title: Bugsy Siegel

text: During the trial, newspapers revealed Siegel's past and referred to him as "Bugsy." Siegel hated the nickname (said to be based on the slang term "bugs", meaning "crazy", used to describe his erratic behavior), preferring to be called "Ben" or "Mr. Siegel". On May 25, 1944, Siegel was arrested for bookmaking. Raft and Mack Gray testified on Siegel's behalf, and in late 1944, Siegel was acquitted again.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: In 1946, Siegel found an opportunity to reinvent his personal image and diversify into legitimate business with William R. Wilkerson's Flamingo Hotel. In the 1930s, Siegel had traveled to southern Nevada with Sedway to explore expanding operations there. He had found opportunities in providing illicit services to crews constructing the Boulder Dam. Lansky had handed over operations in Nevada to Siegel, who turned it over to Sedway and left for Hollywood.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: In the mid-1940s, Siegel was lining things up in Las Vegas while his lieutenants worked on a business policy to secure all gambling in Los Angeles. In May 1946, he decided that the agreement with Wilkerson had to be altered to give him control of the Flamingo. With the Flamingo, Siegel would supply the gambling, the best liquor and food, and the biggest entertainers at reasonable prices. He believed that these attractions would lure not only the high rollers but thousands of vacationers willing to gamble $50 or $100. Wilkerson was eventually coerced into selling all stakes in the Flamingo under the threat of death and went into hiding in Paris for a time. From this point the Flamingo became syndicate-run.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: Siegel began a spending spree. He demanded the finest building that money could buy at a time of postwar shortages. As costs soared, his checks began bouncing. By October 1946, the Flamingo's costs were above US$4 million. By 1947, the costs were over US$6 million (equivalent to $ million in ). By late November of that year, the work was nearly finished.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: According to later reports by local observers, Siegel's "maniacal chest-puffing" set the pattern for several generations of notable casino moguls. His violent reputation did not help his situation. After he boasted one day that he had personally killed some men, Siegel saw the panicked look on the face of head contractor Del Webb and reassured him: "Del, don't worry, we only kill each other." Other associates portrayed Siegel in a different aspect; he was an intense character who was not without a charitable side, including his donations for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. Lou Wiener Jr., Siegel's Las Vegas attorney, described him as "very well liked" and said that he was "good to people."


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: Problems with the Outfit's wire service had cleared up in Nevada and Arizona, but in California, Siegel refused to report business. He later announced to his colleagues that he was running the California syndicate by himself and that he would return the loans in his "own good time." Despite Siegel's defiance to the mob bosses, they were patient with him because he had always proven to be a valuable man.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: The Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, at which time only the casino, lounge, theater, and restaurant were finished. Although local people attended the opening, few celebrities did. A handful drove in from Los Angeles, despite bad weather. Some celebrities present were Raft, June Haver, Vivian Blaine, Sonny Tufts, Brian Donlevy, and Charles Coburn. They were welcomed by construction noise and a lobby draped with drop cloths. The desert's first air conditioning system broke down regularly. While gambling tables were operating, the luxury rooms that would have served as the lure for people to stay and gamble were not ready. As word of losses made their way to Siegel during the evening, he began to become irate and verbally abusive, throwing out at least one family. After two weeks, the Flamingo's gaming tables were $275,000 in the red and the entire operation shut down in late January 1947.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: After being granted a second chance, Siegel knuckled down and did everything possible to turn the Flamingo into a success by making renovations and obtaining good press. He hired future newsman Hank Greenspun as a publicist. The hotel reopened on March 1, 1947—with Lansky present—and began turning a profit. However, by the time profits began improving, the mob bosses above Siegel were tired of waiting. Although time was running out, at age 41, Siegel had carved out a name for himself in the annals of organized crime and in Las Vegas history.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: On the night of June 20, 1947, as Siegel sat with his associate Allen Smiley in Virginia Hill's Beverly Hills home reading the "Los Angeles Times", an unknown assailant fired at him through the window with a .30 caliber military M1 carbine, hitting him many times, including twice in the head. Some looked upon it as a cowardly approach, bushwhacking the formidable and weapons-proficient Siegel from a distance. No one was charged with killing Siegel, and the crime remains officially unsolved.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: One theory is that Siegel's death was due to his excessive spending and possible theft of money from the mob. In 1946, a meeting was held with the "board of directors" of the syndicate in Havana, Cuba so that Luciano, exiled in Sicily, could attend and participate. A contract on Siegel's life was the conclusion. According to Stacher, Lansky reluctantly agreed to the decision. Another theory is that Siegel was shot to death preemptively by Mathew "Moose" Pandza, the lover of Sedway's wife Bee, who went to Pandza after learning that Siegel was threatening to kill her husband. Siegel apparently had grown increasingly resentful of the control Sedway, at mob behest, was exerting over Siegel's finances and planned to do away with him. Former Philadelphia family boss Ralph Natale claimed that Carbo was responsible for murdering Siegel, at the behest of Lansky.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: Siegel's death certificate states the cause of death as homicide and the immediate cause as "Cerebral Hemorrage due to Gunshot Wounds of the Head." Siegel was hit by several other bullets, including shots through his lungs. According to Florabel Muir, "Four of the nine shots fired that night destroyed a white marble statue of Bacchus on a grand piano, and then lodged in the far wall."


