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11 Contemp. Drug Probs. 169 (1982)
Books: Review/Commentary

handle is hein.journals/condp11 and id is 181 raw text is: Contemporary Drug Problems/Spring 1982 REVIEWED BY Joseph L. 'entner, Ph.D., Professor, ditical Science, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana Books: reviewlcommentary Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium, by Dean Latimer and Jeff Goldberg (New York: Franklin Watts, 1981), 306 pp. Countless fortunes have been won and lost over opium. Dynasties have come and gone in its wake and a lengthy war was waged in its name, leaving thousands of casualties and half of China's adult male population addicted. Mesopotamia was the original home of the opium poppy. The Sumerians, who settled there about 5500 B.C., developed an ideogram for opium. This has been translated as hul gil; hul meaning joy or rejoicing. Cultivation of the poppy and the use of opium spread from Mesopotamia to other parts of the ancient world, including Greece, Rome, Persia, and Egypt. Arab traders introduced it into the Orient. Opium is produced by slicing the opium poppy's unripe seed pods and drying the milky white juice that oozes out until it turns brown. The resulting goo is then scraped, boiled, collected into balls or bricks, wrapped, and sold as opium or sent to processors who convert it to morphine, heroin, codeine, or other opiates. Grown today in Southeast Asia, Turkey, China, Mexico, Lebanon, Greece, Iran, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, opium's potency depends upon freshness, country of origin, processing, and adulteration. Opium's analgesic properties come from its many alkaloids; one of these, morphine, provides its euphoric properties. For thousands of years, the drug has been used as a pain-killing @ 1983 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.

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