, but never ties it all together into a coherent theme. Or even several coherent themes. The writing isn't particularly good, either - call it workmanlike. That's surprising, as the author was nominated for a Booker Prize for his fiction. But just read the dreadfully dull opening paragraphs, a lackluster description of the opium poppy that sounds like it was lifted from a Petersen's Field Guide. The rest of the book doesn't get much better. The author is also fond of action-packed but meaningless phrases like, "Then in 1864 in China, things really began to happen." Yes, I'm sure. Things probably happened in 1863 and 1865 as well... A more serious flaw is the lack of footnotes or endnotes. The book claims to be a "History", but refuses to provide sources. So while it's full of interesting facts, I have no idea which facts are actually true. This is a pretty serious issue when, among other things, the author links the downing of the Pan Am flight off Lockerbie with CIA drug connections. The editors should have been ashamed to let that assertion go by unsourced. In the end I'd call Opium: A History a curiosity. If you want a general overview about this most sinister of drugs - you know who you are - you'll like the book.

Sleep and his brother Death figure prominently in Martin Booth's "Opium - A History." His subject is a two-headed god---bringing surcease from pain, but also addicting and killing its too-faithful followers.

Booth writes a truly fascinating and detailed history of opium's influence on the world's history, economies, and cultures. According to the author, opium has been used by man since prehistoric times. It was already under cultivation in Mesopotamia by 3400 B.C. He describes the wars that have been fought to control the opium trade, and nowadays the multi-billion dollar heroin industry. Nor does he neglect the social implications of an addicted population:

"For many addicts, heroin is favoured because, whilst allowing them to maintain full consciousness, they can withdraw into a secure, cocoon-like state of physical and emotional painlessness. Heroin is seen as an escape to tranquility, a liberation from anxiety and stress: for the poor, it is a way out of the drudgery of life, just as laudanum was for their forebears two centuries ago."

If much of your recent reading has been driven by current events, this book will open your eyes to the cultivation and processing of `papaver somniferum' throughout the `Golden Crescent' - a geographical area from Turkey to Tibet that includes the mountains of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Here is what the author has to say about growing poppies in the Mahaban Mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border:

"It is perfect poppy country with suitable soil, steep and well-drained hillsides, long hours of sunshine and the right amount of rainfall. There being no other forms of income apart from agriculture, it follows that the opium poppy provides an ideal cash crop."

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (10/03/2001) the drug trade is the primary income source for Afghanistan's ruling Taliban. U.S. State Department intelligence information on drug trafficking in the region indicates that the Taliban has collected at least $40 - $50 million this year through a tax it imposes on the opium poppy crop.

There are hazards to cultivating the poppy. "...Farmers can tell when the time to harvest is nigh because they wake in the morning with severe headaches and even nausea. Harvesters may absorb opium through their skin and excise officers and traders who come into frequent contact with it can also be affected."

Booth gives his readers a very well-researched and fascinating look at the seductive flower whose pharmacological properties came to mean all things to all men: poets; farmers; soldiers; doctors; murderers; terrorists; kings; and cancer patients.

.... It is this blessing-and-curse quality of the opiates that is the foundation of Martin Booth's sweeping work, "Opium". After 350 pages of truly engrossing history, he sums up with a few words: "few doctors would be hard-hearted enough to practise medicine without it. Millions have been enslaved by it: yet it has also destroyed millions of lives, enslaved whole cultures, and invidiously corrupted human society to its very core."

To those who would legalize the stuff and be done with it, I recommend the chapter on Britain in the Industrial Revolution. Mothers fed their babies "soothing syrups" purchased legally at the local apothecary. Such syrups contained laudanum or morphine in order to quiet the crying of babies and help them sleep. These things the syrups did, but they also addicted the children, so that by the age of three or four they resembled "little old men or (were) wizened like a little monkey".

Those who favor the get-tough methods currently in vogue in the US would do well to read of the ups and downs of the international traffic over the last two centuries. The odds of defeating a business as lucrative as heroin seem to be very slim indeed. The emperor of China couldn't do it, and neither have any of the US administrations. In fact, China seems to be one of the hotbeds of the trade, and US consumption is high. Booth doesn't make any recommendations, for it's not a public policy book, as is Jill Jonnes' equally excellent history, which recommends stigmatization of drug use and conducting a war against the trade. "Opium" rather shows where we've been (we being just about every society on the globe) and the current state of things. As for the future, Booth doesn't hazard a guess or push a solution. He doesn't have to. His illumination of the long and tortured history of humans and the poppy is enough to suggest a middle course, neither drug war nor drug festival.

Martin Booth, a British novelist and documentary film writer, has written a readable monograph on the social history and politics of world opium use. The first 6 chapters deal with the early medicinal use of opium and the 19th century discoveries of morphine and heroin; they progress through the use of opium for pleasure and artistic inspiration to end in addiction and degradation. Mr. Booth implies that many prominent artists, writers and rulers were "addicts" though he often presents little evidence to validate these claims. The remaining 10 chapters of the book deal with the lucrative opiate trade from its earliest beginnings through the present day, and its role in narcoterrorism, narcotourism and Realpolitik. The author clearly chooses to emphasize the nefarious, rather than the beneficial characteristics of opium and its alkaloids. He did not include any maps, figures, or footnotes that would heighten the interest level of 353 pages of text. If you are looking for information on the medical and biological aspects of opiates, this book will be of little use. Mr. Booth devotes little or no attention to the great advances made in our understanding of opiate pharmacology during the twentieth century: the synthesis of opiate antagonists, the discoveries of multiple opioid binding sites and endogenous opioid peptides in the body, or the recent cloning of opioid receptors. The neurobiological underpinnings of opioid addiction and the evolution of antiaddiction treatments based on this scientific foundation are also given little consideration. Nevertheless, "Opium: A History" is a concise source of information on the socioeconomics and politics of the opium trade that has occurred over the past two centuries. END

"Opium: A History" by Martin Booth is an engrossing work of nonfiction that details human reliance on opium for thousands upon thousands of years and how it has affected us physically, emotionally, economically, and morally.

