Milk of Paradise by Lucy Inglis Joe Brace
JOE BRACE
Milk of Paradise By Lucy Inglis Macmillan £25 Oldie price £16.52 inc p&p
The history of opiates is also the history of pain and euphoria. Lucy Inglis’s book shows us the ease with which opiates have moved between the roles of essential painkiller and social ecstatic over the millennia and across the world. The book is, somewhat unevenly, divided into three sections: opium, morphine and heroin. Through this structure we follow winding sociopolitical and medical developments, from the Neolithic to the rock band Nine Inch Nails.
Papaver somniferum is one of humankind’s ‘earliest attempts at genetic engineering’ – there is no wild opium poppy. The first evidence of its use (7,500 years ago) is contemporaneous with, if not earlier than, the discovery of alcohol. Traces have been found dating from Stone Age Britain (in the long barrows of Northamptonshire); 5,000 years later, Alexander took it east on his campaigns to Persia and India.
From the earliest medical writing, opium is ubiquitous. In the 1st century, Dioscorides informs us that, ‘applied to the finger and used like a suppository, the latex induces sleep’. The farm labourer took it by day to ease his aching body; the emperor by night to soothe his troubled mind. While on campaign in Germania, Marcus Aurelius took his opiate daily for a decade. In the 14th century, the French physician Chauliac recommends an eye bath of opium and ‘womanis mylke’. Christopher Wren experimented with opium and other anaesthetics in the 17th century.
Friedrich Sertürner barely survived discovering morphine in 1805. Such was its potency that only a vinegar emetic saved him and his fellow test subjects. The market proved hungry for it. Soon unregulated concoctions, such as Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which promised to produce a ‘natural, quiet sleep’ and contained around 38mg of morphine per tablespoon, were flooding America.
While opium addicts ‘plateau’ after a certain amount of use and do not
increase their dose, this is not the case with morphine and heroin. The epidemic that swept the US and Europe at the start of the 20th century encompassed large numbers of white-collar workers who had previously kept their addictions secret. A 19th-century study claimed that 40 per cent of all addicts in America and Europe were doctors and 10 per cent doctors’ wives.
The syntheses of diacetylmorphine, or heroin, by the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer in 1897, fentanyl in 1956 and Oxycontin by Purdue Pharma in 1996 have all accelerated the speed and ease with which a consumer can reach spiralling addiction. Fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than heroin, is used to exploit the ‘golden hour’ after a traumatic injury when pain relief can drastically lower casualty rates. In the US Army, it is dispensed in lollipop form, taped to the soldier’s thumb, so it drops out of his mouth as he loses consciousness.
In the age of colonial war and trade, opium became ever more important, not just as a battlefield essential but as a currency that was everywhere in demand. The fortunes made from the opium traded for tea in China not only built Hong Kong but also P&O and HSBC, and enabled the US to purchase the thousands of ‘coolie’ workers they needed to build the railroads.
Milk of Paradise is at its best when tracing the tortuous influence that opium has had on history. It revels in the ironies created by its ‘indefensible… indispensable’ nature: as with the US teaching Mexican farmers to cultivate medicinal opium during the Second World War, then demanding they stop during peacetime.
However Inglis never engages fully with the psychology of the user; opiates are only ever treated as a product to be sold or ostentatiously consumed. She never reflects on what makes certain demographics or societies prone to addiction.
Concluding with a rhetorical flourish, she says, ‘Under capitalism or communism the poppy will thrive’, despite her own admission that ‘Mao… successfully eradicated opium production and he did it in under two years’.
Another book – with a more psychological focus – might look at how and why.