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: The day after Siegel's death, the "Los Angeles Herald-Express" carried a photograph on its front page from the morgue of Siegel's bare right foot with a toe tag. Although Siegel's murder occurred in Beverly Hills, his death thrust Las Vegas into the national spotlight as photographs of his lifeless body were published in newspapers throughout the country. The day after Siegel's murder, David Berman and his Las Vegas mob associates, Sedway and Gus Greenbaum, walked into the Flamingo and took over operation of the hotel and casino.


title: Bugsy Siegel

text: In the Bialystoker Synagogue on New York's Lower East Side, Siegel is memorialized by a Yahrtzeit (remembrance) plaque that marks his death date so mourners can say Kaddish for the anniversary. Siegel's plaque is below that of Max Siegel, his father, who died just two months before his son. On the property at the Flamingo Las Vegas, between the pool and a wedding chapel, is a memorial plaque to Siegel.


title: A Little Life

text: A Little Life is a 2015 novel by American writer Hanya Yanagihara. Despite the length and difficult subject matters, it became a critically acclaimed best seller.


title: A Little Life

text: "A Little Life" follows a chronological narrative with flashbacks frequently interspersed throughout. The novel's narrative perspectives shift throughout the story's progression. During the beginning of the novel, a third-person omniscient perspective privileging the thoughts of Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm is employed. As the story gradually shifts its focus towards Jude, its perspective progressively molds entirely around each character's interactions with Jude and the experiences of Jude himself. This literary perspective is punctuated by first-person narratives told by an older Harold, nine years in the future.


title: A Little Life

text: The novel focuses on the lives of four friends: Jude St. Francis, a disabled genius with a mysterious past; Willem Ragnarsson, a kind, handsome man who aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, an architect working at a prestigious firm; and Jean-Baptiste "JB" Marion, a quick-witted painter who wants to make a name in the art world. The book follows their relationships changing under the influence of success, wealth, addiction, and pride.


title: A Little Life

text: The novel's main focus is the enigmatic lawyer, Jude. He suffers from a damaged spine which leaves him with a limp and excruciating pain in his legs that comes and goes. Unbeknownst to his friends, he also frequently self-harms, one such bout of cutting led Willem to take him to Andy Contractor, Jude's doctor and trusted friend. It is clear that he suffers from debilitating mental trauma from his childhood.


title: A Little Life

text: Despite this apparent closeness with his friends, Jude finds himself unable to divulge either detail of his past or current state of mind to his roommate. Nonetheless, he thrives in his law practice, and develops a close parent-child relationship with his former professor, Harold, and his wife Julia, which results in the pair adopting him when Jude turns thirty. While thankful, the time before the adoption is filled with further bouts of self-harm, as Jude believes he is inherently unworthy of affection. Meanwhile, the rest of the group finds success in their respective fields, with Willem becoming a star of theater and then film. JB finds success as an artist but also becomes addicted to crystal meth. The group stages an intervention, where JB mocks Jude by doing a crude imitation of his limp. In spite of successful treatment, and a great deal of apologizing, Jude finds it impossible to forgive JB. Willem refuses to forgive him too, causing the group to fragment, with only Malcolm remaining friends with all four members.