The book starts with a discussion on the poppy flower itself and how opium is derived from the plant's sap and ending on the efforts of international traffickers, government enforcement agencies, and doctors alike in either expanding or eradicating addiction to opium. In between, you will learn about opium's horrible effects on the body, Britain's establishment of the opium trade in China and later efforts to destroy it (counter to the rest of the world's reliance on opium to support their economies), the transformation of opium to heroin, the use of opium to inspire artists around the world, and the quiet and insidious opium trade that goes on with the permission of many governments to support war efforts and other international issues.

To me, the most fascinating thing I learned from this book was the amount of people addicted to the drug in the past because it was such an important painkiller/medicine and because it helped quiet fussy babies. You can't help finish this book and wonder if it is even possible to win a war against a drug that has shaped the lives of so many humans and so many societies for thousands of years.

I personally found the book easy to read, though I preferred the first two-thirds of the book. This part of the book covered the drug itself, its health affects, and its early history up to the nineteenth century. I wasn't as interested in the international trafficking part of the book (the last one-third), probably because so many people, organizations, and countries were mentioned that I lost track of which country was fighting who and who was doing what with heroin or opium. Still, the book is an eye-opening read. The excruciating description of opium withdrawal should be mandatory reading for high school kids to help stymie any attempt at trying the drug.

The history of opium is a very interesting subject, as Martin Booth initially proves here. Dating from the earliest days of human civilization, opium use has gone through many stages of glamorization and condemnation, while entire nations and peoples have been held in its sway. Unfortunately, after a fascinating start this book wrings out most of the interesting aspects of this subject. Booth's writing shows the British tendency toward dryness and tedium, with an often anal-retentive obsession for small details at the expense of big picture conclusions, especially regarding the personal human effects of the use of opium and its modern derivatives like heroin. Booth makes many dubious generalizations about popular culture, crime communities, and ethnic groups - an example is the claim that American blacks from the south who emigrated to the north took up heroin en masse because they disliked the winters. Booth's very few glimmers of personality occur only when he indignantly criticizes some of his sources, calling one an ignorant bigot and another a pious zealot while quoting them. Most of the final third of the book really drags with tedious drug war reporting on the modern heroin trade. Other reviewers have noticed Booth's complete lack of footnotes and citations, and this is a real issue as his credibility is often stretched by opinionating and speculation. Overall, a potentially fascinating subject is made boring.

I borrowed this book from a colleague of mine and was glad I did. This book is impeccably researched and provides fascinating insight into the history of opium -- the cultures it created and destroyed and the effects it had on people, science and civilization. A little slow in the beginning with the biological history, but still a must-read.

Sleep and his brother Death figure prominently in Martin Booth's "Opium - A History." His subject is a two-headed god---bringing surcease from pain, but also addicting and killing its too-faithful followers.

Booth writes a truly fascinating and detailed history of opium's influence on the world's history, economies, and cultures. According to the author, opium has been used by man since prehistoric times. It was already under cultivation in Mesopotamia by 3400 B.C. He describes the wars that have been fought to control the opium trade, and nowadays the multi-billion dollar heroin industry. Nor does he neglect the social implications of an addicted population:

"For many addicts, heroin is favoured because, whilst allowing them to maintain full consciousness, they can withdraw into a secure, cocoon-like state of physical and emotional painlessness. Heroin is seen as an escape to tranquility, a liberation from anxiety and stress: for the poor, it is a way out of the drudgery of life, just as laudanum was for their forebears two centuries ago."

If much of your recent reading has been driven by current events, this book will open your eyes to the cultivation and processing of `papaver somniferum' throughout the `Golden Crescent' - a geographical area from Turkey to Tibet that includes the mountains of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Here is what the author has to say about growing poppies in the Mahaban Mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border:

"It is perfect poppy country with suitable soil, steep and well-drained hillsides, long hours of sunshine and the right amount of rainfall. There being no other forms of income apart from agriculture, it follows that the opium poppy provides an ideal cash crop."

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (10/03/2001) the drug trade is the primary income source for Afghanistan's ruling Taliban. U.S. State Department intelligence information on drug trafficking in the region indicates that the Taliban has collected at least $40 - $50 million this year through a tax it imposes on the opium poppy crop.

There are hazards to cultivating the poppy. "...Farmers can tell when the time to harvest is nigh because they wake in the morning with severe headaches and even nausea. Harvesters may absorb opium through their skin and excise officers and traders who come into frequent contact with it can also be affected."

Booth gives his readers a very well-researched and fascinating look at the seductive flower whose pharmacological properties came to mean all things to all men: poets; farmers; soldiers; doctors; murderers; terrorists; kings; and cancer patients.

"Opium", is a very informative book about the history of opium and its derivatives such as morphine and herion. I was fascinated to learn about the effect this drug has had on various cultures such as China and India. Anyone wanting to obtain information for academic purposes or just to learn more about this fascinating drug will definitely enjoy this book.

"Opium" is an entertaining and well researched narrative of the History of the drug from ancient to modern times.Particularly interesting is the role Opium played in the development of the city of Hong Kong and the country of China. It was used extensively by both the English and the Japanese to exert influence over the Chinese people.Reads like a fast paced novel with fascinating insight into the effects of both taking the drug and withdrawing from it.Thoroughly recommended.