Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium

300 Pages·2014·6.42 MB·English

by  Jeff Goldberg

Copyright © 2014 by Jeff Goldberg and Dean Latimer All Rights Reserved. No
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62636-540-7
eISBN: 978-1-62873-899-5
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
PREFACE, 2014
THE AYATULLAH’S OPIUM
INTRODUCTION
GOD’S OWN MEDICINE
by William Burroughs
PREFACE
FLOWERS IN THE BLOOD
The Body’s Own Opiates
On Emotions and Molecules
Eureka! Endorphin and So Much More
The Pituitary’s Pharmacopoeia
ONE
LEGENDS
How Opium Came to the Burmese Highlands
Philistine Opium-Pipes and Poppy-shaped Vases
The Plant of Joy
The Poppy Goddess
Homer’s Nepenthe
Hippocrates, Galen, and Opium as Medicine
TWO
DRUGS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Hashish: The Scourge of Medieval Islam
The Strange Ways and Drugs of the Ancient Scythians
What the Qur’an Doesn’t Say
The August History of Afyon in the Middle East
THREE
THE STONE OF IMMORTALITY
Opium in Medieval Europe
Marvelous Paracelsus and the Anodyne Specific
Sir Christopher Wren: The First Intravenous
“The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d”
Addiction Discovered (Reluctantly)
FOUR
THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE
Revolting Drugs and Vile Practices in the English Fens
The Scandal of Working Class Stimulation
George III’s Porphyria and George IV’s Hangover Remedy
A Death Drug
FIVE
THE DREAMERS
A Brief Account of the “Opium-Eater”
The Case of Poor Coleridge
Sir Walter Scott: A “Monstrous, Gross” But Necessary
Medication
John Keats: Laudanum, Love, and Death
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Poetical Paragraphs and
Morphine Draughts”
Wilkie Collins: A Most Self-possessed Drug Addict
Opium and the Other Romantics
SIX
CHINA: THE OPIUM WARS
Jardine-Matheson and the Honorable Opium Entrepreneurs
The Arrival of the Redheaded Barbarians
The Chinese Opium Epidemic Reconsidered
Chaos in Guangdong
Opium Traders Held Hostage
An Unspoken War
Jesus Opium
SEVEN
AMERICAN AFYON
Perkins of Boston vs. Wilcocks of Philadelphia
Houqua of Whampoa: The Richest Man in the World
John Jacob Astor and the Opium Trade
The “Emily” Affair
The Cunning John Latimer
EIGHT
NERVOUS WASTE
The Wide Open American Opium Market
The Annoying Tendency to Self-injection
Modern Times and Morphine
Self-abuse and Drug-abuse
NINE
YELLOW PERIL
Mark Twain’s Chinatown
The Chinese and the Job Market
Samuel Gompers and the “White Labor” Movement
The Chinaman’s Vice
Yellow Journalism: Coolies, White Women, Children,
and Opium
TEN
THE FATHER OF AMERICAN NARCOTICS LAWS
The State Department’s Hamilton Wright
The Child Races Act
Liquor on His Breath Disgraces Wright
The Harrison Narcotics Act
ELEVEN
HEROIN BOYS
The Urban American Blight
Bayer’s Marvelous Mega-aspirin
Chippers and Addicts
Youth Gangs, Bolsheviks, and Heroin
Harry Anslinger and Heroinomania
TWELVE
THE CURE
The Elusive Autotoxin
Addiction: Vice or Disease
Federal Narcotics Farms
The Case for Methadone Maintenance
EPILOGUE
THE BUSINESS
Inevitable Results of Unsound Legislation
The Economics of Heroin
The Anslinger-McCarthy Connection
The 5 Percent Solution
Drug Control: A $52 Billion Business
FOR FURTHER READING
PREFACE, 2014
THE AYATOLLAH’S OPIUM
While this book was being written in the winter of 1979, the Shah of Iran fell
and the sinister hawk-like face of Ayatollah Khomeini, in his black turban, white
beard and scowling gray eyebrows, sent a Pavlovian shudder down the nation’s
spine. He was the Imam America loved to hate. So, it was especially intriguing
when that same sinister face was pictured in the December 15, 1979, New York
Post beside several big baggies of opium, that most sinister drug.
Earlier in the month, customs agents at Kennedy Airport had discovered four
kilos of opium concealed in four hollow portraits of the Ayatollah, arriving from
Shiraz on the way to the West Coast. In Canoga Park, near LA, Drug
Enforcement Administration agents arrested three Iranians, and seized thirty-five
pounds of opium and eleven more portraits of Khomeini. The next day, they
proudly displayed the stash for reporters, and the image of the Ayatollah, and his
opium was beamed straight to the hateful heartland.
Neither the DEA nor anyone else puzzled over why anyone in his right mind
would smuggle thirty-five pounds of smelly, oozy, bulky opium to America, in
portraits of the Ayatollah, in the middle of the fifth week of the hostage crisis.
Did these guys want to get caught? It seemed likely.
The DEA issued grave warnings that a tidal wave of Iranian junk was
heading for America. And. indeed, over the next six months, suitcases full of
black opium and an influx of heroin hit the New York streets.
The Iranian connection? Maybe. Law enforcement officials were quick to
attribute a record 680-ton opium harvest in Iran to Khomeini’s Green
Revolution, but it didn’t make sense. Since opium in Iran is planted in the fall
and harvested in the spring, the bumper crop had to be in the ground before the
Shah left the country. Was the Ayatollah’s opium really the Shah’s opium?
Such is the winding trail of the Dragon.
In the thirty-five years since Flowers in the Blood first appeared, some
things have changed for the better—in the United States, finally, an emphasis on
drug treatment, based on the disease model of addiction, has largely replaced the
criminalization and condemnation of addicts as moral weaklings and nervous
waste cases [see Chapter 8]. Other things haven’t changed at all. In 2012, HSBC,
the very same Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation that financed the
Opium Wars [see Chapter 6], plead guilty and was fined $1.9 billion on charges
of laundering money for Mexican drug lords and terrorist organizations
including Al Qaeda. At the same time, the yellow peril of the inscrutable
Chinaman [see Chapter 9] and threat of cocaine-crazed Negroes [see Chapter 10]
were in the process of morphing into Mad Muhammadans. From the Ayatollah
Khomeini to Osama bin Laden to the Taliban,1* all have been portrayed as the
sinister face of the dope trade.
But if you really want to know who started it all, go back to Hassan-ibn-
Sabbah, the legendary Old Man of the Mountain, who lived in Persia (Iran) in
the early twelfth century and was the leader of the Assassin Order, perhaps the
most efficient terrorist organization in history.
Like Khomeini and ninety percent of all Iranians, Hassan-ibn-Sabbah was a
member—in fact, an early champion—of the Shiite movement, which since its
inception has fought for the civil rights of non-Arab Moslems, the minority
Aryan Moslems who live mainly in Iran.
When the Turkish Sultan of Rum invaded Persia, Hassan’s Assassins, all
innocence and blood in their white tunics and red turbans, staged guerilla raids
that systematically killed him and all his adult successors, leaving a child on the
throne.2
According to Marco Polo, the secret of Hassan-ibn-Sabbah’s power over his
Fedayeen was dope. In Polo’s account of his travels, he wrote that Hassan
erected a pleasure garden, where fountains of wine, milk, and honey splashed
and “the most beautiful damsels” sang and danced. The garden was a veritable
Paradise, the original vision of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan [see Chapter 5].