title: A Little Life

text: It becomes clear that Jude was sexually traumatized at a very young age, making it difficult for him to engage in romantic relationships. His friends and loved ones begin questioning this isolation as he enters his forties, with Willem especially being baffled with regard to Jude's sexuality. As his loneliness grows more intense, he enters an abusive relationship with fashion executive Caleb, who is disgusted by Jude's limp and his increasing use of a wheelchair. Jude finally breaks off the relationship after Caleb rapes him, and they meet a final time when Caleb follows him to dinner with Harold, humiliates him, and then follows Jude to his apartment, where he brutally beats and rapes him, leaving him for dead. Jude nonetheless refuses to report the incident to the police, believing he deserved it. Besides Harold, only Andy – Jude's doctor and ongoing confidante – knows the truth of the failed relationship.


title: A Little Life

text: Although Jude's body manages to heal, the rape causes him to flash back to his childhood, wherein he was raised in a monastery and repeatedly sexually assaulted by the brothers. He recalls a period when one of the brothers, Brother Luke, ran away with him, forcing him into years of child prostitution. After he was rescued by the police, Jude was placed in state care, where the abuse continued at the hands of the counselors there. After the break-up with Caleb brings back this childhood trauma, Jude finally decides to kill himself but survives the attempt. In the aftermath, Willem comes back home and begins to live with him. Jude continues to refuse therapy but begins to tell Willem the least traumatic stories about his childhood, which Willem finds disturbing and horrifying. The two soon begin a relationship, but Jude continues to struggle with opening up, and does not enjoy having sex with him.


title: A Little Life

text: In an attempt to curb his cutting, Jude decides to instead burn himself as a form of self-harm, but accidentally inflicts third-degree burns that require a skin graft. The wound is so severe that Andy tells him he has to tell Willem what happened, or else he will do it for him. Before Jude can tell Willem, Andy accidentally divulges the information. Willem is horrified but, after a difficult fight, Jude finally confesses that he does not enjoy sex, and tells Willem about the years of sexual and physical abuse he endured. Jude also reveals that he escaped state care at age 14 and hitchhiked, performing sexual acts as payment to drivers. He also explains to Willem that the damage to his legs was caused by a man called Dr. Traylor, who picked Jude up and held him captive while he cured him of venereal disease, assaulted him, and eventually ran him over with his car.


title: A Little Life

text: The relationship continues, with Willem sleeping with women (and not with Jude) for a while, until he eventually stops, due to a sense of guilt and uneasiness. The two settle into a comfortable life together, which is shaken when Jude's legs become worse, and he must reluctantly amputate. He manages to learn to walk again with his new prosthetics, and the pair enter a period of their life which Willem dubs "The Happy Years". However, while picking up Malcolm and his wife from the train station for a visit, Willem is involved in a car accident with a drunk driver, which kills all three occupants. With his close friend and lover dead, Jude descends once again into self-destructive habits, losing such an excessive amount of weight that his remaining loved ones stage another intervention. Though they are able to get him to gain weight and to attend therapy, years of depression and despair finally overtake Jude, and he takes his own life.


title: A Little Life

text: JB was the only one with roots (a home) and he was able to spend a self-satisfied happy long life. Malcolm had cut his roots (leaving from home). Willem had weak roots (with a home he was not satisfied with). Jude had no roots and then found his roots with Harold and then after his friend's death, he was not even familiar with them. From the four friends, JB was the only one who had real roots and was the only one to have a long life.


title: A Little Life

text: A core focus of the novel is the evolution of the relationships between Jude, Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude's adoptive father, Harold. Jude's life in particular is populated by men who love and care about him, as well as men that exploit and abuse him, and those who fall in the liminal spaces between the two categories. We see this directly from the moment that he follows Brother Luke into the greenhouse, as well as the moments in which he knew what he was doing in the motel rooms was wrong, but still had felt dedication and love for Luke since up until those moments in his life, he was the only person who was kind to him. The social and emotional lives of each male character are the fabric that weaves the novel together, creating an insular narrative bubble that provides few clues about the historical moment in which the story is situated.


title: A Little Life

text: Yanagihara confines the reader's perspective and emphasizes the examination of the distinct interior lives of each character and the people that populate and influence their lives. There are few women dispersed throughout the story, as a result, the novel can be considered a rumination on the strengths and the limits of romantic love, friendship, and relationships among men.


title: A Little Life

text: Despite the various iterations of relationships and attempts to connect with Jude, his existence is often stagnated by isolation and loneliness in dealing with trauma and pain. His few attempts to reach out and connect with others during his adult life manifest in the repetition of yet another cycle of sexual abuse and trauma – his relationship with Caleb. The flashbacks to his abusive experiences with Dr. Traylor, Brother Luke, and boy's home counselors demonstrate the moral and affective extremes of abuse and exploitation that he experiences. Yet the novel invites juxtaposition by way of narration from Harold who shows a father's unconditional benevolent love to his adopted son.


