EXTRACT | Read chapter three of ‘Smoke and Ashes’ by Amitav Ghosh

ABOUT THE BOOK

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels, The Ibis Trilogy, 10 years ago, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on the currents: opium.

Most surprising was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.

Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the empire's financial survival.

Tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League) and of contemporary globalism itself.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Ghosh reveals the role one small plant had in the making of our world, today teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

THREE

‘An Actor in Its Own Right’

The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, is believed to have originated in central or eastern Europe, possibly the Balkans, or around the coast of the Black Sea. The flower appears to have forged, very early on, a special relationship with human beings: indeed, it is possible that the plant developed its chemical structure precisely to ensure that humans would propagate it. This may be why there are no truly wild varieties of the opium poppy; they are all cultivars that evolved in collaboration with human beings, to enhance their medical and psychoactive properties.

Opium has been found at a 6,000-year-old archaeological site in Switzerland, and in an Egyptian tomb that dates back to the second millennium before the Common Era. The substance was well known in the Greek and Roman worlds, and is mentioned by Homer, Virgil, Livy, Pliny and Ovid. There are possibly references to it also in the Bible. In the eleventh century, Avicenna described opium as the ‘most powerful of stupefacients’, a substance that possessed extraordinary properties both as a painkiller and as a poison.

However, awareness of the powers of the poppy almost certainly preceded these references by several centuries. Long before the beginnings of recorded history, many groups of people seem to have discovered, independently of each other, that the opium poppy produces a uniquely powerful medicinal substance that can be used to treat coughs, stomach disorders and many other ailments. It takes only a glance at the list of chemicals in several commonly used medications to see that opium remains pharmacologically indispensable to this day. Simply put, opium is perhaps the oldest and most powerful medicine known to man. As Thomas Sydenham, a seventeenth-century English apothecary, noted: ‘Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his suffering, none is so universal or efficacious as opium.’

Today pretty much everyone who uses modern medicines has been exposed to opium. Back when I was doing readings from Sea of Poppies, I would often be asked whether I had ever used opium. I would explain that I had never used opioids recreationally (indeed, in the course of writing the novel I had developed so much respect for the opium poppy that I could not bring myself to take opioid painkillers even when I was recuperating from a surgical procedure). Yet, whether unconsciously or not, I have still ingested a fair amount of opium over the years through medications like Imodium, Corex and other codeine-based cough medicines. Opium has so many medicinal applications that it remains indispensable for the modern drug industry, just as it was for medieval apothecaries.    

Indispensable as opium is as a medication, it is even more valuable as an anaesthetic: its extraordinary ability to assuage pain has been known since antiquity, and it has long been used in surgical and dental procedures. Even today many, if not most, anaesthetics are derived from opioids. It is not uncommon for opioid-based anaesthetics to induce an unexpected sense of elation, which is why the otherwise ghastly experience of a colonoscopy can end with a strange feeling of euphoria. I remember, as a teenager, waking from a minor surgical procedure and experiencing a sense of rapture so extreme that I wanted to jump off the bed and fling my arms around the nurse. That feeling was so peculiar that I have never forgotten it. It took me decades to figure out that I had been given an opioid-based anaesthetic—because the role of opium in modern life has come to be so thoroughly repressed that it is quite common for people to say: ‘Oh well, it might have been great to live in the middle ages, but what if you had to have a tooth pulled or a limb amputated?’ The answer, of course, is that then, as now, you would have been given a strong dose of some opioid.

As an anaesthetic opium is so important that during the World Wars it was treated as a vital strategic resource. This being the case even in modern times, it can well be imagined how valuable opium was in earlier eras when medicinal substances were far fewer in number. It is hardly surprising then that a trade in medicinal opium should have come into being very early across Europe, Asia and Africa.

That opium can induce changes in consciousness has, of course, also been known since antiquity. But this does not seem to always have been a major factor in the circulation of the drug. In this, opium is completely different from wine, toddy, marijuana, coca, kava, peyote, ayahuasca, mescalin, psilocybin mushrooms, pituri and most other mind-altering substances known to humans—and, as is well known, there has, historically, never been any human society that did not use some mind-altering substance, or develop techniques like meditation, fasting or ordeals, to enter into altered states of consciousness. As David Courtwright has pointed out, the urge to alter their normal consciousness is so powerful in humans that ‘[c]hildren at play will whirl themselves into a vertiginous stupor’. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what it would be like to live always at a single, unvarying pitch of sobriety: such a state would probably be indistinguishable from clinical depression.

