ON THE TRAIL OF THE ORIGINAL OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE

Author: By David Rollow

Date: SUNDAY, July 19, 1998

Page: C2

Section: Books

He starts in 4000 BC and traces the history of opium's course through Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The drug was known to medicine in Egypt, Sumer, and Greece, where Homer depicts Helen of Troy giving it to the defeated warriors in the form of nepenthe. It was spread through the world, first by Arabs and much later by the English, always as an agent of colonization. Booth's stories bring to mind ``Plagues and Peoples,'' William McNeill's history of infectious disease, another great instrument of colonization, and in fact opium is what McNeill would call a microparasite. If it weren't so much like death, you would think it was alive.

There is little about opium that Booth has not found a place for in this well-organized book, at once an encyclopedic source of information about opium and a lively history of its evolution from painkiller into the third-largest economy in the world, after currency trading and oil. Booth estimates the global turnover related to opium today at $750 billion a year. The book contains such interesting information and lore as the origin of the hypodermic syringe (perfected by a Scottish surgeon), and the fact that in Turkey opium was, like gold, valued in carats, 20 to 24 carats indicating top grade. The clipper ship was invented to speed shipment of opium from India to China. Nowhere has opium been used more widely than in China, where it was smoked throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The opium poppy has no natural antagonists. It can be grown in almost any kind of soil, and needs no fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Harvesting opium is labor-intensive, so a source of cheap labor is necessary. It is therefore an excellent agricultural product for the developing world, and (conveniently enough) growers tend to become addicts, keeping labor costs low. Wherever the opium poppy is established, it drives out other cash crops. Governments have encouraged peasant farmers to produce opium because of its profitability, which increases tax revenues. The lack of antagonists is a constant all down the line to the addict, who finds that there is no reliable way to break the habit.

By the 16th century, opium was established in Europe as a painkiller. By 1700, it was known to be addictive, but addiction was not considered a problem. A hundred years later the drug was an everyday medicine in England. According to Booth, ``every British person took opium at some time in their lives and many took it frequently.'' Opium was the effective ingredient of most patent medicines; Godfrey's Cordial, one of many syrups for calming babies, was known as ``The Comfort.'' Dover's Powder was in use as a painkiller until World War II, and the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in 1911, comments that it is ``hardly to be surpassed'' as a treatment for a cold in its early stages. In England, at any rate, opium was the opiate of the working classes, for whom it was a refuge from every sort of ache and pain, physical and spiritual. Morphine, injected, was the opiate of the upper classes.

As long as opium has been known to medicine, it has been flogged as a cure-all, effective against headaches, vertigo, deafness, epilepsy, apoplexy, poor sight, bronchitis, coughs, colic, jaundice, spleen, fever, dropsy, menstrual cramps and the pain of ovulation, melancholy, and even leprosy. Because it is costive, it is effective in the treatment of diarrhea, and therefore of cholera, typhoid, and dysentry; but its chief medical use is as an anodyne. It is the most effective painkiller ever known. Its enthusiasts, like the enthusiasts of Prozac and Zoloft today, promoted it as an antianxiety agent and aid to concentration. ``It worked,'' Booth notes. ``It was not a placebo.'' And it was a real advance over cupping and bleeding.

The main thing wrong with opiates is that they are so addictive. But addiction as such was not considered evil until some time in the 19th century, when it became associated with various forms of vice and degeneracy, usually involving the sexual enslavement of young boys or women. This is difficult to explain, since opium supposedly replaces the need for sex. Taken to excess, it causes a tranced lethargy which may cut down on productivity. However, for every tale of degenerate torpor, there is one of the field hand who falls asleep at his hoe for a few minutes and then works with renewed energy and concentration when he wakes. The real evil, in terms of political economy, seems to be its effect on the balance of trade between producing and consuming nations. China, placed on a sound economic footing by the Confucian bureaucracy, almost imploded as opium imports drained the imperial treasury.

In the 20th century, opium morphed into its evil twin, heroin, 10 times more compact and five to eight times as strong. The alkaloid was isolated by an obscure German pharmacist named Senturner. Heroin was originally a trade name from the German for ``heroic remedy,'' and it was marketed as such by Bayer, the same company that developed aspirin. Heroin was introduced into the marketplace just as drug controls were coming into effect in America, and thus it was criminalized from the beginning. Today it is used as medicine only in England.

The most chilling chapters in the book describe the use of opium and heroin to finance wars, a practice that still goes on. In recent months, newspaper stories have cited Afghanistan as the opium capital of the world. Taliban leaders promise the United Nations they will destroy poppy crops; subsequent stories detail how opium production is up 25 percent there, especially in Taliban-controlled regions. Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Chinese opponent of Mao, was bankrolled by a Chinese gangster and opium kingpin named Big Eared Tu, himself an addict. Ever since, opium (or heroin) has served as money in East Asia, enabling insurgents or terrorists to arm themselves. Apparently the only way to field an army in Southeast Asia is to finance it with opium. Sometimes the trade is controlled by government, sometimes by gangs or insurgencies. All efforts at governmental control have led to corruption, smuggling, piracy, and black markets.

``Opium'' is of great value for its thoroughness, and it is briskly written -- Booth is a novelist and film writer. The book's most serious flaw is his tendency to gloss over dubious information and rumor, especially in telling the more recent history. Too often, phrases like ``it is alleged that'' or ``it is estimated that'' serve to hedge the facts beyond confirmation. But the author's tone is objective and sober almost to a fault.

Opium and its derivatives make up a subject impossible to remain neutral about; Booth seems convinced that the drug is an evil, perhaps an ineradicable one. But the outrage is not in the act of taking the drug, or even in becoming addicted, but in the rapacity of sellers, the corruption and hypocrisy of governments, and the economic havoc the drug trade has wrought throughout the world.