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A Morphia industry in India?: Entwined interests of colonial science, medicine and commerce.

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In 1829, at a meeting of the Westminster Medical Society, a group of physicians wondered why the ‘East India Opium’ was being overlooked in favour of the opium from Turkey, particularly when the efficacy and purity of the former and the quantity of morphia that it yielded had been extremely positive from the results of its analysis by medical institutions and practitioners. Opium from Smyrna (present day Izmir, Western Turkey) and Constantinople (present day Istanbul), dominated the world market for raw opium then, and there was much concern among a section of intellectuals on the need to end Britain’s dependency on Turkish opium.

As European medical botanists and scientists set about conducting various experiments on the East India Opium, in India the manufacture and disposal of opium alkaloids had been engaging the attention of both the Board of Revenue and the Government. Ever since the decline of the opium trade with China, the shortage of supplies of cinchona and the growing demand of alkaloids in the United Kingdom had been much discussed by British officials. Faced with the imminent extinction of the opium trade with China, the British government was also frantically looking for possibilities to expand the government opium monopoly over excise opium and exploring the manufacture of medicinal preparations of opium. The loss of trade with China had made the issue of alkaloids a ‘question of great practical importance.’ Although it appeared that the British Government seemed to accept the prospective loss with admirable calm, and the opium system in India was adapting to the changing conditions, the opium establishment in Ghazipur was gradually being prepped up for the manufacture of high-grade medicinal opium.

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The State of Drug Checking in the United Kingdom

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A reagent drug testing kit

In a context where drug overdose deaths and other drug-related harms are on the rise, epidemiological evidence-backed harm reduction services including drug checking, drug consumption rooms, and needle exchanges are a crucial priority. In this post, Contributing Editor Juliet Flam-Ross describes the state of drug checking services in the UK.

Paging Dr. Google: Does Better Data = Better Health?

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In 2011, information scientist Larry Smarr described his 10-year effort to “increasingly quantify my body.”

Smarr brings serious skills to the task. Based for many years at UC-San Diego, he’s a long-time top-tier performer in deep realms of computer science.  

Smarr has had periodic MRIs, regular blood work, and colonoscopies far more often than the national average. He has tallied what he eats and drinks and the calories he has burned. He has had his DNA sequenced. He has produced, and shown to his colleagues, 3-D images of his innards.

It paid off when he figured out that he had Crohn’s disease, a challenging gastrointestinal condition, before his doctors did.

Smarr clearly has a passion for self-development and access to plenty of tools for the job.

But his story, and the stories of thousands of self-trackers, raise challenging questions.

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Sacrificing Children: The view from a jury room

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When I think about the term “miscarriage of justice,” I think about the obvious ones. A defendant is convicted of a crime that they didn’t actually commit, a police officer uses excessive force, official incompetence allows someone who has committed a crime to walk away from legal consequences, “on a technicality.” Less obvious but also significant is the role of undue influence and corruption as individuals with money and power who commit crimes frequently overwhelm the criminal justice system or avoid consequences altogether.

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An ‘Opium Zone’ From Assam to Yunnan: Opium Trade, Imperial Interests and Politics of Control in a Frontier Landscape

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A careful examination of the epigraphic and literary sources, including accounts left by early European travellers to Assam like Tavernier, Bernier, Manucci and Glanius, speak of Assam as a very fertile country with trading links across Burma into China. Marketable commodities were exported not only to the neighbouring provinces but also to adjacent countries; Burma, Tibet, China- by the mountain passes, land and water routes. Indeed, it was the lucrative trade with Tibet and China passing through Assam that was a vital factor in efforts of the Turko-Afghan kings and the Tai-Shans to capture the Brahmaputra valley.

Colonial reports foreshadow the growing importance of the region as central to the Imperial strategy of opening up communications. Cold statistics and correspondence from the personal papers of leading British firms of the time, Jardine Matheson and Baring Brothers, and debates in the British press and parliament reveal how the issue of opening up of trade with China was intensely pursued. Following the opium imbroglio culminating in the Opium Wars, the colonial power was on the lookout for new routes. The opium trade had grown fundamental to Britain’s economic framework to be ignored/abandoned. So, how did Assam fit into the power play of the politics of trade and expansion? In opium, they found a plausible approach. Opium was all over the frontier. Despite the growth of local poppies in Yunnan, the ‘Chinamen’ exhibited preference for the Patna opium for smoking. The ‘Assam’ opium was also much in demand in Yunnan. Opium became a valuable article for exchange and was found to be traded for gold across the frontier.

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From Colonial Indifference to Capital Punishment: A History of Drug Use and Responses in the Malay Peninsula

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Contributing editor Capu Barcellona gives a historical overview of drug use patterns and regulatory responses in the Malay peninsula, including Singapore and Malaysia, from opium to cannabis.

Opium Connoisseurs: The Rajas and the Padshahs of India

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By the sixteenth century, in India, opium was more than a mere herbal medicine or a valuable item of maritime trade. From its earliest introduction around the tenth century AD, to its wide and swift diffusion by the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, the assimilation and the subsequent ‘Indianisation’ of opium proved to be a major cultural watershed, particularly in Bengal, Behar, North-Western Frontier provinces, Central India, and certain parts of Rajputana. Here, opium attained the status of connoisseurship, like that in China, where the thakurs of Rajputana, the rajas of Punjab, the kathis of Kathaiawar and the Mughals padshahs, perfected and refined opium eating into an art and craft.

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