Various other animals are also known to seek out mind-altering plants, so it is quite possible that humans learnt about psychoactive substances from other species, perhaps even before the emergence of Homo sapiens. Since many plants with psychoactive properties grew wild in forests and grasslands, they were easily collected by foragers, nomads, forest dwellers or indeed anyone who had any familiarity with plants. Some of these plants are so vigorous and hardy that they are virtually impossible to eradicate: Cannabis sativa, for instance, is among the world’s fastest-growing plants. While travelling around southern China in 2012 I remember seeing cannabis growing luxuriantly, not just in forests but also around towns and villages.

Because of their widespread availability within their own traditional habitats, palm wine, toddy, cannabis, coca, betel nut, kava, peyote, tobacco, pituri, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, mescalin and the like might be described as ‘grassroots psychoactives’. One distinctive feature of these substances is that they were used primarily for their ability to alter states of mind (rather than their medicinal qualities, as was the case with opium). The fact that the properties of these substances were well known within their native regions meant that the local populace was able to develop certain protocols and rituals for their use, so as to limit the scope for abuse. These traditional societal usages were typically developed over very long durations of time, certainly centuries if not millennia.

Opium differs from grassroots psychoactives in many respects, not the least of them being the time span over which it became a substance that large numbers of people began to use for the specific purpose of altering their consciousness. This happened only a few hundred years ago, which is significant because it suggests that opium developed its distinctive user profiles relatively recently in comparison  with grassroots psychoactives. The time frame within which opioid use develops in a society is, in fact, critical to how its wider societal effects play out.      

Spatially too there are important distinctions in the ways in which mind-altering substances circulated. The use of grassroots psychoactives tended to be localized, being specific to certain cultures and regions. The chewing of coca leaves, for instance, was limited to certain societies in South America and has remained so to this day. The practice did not spread beyond the continent even when substances derived from coca leaves, such as cocaine, became commodified as recreational drugs. In the late nineteenth century the Dutch cultivated coca on a large scale in Java, but the practice of chewing the leaves was never adopted by the farmers who grew the plant, even though other psychoactives, like opium, were widely used on the island at that time. Unlike coca, cannabis was an ‘Old World’ plant that had a wide geographic range across continents, and was, moreover, exceptionally hardy and vigorous. Yet, cannabis was not used as a psychoactive everywhere that it grew: in many places, such as Italy, it was cultivated for its fibre (hemp). Back then the European preference was for wine and spirits. In the Indian subcontinent, on the other hand, the mood-altering properties of cannabis were embraced so early and so eagerly that ‘India has been called the world’s first cannabis-oriented culture’.

Another respect in which grassroots psychoactives differ from opioids is that they generally require very little processing; most of them can be chewed or smoked, or otherwise consumed almost as soon as they are harvested; some can be used after being dried, and others straight off the plant, like palm toddy. The sap of poppy bulbs, on the other hand, requires a significant amount of processing for it to be transformed into opium. Even as recently as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it would take almost an entire year for poppy sap to be converted into usable opium; it cannot be used fresh off the plant, like marijuana, qat or coca leaves. This is probably why the pre-modern trade in opium was largely medicinal: the processing that the raw gum required may have imposed a natural limit on the quantities of the drug that could be in circulation.

The fact that opium had to be processed meant also that it was expensive, so it is no coincidence that early adopters were often cultural elites and literati. This has remained a constant feature of opioid use, from medieval courts to the present day. In the contemporary West too, musicians, artists and writers were often the pioneers in opioid-use because ‘there was a certain glamour in it’. The early embrace of opium by elites is another factor that sets the substance apart from grassroots psychoactives. Toddy, marijuana and mahua, for example, were looked down upon by elites because they grew in the ‘wild’ and were consumed by poor peasants and foragers. Their own preferences, by contrast, tended to be for highly refined consciousness-altering substances like wine, spirits and, especially, aphrodisiacs (which opium was mistakenly thought to be). It is not surprising then that opium, which also required refining, held a special appeal for connoisseurs and literati, ranging from writers like Thomas De Quincey in England, Jean Cocteau in France and William S. Burroughs in the United States to Zhang Changjia in China. This appeal did not wane over time; if anything it grew stronger. According to Beth Macy: ‘The term “hipster”, in fact, drew from the Chinese opium smoker of the 1800s, who’d spent much of his time smoking while reclining on one hip. The hipster counter-culture took inspiration from heroin-addicted jazz greats like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.’