title: A Little Life

text: Meanwhile, the analysis conducted on Hanya Yanagihara's "A Little Life" is a dissertation by Edvinsson in 2019 which discuss the non-stereotypical masculinity of the main characters in the novel. Edvinsson (2019) uses the basis of gender stereotypes and Raewyn Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity to analyze the masculinity of Yanagihara's male characters in "A Little Life". It is found that the characters in Yanagihara's novel do not fit into the practices of hegemonic masculinity, as their masculinity is portrayed and combined with the so-called effeminacy and feminine traits, and therefore they are considered defying the typical gender roles the society legitimizes. Yanagihara's male characters tend to have a wide range of characterization which makes them carry the complex view of masculinity which does not suit the idea of hegemonic masculinity. The findings also show that hegemonic masculinity on men can be constantly changing over time. In conclusion, this analysis has indicated that the male characters in Yanagihara's "A Little Life" have the mixture of masculinity and femininity, with some implying the stronger masculinity side and the other carrying the stronger femininity side in them (Edvinsson, 2019).


title: A Little Life

text: In an article written for "New York Magazine", Yanagihara states that "one of the things [she] wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never got better… [for him] to begin healthy (or appear so) and end sick – both the main character and the plot itself". The first sixteen years of Jude's life, plagued by sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, continue to haunt him as he enters adulthood. His trauma directly affects his mental and physical health, relationships, beliefs, and the ways in which he navigates the world. He struggles to move beyond the damage the past has wrought upon his body and psyche.


title: A Little Life

text: To Ana, Jude's deceased case manager who predates the novel's beginning, Willem, and Jude's psychiatrist later in the novel, Jude divulges almost none of his past to those close to him. The failure to understand Jude's trauma is a constant point of tension in the novel, as well as the subsequent frustration that stems from his inability to build mutual networks of support among his friends and family. Jude's friends, including Andy, are constantly plagued by doubts about the ethical choices such as allowing Jude to live independently while harboring the knowledge of his physically self-destructive behavior. Throughout the novel, Jude constantly apologizes for his actions and for the inability to take the help that would be given to him.


title: A Little Life

text: Writing in "The New Yorker", Parul Sehgal called Jude "one of the most accursed characters to ever darken a page". She went on,The story is built on the care and service that Jude elicits from a circle of supporters who fight to protect him from his self-destructive ways; truly, there are newborns envious of the devotion he inspires. The loyalty can be mortifying for the reader, who is conscripted to join in, as a witness to Jude's unending mortifications. Can we so easily invest in this walking chalk outline, this vivified DSM entry? With the trauma plot, the logic goes: evoke the wound and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it.


title: A Little Life

text: "A Little Life" depicts the everyday experience of living with trauma, chronic pain, and disability, demonstrating the inherent intersections with one another. As a direct result of Dr. Traylor running him over with a car, Jude's spinal injuries have long-term health effects that trouble him for the rest of his life. He is prone to episodes of intense pain due to severed nerves in his back, lesions forming on his legs, and has difficulty walking. His insistent inclination towards independence manifests in the ways he constantly resists and fights his body as it breaks down with age, despite numerous treatments and surgeries. Jude continually attempts to take control of his body and his emotions by self-harming. His life is structured around pain, and the anticipation of pain. As Jude grows older, he loathes the increasing dependence he must have on devices such as wheelchairs, canes, and on relying on the care of others.


title: A Little Life

text: There is evident self harm in the novel and Yanagihara does not shy away from the details of how Jude does it nor how he feels while doing so. Harold's realization is excruciatingly painful, more so than the news that Jude has indeed finally killed himself. Harold's self-deception does not save him or Jude from pain; if anything, it adds to both their suffering.


title: A Little Life

text: "A Little Life" was met with widespread acclaim from critics. The novel received rave reviews from "The New Yorker", "The Atlantic", "The Wall Street Journal", and other publications. Review aggregator website Book Marks reported only three negative and three mixed reviews among 49 total – 34 critics gave the book a rave review, while the remaining nine expressed positive impressions. In "The Atlantic", Garth Greenwell suggested that "A Little Life" is "the long-awaited gay novel", as "it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera. By violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama and exaggeration and sentiment, it can access emotional truth denied more modest means of expression".


