Opium, Empire, and India
pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com
pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com
Opiates are amazing. They take away a lot of depression. I got up to 50mg of oxy a day, which is quite modest and very inexpensive. It made me happy. Melted away worries. At one of my startups, we got crossed by a partner, almost had to fire everyone. The stress was paralysing - business partner attempted suicide. Me? Start the day with oxy and feel ready to take on things.
Even now, it can change that morning lethargic everything-sucks-why-don't-I-binge-Star-Trek-or-kill-myself into "hey I'm gonna write some software".
The other comments describe it alright - a warm happy dream. It's quite pleasurable even if you're by yourself; you can spend hours just "nodding" off, in and out of consciousness. It's quite sublime. The peace is so powerful, that a few times when I was being self destructive and got to the edge of OD, I noticed but simply didn't care. I'm more careful nowadays, though oral opiates are quite safe if you don't act reckless.
IV opiates step it up a bit. Users talk of a rush. It's similar to an oncoming amazing orgasm x10, then the warmness floods your body and everything's perfect and you might even gasp for breath it's that good. I think part of that is just the IV, and having a huge shift so quickly. For instance, there's a rush when IV'ing midazolam (dangerous, do not use without medical supervision), right before you pass out.
I've gone off opiates a few times. It wasn't as an enjoyable life. The only downsides are constipation (eh, saves time) and possibly lower testosterone (as someone often manic, lower libido is great - but it's easy to get TRT anyways.) I've not seen much as far as long-term damage from use.
Isn't addiction the biggest problem, requiring increasingly higher doses to achieve the same effect?
Opium IIRC is a natural mixture of morphine and codeine among some other alkaloids, but primarily those two.
You can buy opium in the US in the form of "unwashed" poppy seeds (The seeds are from the pod and are coated in opium, which is typically washed off), which I don't particularly recommend due to safety and legal reasons, but that's up to you ofcourse.
Source: I have tried my share drugs and smoked opium in rural parts of Asia several times.
For someone experiencing pain whether physical or emotional, the opportunity to escape that pain seems to me to be understandable if not well advised.
Opium -which I have tried once- was lovely. I don't like other opiates though, they provoke a minor allergic reaction consisting of itchiness and uncomfortable warmness I did not experience with opium. These were hydrocodone and other legally and appropriately prescribed medicines for a serious injury.
Or so I've heard....
Just to be clear, for anyone else reading this, that's true in the etymological sense. But from a biological or pharmaceutical standpoint, 'narcotic' has a pretty narrower meaning, referring to a specific class of drugs (which tend to produce numbing effects, but not everything with numbing effects is a narcotic).
To make matters more confusing, law enforcement, on the other hand, uses 'narcotic' as synonymous with 'any illegal drug', whether or not it actually is a narcotic (in the biological sense) or has a narcotic effect (in the literal sense that you are referring to).
For example, the 'narcotics unit' will deal with cocaine, which is used as a topical anesthetic for numbing[0], but cocaine is very much not a narcotic from a medical standpoint.
[0] in theory, you could use cocaine for a root canal, but you're more likely to get Novocaine instead.
No, they aren't. It depends a lot on the person, the specific narcotic, and the quantity taken. Some (most in my experience) people feel intense euphoria, others don't.
My only experience with numbing is the dental anesthetic they use in your mouth, which I don't recall producing much sensations but it does noticeably take sensation away.
Those aren't narcotics (most likely). It was probably Novocaine or Lidocaine. Those drugs end in -caine because they're all part of the same family as cocaine, which is not actually a narcotic (but does have euphoric effects at sufficient dosing levels!).
Topical use of any of those drugs, however, will likely not produce euphoria.
For the benzodiazepine class of drugs it's a little less clear cut - people who take them recreationally may well be alleviating stress or anxiety and finding that pleasurable. Opiates.... nah.
I thought that I felt euphoria the first time I took codeine (but I honestly wasn't sure). I have taken codeine since and was never able to replicate that euphoria.
IME with opioids, there will be times when they feel good (or seem to), but those good feelings are frustratingly hard to replicate. I've taken a skeptical look back at all my use and concluded that the drugs simply don't have the power to cause euphoria all by themselves. They can be sort of like a social lubricant, and they can be reliably good when I feel like complete shit. But I never figured out a way to conjure euphoria on command using just opioids.
