INCLUDING:
ASTOR, CABOT, PEABODY, ARCHER, PERKINS HATHAWAY, WEBSTER, DELANO, COOLIDGE, AND FORBES
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 the Turkish and Chinese terms “afyon” and “yapian.”
A useful analogy in thinking of the social history of opium is that of an opportunistic pathogen,…