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“Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur (who also slew Eumolpus’ son Kerkyon, to become king of Eleusis and neighboring Athens), pacified Cerberus, Hell’s watchdog, with poppy-juice on his aborted raid to kidnap the spring-princess, Persephone, from her lover, Hades.
Jason of Thessaly was an adept herbalist—the name translates as “healer”—well-acquainted with opium. He used it as a kind of Mickey Finn, sprinkling it on the eyes of the serpent guarding the Golden Fleece.
And the fire which Prometheus stole from Zeus is described metaphorically by Aeschylus as both flower and drug. Prometheus concealed the “fire” in the customary manner of Greek herb-gatherers—in a hollow fennel stalk—and stole it from Zeus at a place called Mekone, which translates literally as poppy town.”
― Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium
Jason of Thessaly was an adept herbalist—the name translates as “healer”—well-acquainted with opium. He used it as a kind of Mickey Finn, sprinkling it on the eyes of the serpent guarding the Golden Fleece.
And the fire which Prometheus stole from Zeus is described metaphorically by Aeschylus as both flower and drug. Prometheus concealed the “fire” in the customary manner of Greek herb-gatherers—in a hollow fennel stalk—and stole it from Zeus at a place called Mekone, which translates literally as poppy town.”
― Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium
“(speaking of the widespread availability and cheapness of opium in 19th century England):
With everyone from kings to chimneysweeps so plentifully exposed to opiates, the British Empire would surely have crumbled into a land of craven drug addicts if there were any truth to the currently accepted thesis that the availability of narcotics precisely determines the number of addicts in the population. But the Empire was never in stouter shape than during this extremely extended opium epidemic.”
― Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium
With everyone from kings to chimneysweeps so plentifully exposed to opiates, the British Empire would surely have crumbled into a land of craven drug addicts if there were any truth to the currently accepted thesis that the availability of narcotics precisely determines the number of addicts in the population. But the Empire was never in stouter shape than during this extremely extended opium epidemic.”
― Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium
“As recently as A.D. 1248, according to the Muslim annalist Abdallah ibn al-Baytar, Acquit (formerly Thebes) on the Nile remained the only dependable source in the Middle East of choice black opium systematically produced for medicine.
(...)
What distinguished the Egyptian product was the unusually high percentage of one of opium’s twenty-four alkaloids, thebaine. High thebaine opium doesn’t produce the same subjective euphoria as other cultivars, as those, for example, raised in India for the China market at the height of the British opium trade in the nineteenth century. But opium thebaicum was good medicine and as such it escaped the wrath of medieval Muslim theocrats.
Hashish has a murkier past. To go by Middle Eastern records, you’d think it was very abruptly discovered around A.D. 1050, already a full-blown drug menace, becoming within a century the favorite intoxicant of bums, thieves, berserkers and apostates.
(...)
In the Middle East, surviving remnants of the obliterated past, like the Sufi cult of the “Green Man,” strongly suggest that cannabis didn’t just spring out of the ground to confound the councils of the wise, but was an object of religious veneration before the advent of Islam, and thus posed a profound threat to the New Order of God.”
―
(...)
What distinguished the Egyptian product was the unusually high percentage of one of opium’s twenty-four alkaloids, thebaine. High thebaine opium doesn’t produce the same subjective euphoria as other cultivars, as those, for example, raised in India for the China market at the height of the British opium trade in the nineteenth century. But opium thebaicum was good medicine and as such it escaped the wrath of medieval Muslim theocrats.
Hashish has a murkier past. To go by Middle Eastern records, you’d think it was very abruptly discovered around A.D. 1050, already a full-blown drug menace, becoming within a century the favorite intoxicant of bums, thieves, berserkers and apostates.
(...)
In the Middle East, surviving remnants of the obliterated past, like the Sufi cult of the “Green Man,” strongly suggest that cannabis didn’t just spring out of the ground to confound the councils of the wise, but was an object of religious veneration before the advent of Islam, and thus posed a profound threat to the New Order of God.”
―
