Papaver somniferum
Posted: Mon Nov 11, 2013 8:53 pm
http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Papaver/ wrote: <<The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), an annual herb 3-5 feet tall with gorgeous white to pink or purple flowers, has had a powerful impact on human affairs as a medical blessing and a societal curse. This plant produces copious amounts of a viscous latex, which is loaded with strong alkaloids. The latex is collected by incising the immature capsule with a single or multibladed knife and subsequently scraping off the coagulated latex into a bowl. The dry, darkened, slightly sticky latex mass is called opium, from the Greek opos, which means juice. Mature seeds lack alkaloids and are used on rolls and other pastry goods.
The opium poppy is native to southern France, Spain, and northwestern Africa. There is a cave site in southern Spain, dated at 5500 B.C., in which intact capsules of opium poppy were found in a religious artifact. Much later, in the Early Bronze Age (3000 B.C.) in the Swiss Lake dwellings caches of poppy seeds and presscake have been found. Nobody knows by what route the peoples or poppies came from Iberia to Switzerland, but a northward course along the Rhone seems likely, and farming peoples probably also came from the Balkans via the Danube. It seems likely that over time this plant was cultivated in Switzerland so that large numbers of seeds could be harvested to press for oil and to be ground for flour (dough). There is no indication that in early western Europe these poppies were smoked or used for medicine.
From 1600 to 1200 B.C., P. somniferum was apparently involved in northern Europe amber and tin trade routes, and thereby spread eastward from Switzerland, and perhaps intentionally or as a weed also into the eastern Mediterranean. Then in the Late Bronze Age poppies are finally seen in the records of the Greek realm, including Homer's Iliad, where they were revered as potent medicinal plants. In ancient Crete, there appears to have been a poppy goddess that wore a crown with three capsules.
Pliny the Elder warned of the dangers of opium; however, its use as a medicine created addicts, such as the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the great Arabic physician Avicenna died of an unintentional overdose of opium in wine. Later addicts included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dumas, Edgar Allen Poe, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. So feared was addiction that France prohibited the sale of opium in 1718 and 1735. Opium smoking in China was forbidden in the 1690s, but the British East India Company smuggled opium into China and promoted its importation. Eventually this precipitated the Opium Wars between China and Britain and France (1839-1842, 1856) , which reshaped the history of that region. In the 1840s, England was given as one concession the island of Hong Kong, which on 1 July, 1997, was returned to Chinese rule. Chinese laborers of the 19th Century promoted use of opium in the western United States when they were imported to build the railroads.>>