title: A Little Life

text: "The New Yorker"'s Jon Michaud found "A Little Life" to be "a surprisingly subversive novel – one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery". He praised Yanagihara's rendering of Jude's abuse, saying it "never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude's suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character". He concluded that the book "can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, "A Little Life" feels elemental, irreducible – and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it".


title: A Little Life

text: In "The Washington Post", Nicole Lee described Yanagihara's novel as "a witness to human suffering pushed to its limits, drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose". She wrote that "through insightful detail and her decade-by-decade examination of these people's lives, Yanagihara has drawn a deeply realized character study that inspires as much as devastates. It's a life, just like everyone else's, but in Yanagihara's hands, it's also tender and large, affecting and transcendent; not a little life at all".


title: A Little Life

text: Jeff Chu of "Vox" would "give "A Little Life" all of the awards". He said that no book he previously read had "captured as perfectly the inner life of someone hoarding the unwanted souvenirs of early trauma – the silence, the self-loathing, the chronic and aching pain" as this one, and found Yanagihara's prose to be "occasionally so stunning" that it would push him "back to the beginning of a paragraph for a second read". As he phrased it, "indeed, "A Little Life" may be the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read. But I would never recommend it to anyone". Chu also said that Yanagihara's descriptions embodied his feelings, citing that "Jude's inability to address his wounds" compelled him to begin to address his own: "his struggle to find his peace emboldened me to try to find mine".


title: A Little Life

text: Writing in "The Wall Street Journal", Sam Sacks called the story "an epic study of trauma and friendship, written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured". He said, "what's remarkable about this novel, and what sets it apart from so many books centered on damaged protagonists, is the poise and equanimity with which Ms. Yanagihara presents the most shocking aspects of Jude's life. There is empathy in the writing but no judgment, and Jude's suffering, though unfathomably extreme, is never used to extort a cheap emotional response".


title: A Little Life

text: The "Los Angeles Times"'s Steph Cha remarks that ""A Little Life" is not misery porn; if that's what you're looking for, you will be disappointed, denied catharsis. There are truths here that are almost too much to bear – that hope is a qualified thing, that even love, no matter how pure and freely given, is not always enough. This book made me realize how merciful most fiction really is, even at its darkest, and it's a testament to Yanagihara's ability that she can take such ugly material and make it beautiful".


title: A Little Life

text: To NPR contributor John Powers, "A Little Life" is "shot through with pain", but "far from being all dark"; in fact, it is "an unforgettable novel about the enduring grace of friendship", he concluded. Similarly, in "Bustle", Ilana Masad wrote that Yanagihara explored "just what the title implies", which is, "the little bits of the little lives, so big when looked at close up, of four characters who live together in college and keep alive their friendship for decades after", and dubbed the novel "a remarkable feat, far from little in size, but worth every single page". In addition to being critically praised, the book is popular: as of December 2022, it had more than 400,000 ratings on Goodreads, with an average of 4.34 out of 5.


title: A Little Life

text: A notable negative opinion, however, appeared in "The New York Review of Books". Daniel Mendelsohn sharply critiqued "A Little Life" for its technical execution, its depictions of violence, which he found ethically and aesthetically gratuitous, and its position with respect to the representation of queer life or issues by a presumed-heterosexual author. Mendelsohn's review prompted a response from Gerald Howard, the book's editor, taking issue not with Mendelsohn's dislike of the novel but "his implication that my author has somehow, to use his word, 'duped' readers into feeling the emotions of pity and terror and sadness and compassion", and his implication that the book only appeals to "college students and recent graduates who have been coddled by a permissive and endlessly solicitous university culture into 'see[ing] themselves not as agents in life but as potential victims'".


title: A Little Life

text: Plus, Christian Lorentzen, writing in the "London Review of Books", referred to the characters as "stereotypical middle-class strivers plucked out of 1950s cinema". He asked, in regard to JB, who becomes a crystal meth addict, "what real person trapped in this novel wouldn't become a drug addict?". "The New York Times" reviewer Janet Maslin also wrote negatively of the novel, saying Yanagihara introduces "great shock value into her story to override its predictability. One major development here is gasp-inducingly unexpected, the stuff of life but also of melodrama. It may not lift the bleak mood, but it explains a lot about this voyeuristic book's popular success". And in a 2022 review of "A Little Life"'s theatrical adaptation (of which more below), Naveen Kumar of "The New York Times" stated that the novel's reputation "has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive".


