Opium: A History (Paperback)

~ (Author) "The opium poppy is botanically classified as Papaver somniferum..." (more)
Key Phrases: poppy farming, heroin manufacture, morphine base, Hong Kong, Khun Sa, Golden Triangle (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With personages from Khun Sa to Coleridge to Kurt Cobain populating its far-ranging pages, Opium: A History provides a comprehensive look at the drug as it's been used, abused, fought over, and profited from throughout the millennia. In all likelihood, one of the first medicinal drugs known to mankind, opium and its derivatives have eased and caused suffering in almost equal measure, a fact that the evenhanded Booth takes pains to point out. In fact, he quotes rock musician Frank Zappa with approbation: "A drug is neither moral nor immoral--it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole." Booth's book traces opium's history from the first evidence of poppy cultivation (possibly as early as 4,000 B.C.) to the drug wars of today, exploring its uses in different cultures, its roles in British and Chinese political affairs, its use by artists and musicians, and its horrifying ramifications for addicts.

Booth writes with admirable attention to detail, if very little élan. Plowing through some of his sentences is a little like chewing on a mouthful of sawdust: "There are several reasons suggested for the popularity of the hypodermic but the primary one is the lowering standard of heroin purity caused by the success of legislation on production and by the selling methods employed by Italians who took over distribution from Jewish gangs, leading to an increase in price and higher levels of adulteration." It's enough to drive a reader to drugs. Nonetheless, the power of his narrative can't be entirely erased by the unwieldiness of his prose. The book is filled with striking images and surprising facts--for instance, opium-addicted Victorian children, fed "soothing syrups" by minders to keep them quiet. Undernourished, yellow-skinned, in the words of one contemporary observer, they "shrank up into little old men or wizened like a little monkey." In the end, Booth finds few answers to the problems posed by the opium trade--a scourge he says has "destroyed millions of lives, enslaved whole cultures and invidiously corrupted human society to its very core." In writing this exhaustively researched history, however, Booth brings us that much closer to understanding--and thereby conquering--the most tenacious of human addictions. --Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A novelist (Hiroshima Joe) and nonfiction writer (Opium: A History), Booth is a British author too little known here. This very strong book, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, should introduce him to discriminating readers. As in Hiroshima Joe, the hero is an ordinary man thrust into a forgotten corner of history, who becomes a player in an extraordinary situation. Alexander Bayliss was a British businessman on a visit to the Soviet Union in the 1950s when he was arrested as a spy and sent into the Siberian gulag. Now, on his 80th birthday, he has become a cherished fixture in the tiny Russian village where he went to live after his release with the daughter of one of his dear companions of the gulag, who had died in a mining accident. Known to the peasants as Shurik, he has been the village schoolteacher, an angel of enlightenment who has helped open the eyes of some of the local children to a wider world. But his identity has at last been discovered; the British Embassy in Moscow has sent a car, and a long-forgotten cousin is on his way to meet him. Shurik/Bayliss must decide: what is he to do with what remains of his life? The book is at once a poignantly lyrical portrait of his life in Myshkino (as if the Russian countryside in summer were seen through the eyes of an English nature poet) and a harrowing account of his life as a zekAone of the countless thousands of political prisoners who toiled in inhumanly brutal conditions in the Arctic wastes. That life also brought undying comradeship of a kind that makes conventional friendships seem tame, and in one unforgettable scene Bayliss has to make a terrible choice for his dearest friend. In another indelible passage, his little crew is sent to uncover a woolly mammoth long frozen in the ice. Through it all, Bayliss is a model of modest goodness and tenderness, one of the most lovable creations in recent fiction. His story is at once horrifying and deeply affecting, a paean to what is eternal in the Russian spiritAand the work of a sharp-eyed humanist whose powers are at full stretch. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (June 12, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312206674
• ISBN-13: 978-0312206673
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #354,969 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but scattershot, December 4, 1999

By	Hubcap (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Opium: A History (Hardcover)

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Papaver somniferum, November 4, 2001

By	E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Riddle Still Unsolved, August 4, 2001

By	Timothy Ritter (Colorado) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Opium: A History (Hardcover)

.... 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.