I'll throw it right back at you - your own personal experiences are worth about as much as mine when it comes to medical evidence, not a lot.
[1] http://www.rxlist.com/oxycontin-drug/side-effects-interactio...
One could easily resolve the question of whether opioids cause euphoria by doing a double-blind clinical study. I would love to do that study, in fact.
[1] http://www.rxlist.com/oxycontin-drug/side-effects-interactio...
Or maybe you're right: they just take away pain. But it turns out a lot of us have existential pain so it works all the time.
As far as I can tell from Part 1 of the article which is posted, the discussion is more of society's use of Opium through the latter part of the millennia. It doesn't go into any specific purveyor of opium products except for the regulation and subsequent clandestine production after prohibition.
> By Regulation XIII of 1816, opium cultivation was legalised in Bengal under the supervision of the Commercial Resident of Rungpore. The control of the Opium Department went from the Board of Revenue in the Customs, Salt and the Opium Departments by the Regulation IV of 1819. In 1850, by Act XLIV, the Customs, Salt and Opium Board was merged in the Board of Revenue at Calcutta. In 1797, prohibition was imposed on the private cultivation of poppy in Bengal proper and in Behar division of the province. It was then that the attention of the Government proper was being met by ‘systematic smuggling and clandestine production’
I am really curious about the Tata family role in this that you allude to. Please elaborate.
I know nothing about the Tatas' origin, although it's hard to miss the importance of the modern Tata Group. Wikipedia says that the family fortune was founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who had some wealth from his father Nusserwanji and parleyed it, through trade, into enough capital to recondition a cotton mill.
Are you saying that Jamsetji's trading company dealt in opium? That his father's business was involved in it? Or even both? If so, looking at things from a United States perspective, I'd find that a little heartening. I'd always seen the opium trade as a matter of pumping money from undeveloped China to already-rich London and Boston; if there was going to be an opium-for-silver trade regardless, at least some of the silver went to somewhere else in need of capital.
Like most things, it's a little more complicated than the packaged narrative. Prior to the introduction of opium to the Canton trade, pretty much all of the goods that were imported from China by foreigners were paid for with silver - mostly from Mexico and Potosi or Japan - as there was very little that Europeans could find or produce that would sell in China's largely self-sufficient economy[1]. By the late 1700s, Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands were shipping millions of silver Dollars into Canton for silks and tea and such every year. China vacuumed up so much of the world's silver supply that it severely distorted the exchange rates in the Qing bimetallic currency system. Up until the opium trade got going, China had a massive, massive trade surplus. A lot of that wealth did get squandered - probably the poster child would be Heshen[2], a Manchu official that siphoned off a fortune estimated at fifteen times the annual tax revenue of the Qing Empire, or Wu Bingjian - one of the primary Chinese merchants in the Cohong system, who was so wealthy he personally contributed a third of the indemnity stipulated in the Treaty of Nanking[3].
[1] I don't have a link, but it is hilarious reading some of the early official records of the English East India company, and their utter inability to find anyone who would buy the woolens they initially tried shipping as cargo.
What made these particular acts of aggression so odious was, as I discovered in shock several years ago, they were not fought for the obvious reasons you would think; that the Chinese has opium and the British sent some military to take it from them. The reality is much more hideous then that.
As the previous poster mentioned, the British had little the Chinese wanted to trade for, and the Brits wanted Chinese tea in huge quantities. What the British eventually settled on was Afghanistan opium, which the Chinese had a taste for. The problem started when the Chinese leaders, seeing the destruction that opium addiction was doing to their people, tried to stop the trade of opium and reign in the millions of ruined lives it was causing.
The British responded, rather poorly I'd say, by going to war with the Chinese to force them to continue to trade the opium for the tea and thusly keep their people enslaved to the drug. It's a rather unbelievable premise for going to war actually, but in 1839 that's what they did.
They won, thus insuring several more generations of totally ruined Chinese addicts. I always think that this pretty much represents government and big business working in tandem at its most evil worse.