title: A Little Life

text: In July 2015, the novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and made the shortlist of six books in September 2015. In 2019, "A Little Life" was ranked 96th on "The Guardian"'s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.


title: A Little Life

text: The theatre company Toneelgroep Amsterdam debuted Koen Tachelet's adaptation of "A Little Life" on September 23, 2018, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Ivo van Hove directed the adaptation, which had a run time of over four hours. Van Hove collaborated with Yanagihara on the script after being given copies of the novel by two friends. Ramsey Nasr played the lead Jude St. Francis in the adaptation, which received generally positive reviews. Theatre critic Matt Trueman wrote that, despite the play's sometime suffocating trauma and violence, it "is van Hove at his best, theatre that leaves an ineradicable mark". The Dutch-language production with English subtitles was shown at the 2022 Edinburgh International Festival and in October 2022 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.


title: A Little Life

text: In August 2020, the theatre company Liver & Lung presented an unofficial musical adaptation of "A Little Life" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Seven songs from the album were released on Spotify on January 7th, 2022, to celebrate the release of Yanagihara's new novel, "To Paradise".


title: A Little Life

text: An English-language version of Tachelet's stage adaptation will premiere in March 25th, 2023, at the Richmond Theatre in South West London, followed by West End run at the Harold Pinter Theatre.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the "Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology" and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, "."


title: Milgram experiment

text: The experiments began on August 7, 1961 (after the grant proposal was approved in July), in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to explain the psychology of genocide and answer the popular contemporary question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The subject and the actor arrived at the session together. The experimenter told them that they were taking part in "a scientific study of memory and learning", to see what the effect of punishment is on a subject's ability to memorize content. Also, he always clarified that the payment for their participation in the experiment was secured regardless of its development. The subject and actor drew slips of paper to determine their roles. Unknown to the subject, both slips said "teacher". The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read "learner", thus guaranteeing that the subject would always be the "teacher".


title: Milgram experiment

text: Next, the teacher and learner were taken into an adjacent room where the learner was strapped into what appeared to be an electric chair. The experimenter, dressed in a lab coat in order to appear to have more authority, told the participants this was to ensure that the learner would not escape. In a later variation of the experiment, the confederate would eventually plead for mercy and yell that he had a heart condition. At some point prior to the actual test, the teacher was given a sample electric shock from the electroshock generator in order to experience firsthand what the shock that the learner would supposedly receive during the experiment would feel like.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The teacher and learner were then separated so that they could communicate, but not see each other. The teacher was then given a list of word pairs that he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer (if correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.) The volts ranged from 15 to 450. The shock generator included verbal markings that vary from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The subjects believed that for each wrong answer the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the learner was separated from the teacher, the learner set up a tape recorder integrated with the electroshock generator, which played previously recorded sounds for each shock level. As the voltage of the fake shocks increased, the learner began making audible protests, such as banging repeatedly on the wall that separated him from the teacher. In every condition the learner makes/says a predetermined sound or word. When the highest voltages were reached, the learner fell silent.


title: Milgram experiment

text: If at any time the teacher indicated a desire to halt the experiment, the experimenter was instructed to give specific verbal prods. The prods were, in this order:


title: Milgram experiment

text: Prod 2 could only be used if prod 1 was unsuccessful. If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, the experiment was halted after the subject had elicited the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The experimenter also had prods to use if the teacher made specific comments. If the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, "Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on." If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, "Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on."


title: Milgram experiment

text: Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical teachers. All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers (the range was from zero to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock. He also reached out to honorary Harvard University graduate Chaim Homnick, who noted that this experiment would not be concrete evidence of the Nazis' innocence, due to fact that "poor people are more likely to cooperate". Milgram also polled forty psychiatrists from a medical school, and they believed that by the tenth shock, when the victim demands to be free, most subjects would stop the experiment. They predicted that by the 300-volt shock, when the victim refuses to answer, only 3.73 percent of the subjects would still continue, and they believed that "only a little over one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock on the board."


