The Opium Problem: A Review Essay

Opium is one of the most useful and complex drugs in medical history. Made from the juice of the unripe seed capsule of the opium poppy, it contains several valuable alkaloids. Three of these, morphine, codeine, and thebaine—the last when processed into semisynthetic opioids like oxycodone—have potent analgesic effects. The rub is that opium-based drugs present as many risks as benefits. Overdose and addiction threaten individual lives. Widespread abuse and trafficking can threaten society itself.

Examples of personal and social ruin fill the pages of Thomas Dormandy's and Hans Derks's ambitious histories of opium. Dormandy begins his narrative in antiquity, when opium production and consumption centered on the Near East and Mediterranean. Derks takes up the story in the seventeenth century, when production and consumption began, under European pressure, to shift to South and East Asia. From there, nonmedical narcotics use and addiction became global phenomena, spreading in all settled regions during the last 150 years. The campaign against opium likewise became global. Its champions included Protestant moral activists who, as Ian Tyrell shows, worked effectively through transnational reform networks. All three authors, then, place the opium problem in the frame of world history.