The tumultuous history of opium

Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium. By Lucy Inglis. Pegasus Books; 448 pages; $28.95. Macmillan; £25.00.

HUNTINGTON, West Virginia, is dying. As a share of the town’s population, overdoses kill more than ten times the American average. Startling numbers of babies are reportedly addicted to opioids at birth. The country at large is suffering, too: 42,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2016, compared with 58,000 fatalities in the Vietnam war. This is not how things were meant to be. Scientists developed opioids to dull pain, not cause it.

As Lucy Inglis recounts in her sweeping new history of opium, the tension between the substance’s medicinal virtue and its dangers is ancient. From their earliest uses, opium and its cousins have both soothed and troubled people. Roman herbalists used the drug to combat dysentery, even as they warned against the “chilled extremities” and “laboured breath” of overdosing. Two thousand years later, a doctor anguished by the addictive power of morphine reflected that no drug “has been so great a blessing and so great a curse to mankind”.

Ms Inglis untangles these contradictions with gusto, guiding readers from primitive Neolithic experiments with poppies to the modern “war on drugs”. Her narrative is propelled by savagery and greed. In 1621 the Dutch helped secure trade in the East Indies (which included opium) by murdering and enslaving 13,000 people on the islands east of Java. Two centuries later Victorian merchants got rich by forcing the “vile dirt” into China, spawning an estimated 12m addicts.

Yet if the opium trade led to violence, violence has also led to the development of innovative applications for opium. The syrette, a sealed single-use dose of painkilling morphine, emerged from the mud and guts of the first world war. Severely wounded troops in Afghanistan have been treated using lollipops laced with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.

Ms Inglis does not just trace the arc of history. She wallows in the exotic details of her story—from the sharpened bamboo the Chinese used to fight British interlopers, to the heroin pills “flavoured with rosewater and coated with chocolate” that were once sold over the counter. Remarkable personalities scamper past. Ralph Fitch, an Elizabethan adventurer and opium trader, returned with tales of the king of Thailand and his pet white elephants, all “dressed in cloth of gold”. Antoine Guérini fought for the French resistance before making it big in the heroin business. There are energetic descriptions of drug culture, from the Romantic poets to David Bowie.

Sometimes “Milk of Paradise” reads like fiction. Occasionally the author overcrowds this narrative with incidental characters; in what is a panoramic survey, she is prone to the odd tendentious claim. Nonetheless, this is a deeply researched and captivating book. The final chapters, in which Ms Inglis escapes the archives, are especially compelling.

Her interviews provide rich insights into the modern heroin trade. Asked if his family grows poppies, one Afghan farmer is blunt. “Sure. Who doesn’t?” A study of the online drug world is similarly revealing. One forum helped addicts avoid dangerous, fentanyl-spiked heroin. The Silk Road website facilitated over a million drug transactions in just two years. Like opium itself, Ms Inglis discovers, the internet has been both a blessing and a curse.