title: Milgram experiment

text: Milgram suspected before the experiment that the obedience exhibited by Nazis reflected a distinct German character, and planned to use the American participants as a control group before using German participants, expected to behave closer to the Nazis. However, the unexpected results stopped him from conducting the same experiment on German participants.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Subjects were uncomfortable administering the shocks, and displayed varying degrees of tension and stress. These signs included sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, and digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures. 14 of the 40 subjects showed definite signs of nervous laughing or smiling. Every participant paused the experiment at least once to question it. Most continued after being assured by the experimenter. Some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating. Although, a while after the experiment, Milgram found that many participants were happy to have taken part in the experiment.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The original Simulated Shock Generator and Event Recorder, or "shock box", is located in the Archives of the History of American Psychology.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Later, Milgram and other psychologists performed variations of the experiment throughout the world, with similar results. Milgram later investigated the effect of the experiment's locale on obedience levels by holding an experiment in an unregistered, backstreet office in a bustling city, as opposed to at Yale, a respectable university. The level of obedience, "although somewhat reduced, was not significantly lower." What made more of a difference was the proximity of the "learner" and the experimenter. There were also variations tested involving groups.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment. He found that while the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages ranged from 28% to 91%, there was no significant trend over time and the average percentage for US studies (61%) was close to the one for non-US studies (66%).


title: Milgram experiment

text: The participants who refused to administer the final shocks neither insisted that the experiment be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave, as per Milgram's notes and recollections, when fellow psychologist Philip Zimbardo asked him about that point.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Milgram created a documentary film titled "Obedience" showing the experiment and its results. He also produced a series of five social psychology films, some of which dealt with his experiments.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The Milgram Shock Experiment raised questions about the research ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress and inflicted insight suffered by the participants. Some critics such as Gina Perry argued that participants were not properly debriefed. In Milgram's defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated; 15 percent chose neutral responses (92% of all former participants responding). Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants. Six years later (at the height of the Vietnam War), one of the participants in the experiment wrote to Milgram, explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress:


title: Milgram experiment

text: On June 10, 1964, the "American Psychologist" published a brief but influential article by Diana Baumrind titled "Some Thoughts on Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram's' Behavioral Study of Obedience.'" Baumrind's criticisms of the treatment of human participants in Milgram's studies stimulated a thorough revision of the ethical standards of psychological research. She argued that even though Milgram had obtained informed consent, he was still ethically responsible to ensure their well-being. When participants displayed signs of distress such as sweating and trembling, the experimenter should have stepped in and halted the experiment.


title: Milgram experiment

text: In his book published in 1974 "", Milgram argued that the ethical criticism provoked by his experiments was because his findings were disturbing and revealed unwelcome truths about human nature. Others have argued that the ethical debate has diverted attention from more serious problems with the experiment's methodology.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Milgram sparked direct critical response in the scientific community by claiming that "a common psychological process is centrally involved in both [his laboratory experiments and Nazi Germany] events." James Waller, chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, formerly chair of Whitworth College Psychology Department, expressed the opinion that Milgram experiments "do not correspond well" to the Holocaust events:


title: Milgram experiment

text: In the opinion of Thomas Blass—who is the author of a scholarly monograph on the experiment ("The Man Who Shocked The World") published in 2004—the historical evidence pertaining to actions of the Holocaust perpetrators speaks louder than words:


title: Milgram experiment

text: In a 2004 issue of the journal "Jewish Currents", Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."


title: Milgram experiment

text: In 2012 Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was a "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter". She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation."


title: Milgram experiment

text: In a book review critical of Gina Perry's findings, Nestar Russell and John Picard take issue with Perry for not mentioning that "there have been well over a score, not just several, replications or slight variations on Milgram’s basic experimental procedure, and these have been performed in many different countries, several different settings and using different types of victims. And most, although certainly not all of these experiments have tended to lend weight to Milgram's original findings."


title: Milgram experiment

text: In his book "Irrational Exuberance", Yale finance professor Robert J. Shiller argues that other factors might be partially able to explain the Milgram experiments:


title: Milgram experiment

text: In a 2006 experiment, a computerized avatar was used in place of the learner receiving electrical shocks. Although the participants administering the shocks were aware that the learner was unreal, the experimenters reported that participants responded to the situation physiologically "as if it were real".


title: Milgram experiment

text: Another explanation of Milgram's results invokes belief perseverance as the underlying cause. What "people cannot be counted on is to realize that a seemingly benevolent authority is in fact malevolent, even when they are faced with overwhelming evidence which suggests that this authority is indeed malevolent. Hence, the underlying cause for the subjects' striking conduct could well be conceptual, and not the alleged 'capacity of man to abandon his humanity ... as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures."'