The plant whose profile most closely resembles that of the opium poppy is the coca bush (Erythroxylum coca), the leaves of which can also be processed into the addictive drug cocaine. But for most of its long history coca was a grassroots psychoactive, used by indigenous populations in South America, where large numbers of people continue to use it in that fashion to this day. However, chewers of coca were not responsible for transforming the leaves of the bush into cocaine. It was a German chemist who isolated the cocaine alkaloid in 1855, though the drug did not become a trade commodity until later in the nineteenth century, some 300 years after opium. So, in effect, cocaine followed in the footsteps of opium, which had long since established certain patterns which, as the historian Alfred McCoy observes, ‘have been repeated, years or even decades later, in the Andes coca zone’.

Opium, therefore, is quite distinctive in its social history. The lumping together of opioids with other psychoactives, as a ‘drug’, is not just misleading; it has also led to profoundly mistaken public health approaches, depriving people of some substances, like cannabis and peyote, that are now known to have many beneficial properties. Indeed, the only effective means of combating the continuing spread of opioids may lie in forging alliances with other plants—that is by making grassroots psychoactives like cannabis and peyote more easily available.    

Of course, opium also has innumerable beneficial uses, perhaps more so than any other psychoactive. It is precisely because of its extraordinary properties that opium also possesses the ability to generate a continually ascending series of more addictive forms, from the ma’jûn of the Middle Ages to chandu, morphine, heroin and oxycodone. Opium’s ability to spin off new and more potent versions of itself—even synthetic analogues like fentanyl—is one of the many tricks that the genie has often used to break out of its bottle. Once it escapes, it has a way of quickly transcending class and spreading from elites to those at the other end of the social ladder. This pattern too has repeated itself many times over throughout history.

These properties have endowed opium with a distinctive ability to interact with human societies in ways that can shape history. ‘[I]t is perhaps appropriate,’ writes William B. McAllister, a US diplomat and historian, ‘to interpret opium as an actor in its own right. Rather than simply an inert substance, opium might be seen over the last three or four centuries as a sort of independent biological imperial agent. In recent decades [opium’s] worldwide ubiquity only confirms its power; opium appears to have bested all its human contenders.’

It is because opium is a historical force in its own right that it must be approached with due attention to the ways in which it has interacted with humans over time. If these interactions are difficult to conceptualize it is largely because they are very strongly inflected by class and power differentials. But those difficulties are further compounded by the fact that the necessary vocabulary does not yet exist for thinking about history in a way that allows for the agency of non-human entities.

…

Through most of human history, opium circulated in very small quantities and was used primarily as a medicine. Anatolia was probably the region in which farmers first began to cultivate poppies as an important commercial crop, and the practice is thought to have spread outwards from there. The armies of Alexander the Great are believed to have carried opium into Iran, hence the derivation of the Persian and Arabic words for opium, ‘afyun’, from the Greek ‘opion’. The Perso-Arabic terms, in turn, engendered the word ‘afeem’, widely used across the Indian subcontinent, and Chinese terms like ‘afyon’ and ‘yapian’. Even after its introduction to the Middle East, opium continued to be used largely for medicinal purposes.

In the Indian subcontinent the cultivation of poppies probably began towards the end of the first millennium of the common era. The first references to opium in Sanskrit date back to the eighth century, at about the time of the Arab conquest of Sind. This, along  with the Perso-Arabic derivations of many Indian words for opium, suggests that the commercial cultivation of the poppy was introduced in the region by way of Iran and the Arab world.

A useful analogy in thinking of the social history of opium is that of an opportunistic pathogen, one that goes through long periods of dormancy, affecting very small numbers of people. But when social processes and historical events provide the pathogen with an opportunity, it bursts out to rapidly expand its circulation. Often, when these outbreaks happen, the pathogen undergoes a mutation, which allows it to elude human immune systems. In opioid outbreaks too the drug mutates and begins to be consumed in newer, more powerfully addictive forms.  

In the case of opium the earliest opportunities for propagation were provided by the Mongols, around the fourteenth century, when their contiguous territories stretched from China to northern India, Iran, the Levant and Anatolia. The oral consumption of opium in various forms was popular among Mongol rulers and in their courts, and the practice was then passed on to their successors, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. The ruling dynasties of these empires were, variously, Shia and Sunni Muslims, but their territories were contiguous—sprawling over a huge swath of Eurasia and north Africa—and they had a significant degree of communication with each other.

It was in these empires that the use of opium went through a second phase of expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The characteristic form in which opium was used also underwent a change at this time. Its potency was enhanced by mixing it with other psychoactives like cannabis, and the mixtures were consumed either as a beverage or a comestible.

