Opium and empire: some evidence from colonial-era Asian stock and commodity markets

On the basis of a new database of stock and commodity prices, along with measures of government revenues, commodity exports and immigration, the article assesses the impact of the opium trade on the economies of colonial Malaya, the Netherlands Indies and China from 1873 to 1911. Stock returns for a few Malayan industries related to international trade are significantly correlated with opium price changes, as are prices for labour-intensive, Chinese-dominated export commodities such as tin and gambier. However, opium price changes explain, at most, only a small fraction of the behaviour of stock and commodity prices. On balance, stock and commodity markets ascribed only secondary importance to ups and downs in the opium trade as measured by the price of the drug.

Chasing the dragon: the cultural metamorphosis of opium in the United States, 1825-1935

Many things to many people, opium has played a role in the emergence of several power bases in the United States. In turn, these bases of power have shaped what opium is for the rest of us. Allopathic medicine brought opium and its derivatives under its control around the turn of the century, promulgating "addiction theory" and addiction clinics as part of its rise to preeminence among rival forms of medicine. Opium also played a role in the U.S.'s international economic and imperialistic ascendance. When politicians began to deploy a new discourse on opium early in this century, they were able to appropriate medical rhetoric. As the politics of opium heated up, some doctors were able to exploit the emerging politically inspired discourse to generate a subtly different medical knowledge of opiates and addiction while establishing a new subdiscipline with the political support of lawmakers and state institutions.

Opium use in Turkmenistan: a historical perspective

This paper presents a picture of how the patterns of opium use have changed in Turkmenistan over more than 100 years and the relationship between these transformations and formal and informal social controls of drug use. From the late 18th century, when opium use began to become a social problem, informal control weakened. Eventually, in the late 19th century, formal control was introduced, aimed at the prohibition of drug trade and use. From that time, the intended and unintended outcomes of implemented policies led to changes in the demographic patterns of users and the social-medical consequences of opiate use. The anti-drug policies, where criminal prohibition coexisted with strategies aimed at raising the population's general living standards and at providing free access to health care, were effective up to the early 1980s. New political and social-economic realities in the 1980-90s have radically changed the drug scene in the country, with heroin trade and use as the main concerns. The government's reaction, while following the old paths, has included new elements, based mainly on ideas of national consolidation.

More mysteries of opium reveal'd: 300 years of opiates

This year is the 300th anniversary of the publication of one of the first books written about opiates and their subjective effects. Since that time the influence of opiates in Western society has grown enormously, as has our knowledge of the mechanisms by which these drugs produce their effects. Wars have been fought over the use of opiates and the economies of several countries depend on their production. In this article, some aspects of the history and effects of opiates on the arts in particular are explored.

Opium in 20th-century Britain: pharmacists, regulation and the people

AIMS

To indicate how the system of pharmaceutical regulation of the sale and use of opium in Great Britain continued throughout the first half of the 20th century.

DESIGN

An oral history investigation of community pharmacy in Great Britain (n = 50), together with an analysis of standard pharmaceutical texts.

SETTING

Community pharmacies in Great Britain during the 20th century.

PARTICIPANTS

Retired community pharmacists with experience of the sale and use of opium during the period.

MEASUREMENTS

Oral testimony of retired community pharmacists about the use and sale of opium, and quantitative analysis of numbers of official preparations of opium available during the period.

FINDINGS

The popular use of opium continued well after the First World War, and its use as an ingredient of prescribed medicines continued well beyond the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948.

CONCLUSIONS

Although the role of pharmacy in the regulation of opiates and other drugs was displaced by medicine following the passage of dangerous drugs legislation in the 1920s, pharmacists continued to play an important part in this regulation, exercising considerable discretion in the process.

The price elasticity of opium in Taiwan, 1914-1942

Between 1895 and 1945, the Japanese colonial government virtually eliminated opium use in Taiwan by licensing and treating existing users, prohibiting sales to others, and raising the price. We evaluate these policies using a two-part model to describe the fraction of the population using opium and consumption among users, and the rational addiction model by Becker et al. (1991). We confirm that opium is addictive and find no evidence supporting the rational addiction hypothesis. Demand is price-elastic with estimated short- and long-run demand elasticities of -0.48 and -1.38. These results have implications for control of other addictive substances.

A quantitative assessment of ancient therapeutics: poppy and pain in the Hippocratic Corpus

In an effort to develop a method to ascertain whether ancient physicians used certain drugs because of their efficacy or for other reasons (random process, tradition, etc.), the authors have devised a statistical test (Efficacy Quotient-EQ) to evaluate ancient therapeutic data quantitatively. They have applied the Efficacy Quotient to clarify whether the Hippocratic physician used poppy (opium) in the treatment of pain because he had recognized that it had analgesic properties or whether he used it as he used others plants devoid of such properties. The authors conclude that the analgesic properties of poppy were not recognized at the time. The appropriateness of using the Efficacy Quotient for the.

The rules of drug taking: wine and poppy derivatives in the Ancient World. IX. Conclusions

Evidence of a ritual use of poppies becomes more and more rare during the late Roman age, until only the medical usage of poppies seems to survive. In the meantime, a complete lack of evidence of a hedonic use of opium persists. As a whole, this study shows a remarkable continuity in the modalities of wine and poppy derivative use from the Ancient World to the present, particularly in that the hedonic use of psychoactive drugs remained restricted to alcoholic beverages. This observation challenges the opinion that drug-taking behavior is under the control of transient cultural contingencies. In addition, it imputes that the attribution of any documented prehistoric or historical nonmedical use of psychotropic drugs for the aim of experimenting with their pleasant effects is a stereotype.