Since the people of these parts of Asia were introduced to opium at a time when supplies were limited, their exposure to it was slow and gradual. This afforded them time to develop social customs and usages for limiting the use of opium to certain contexts, much as Europeans did with alcohol. This process is, of course, analogous to the way in which populations develop immunities to pathogens, except in this case the resistances were social rather than biological. The fact that other psychoactive substances, like cannabis and betel nut, were widely used in the Indian subcontinent probably also helped to limit the spread of opium locally. Moreover, even though opium was a major feature of courtly life in Mughal India, the drug was not an instrument of state policy, or a major source of revenue. Thus, the Mughal Empire had no financial incentive to encourage opium use or expand the industry.

Over time, in the Indian subcontinent and Persia, the use of opium came to be socially acceptable so long as it was consumed orally, in the form of pills and tonics—but there was a powerful taboo against the smoking of opium, which is a much more addictive method of consumption. When drunk or eaten, opium, in the minimally processed forms in which it circulated in India, did not typically produce a ‘high’: it acted more in the manner of a soporific or analgesic. Hence, swallowing opium was seen in the same light as taking a medicine, whereas smoking the drug was considered a recreational activity, and hence ‘a perversion’. A similar pattern of opioid use emerged also in Europe and America. Even though various opioid-based tinctures and tonics were widely consumed in the West, through much of the nineteenth century, the recreational smoking of opium was strongly frowned upon: it was perceived as being characteristic of ‘degenerate races’ and was considered ‘detestable’.

In short, social conventions that had developed through centuries of exposure to opium may have helped to protect some parts of Eurasia from highly addictive forms of opioid use. It needs to be noted, however, that social resistances to addictive substances do not last forever, and can crumble quite quickly when drugs are synthesized into more addictive forms. Iran, for example, developed a major heroin-addiction problem in the early twentieth century, as did India with cocaine, which began to be mixed into the paste that is applied on betel leaves, to make paan. And today parts of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are once again in the grip of rapidly spreading opioid epidemics.

...

It is clear from many European travel narratives that by the 1500s, opium was circulating widely among the courtly elites of northern India, Afghanistan and Central Asia. In this period it was usually consumed in a form known as ma’jûn, a compound made of opium paste and some other substances. Ma’jûn was generally rolled into pellets and eaten, or mixed into beverages and drunk. The first Mughal Emperor of India, Babur, refers to ma’jûn frequently in his autobiography. His son Emperor Humayun was an even greater enthusiast. Humayun’s son Emperor Akbar also used opium, as did his grandson Jahangir, who is reported to have taken ‘six draughts of alcohol each evening and a pill of opium’. Opium use was also widespread in the courts of Rajput rulers, and the substance was even incorporated into some of their rituals, such as weddings.

But the indulgences of kings and emperors are rarely within the reach of ordinary people. The impressions conveyed by travel narratives and historical sources are probably skewed because of a disproportionate focus on elite practices: European travellers and merchants generally tended to attach themselves to royal entourages, and court chronicles were also largely written by people connected with ruling elites. In reality it is unlikely that even a small percentage of the general population would have been able to find, much less buy, opium, even if they had wanted to.

In pre-colonial India, opium poppies were cultivated in two regions of the subcontinent. The eastern and more important  opium-producing region was in the Gangetic plain, around Patna, in modern-day Bihar, while the second was in an area known as Malwa, in west-central India. The total quantity of opium produced in Bihar through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was less than 5,000 chests, while Malwa probably produced around 4,000 chests. Since half the supply was exported,40 the amount of opium available, on a per capita basis, to the 150–200 million inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent in this period was at most 1 or 2 grams per year, a minuscule amount. According to Hans Derks’s calculations, opium was used in small quantities even by the upper classes, a fraction of a gram per day. The amounts are so small that they suggest that only a tiny minority, consisting mainly of rulers and noblemen, consumed opium in substantial quantities. The vast majority of the population of pre-colonial India clearly used the drug mostly for medicinal purposes if at all.

In the nineteenth century, British colonial writers and officials often conveyed the impression that opium was a traditional Indian drug, widely consumed by people of all classes. But it takes only a cursory glance at the figures to see that this could not possibly have been the case. While the knowledge of opium may have been widespread, as in Europe, its actual use was obviously quite limited. Opium use did indeed become common in the subcontinent in the late nineteenth century, when India was exporting as much as 100,000 chests of opium in some years. But this phenomenal growth was not caused by ‘tradition’—it came about, rather, because the drug was instrumental in the creation of a certain kind of colonial modernity.

Extract provided by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Join Ghosh for a public lecture at Javett Art Centre, University of Pretoria on September 13. Click here to register.