title: Milgram experiment

text: This last explanation receives some support from a 2009 episode of the BBC science documentary series "Horizon", which involved replication of the Milgram experiment. Of the twelve participants, only three refused to continue to the end of the experiment. Speaking during the episode, social psychologist Clifford Stott discussed the influence that the idealism of scientific inquiry had on the volunteers. He remarked: "The influence is ideological. It's about what they believe science to be, that science is a positive product, it produces beneficial findings and knowledge to society that are helpful for society. So there's that sense of science is providing some kind of system for good."


title: Milgram experiment

text: Building on the importance of idealism, some recent researchers suggest the "engaged followership" perspective. Based on an examination of Milgram's archive, in a recent study, social psychologists Alexander Haslam, Stephen Reicher and Megan Birney, at the University of Queensland, discovered that people are less likely to follow the prods of an experimental leader when the prod resembles an order. However, when the prod stresses the importance of the experiment for science (i.e. "The experiment requires you to continue"), people are more likely to obey. The researchers suggest the perspective of "engaged followership": that people are not simply obeying the orders of a leader, but instead are willing to continue the experiment because of their desire to support the scientific goals of the leader and because of a lack of identification with the learner. Also a neuroscientific study supports this perspective, namely that watching the learner receive electric shocks does not activate brain regions involving empathic concerns.


title: Milgram experiment

text: In "" (1974), Milgram describes 19 variations of his experiment, some of which had not been previously reported.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Several experiments varied the distance between the participant (teacher) and the learner. Generally, when the participant was physically closer to the learner, the participant's compliance decreased. In the variation where the learner's physical immediacy was closest—where the participant had to hold the learner's arm onto a shock plate—30 percent of participants completed the experiment. The participant's compliance also decreased if the experimenter was physically farther away (Experiments 1–4). For example, in Experiment 2, where participants received telephonic instructions from the experimenter, compliance decreased to 21 percent. Some participants deceived the experimenter by "pretending" to continue the experiment.


title: Milgram experiment

text: In Experiment 8, an all-female contingent was used; previously, all participants had been men. Obedience did not significantly differ, though the women communicated experiencing higher levels of stress.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Experiment 10 took place in a modest office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, purporting to be the commercial entity "Research Associates of Bridgeport" without apparent connection to Yale University, to eliminate the university's prestige as a possible factor influencing the participants' behavior. In those conditions, obedience dropped to 47.5 percent, though the difference was not statistically significant.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Milgram also combined the effect of authority with that of conformity. In those experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional "teachers" (also actors, like the "learner"). The behavior of the participants' peers strongly affected the results. In Experiment 17, when two additional teachers refused to comply, only four of 40 participants continued in the experiment. In Experiment 18, the participant performed a subsidiary task (reading the questions via microphone or recording the learner's answers) with another "teacher" who complied fully. In that variation, 37 of 40 continued with the experiment.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Around the time of the release of "Obedience to Authority" in 1973–1974, a version of the experiment was conducted at La Trobe University in Australia. As reported by Perry in her 2012 book "Behind the Shock Machine", some of the participants experienced long-lasting psychological effects, possibly due to the lack of proper debriefing by the experimenter.


title: Milgram experiment

text: In 2002, the British artist Rod Dickinson created "The Milgram Re-enactment", an exact reconstruction of parts of the original experiment, including the uniforms, lighting, and rooms used. An audience watched the four-hour performance through one-way glass windows. A video of this performance was first shown at the CCA Gallery in Glasgow in 2002.


title: Milgram experiment

text: A partial replication of the experiment was staged by British illusionist Derren Brown and broadcast on UK's Channel 4 in "The Heist "(2006).


title: Milgram experiment

text: Another partial replication of the experiment was conducted by Jerry M. Burger in 2006 and broadcast on the Primetime series "Basic Instincts". Burger noted that "current standards for the ethical treatment of participants clearly place Milgram's studies out of bounds." In 2009, Burger was able to receive approval from the institutional review board by modifying several of the experimental protocols. Burger found obedience rates virtually identical to those reported by Milgram in 1961–62, even while meeting current ethical regulations of informing participants. In addition, half the replication participants were female, and their rate of obedience was virtually identical to that of the male participants. Burger also included a condition in which participants first saw another participant refuse to continue. However, participants in this condition obeyed at the same rate as participants in the base condition.


title: Milgram experiment

text: In the 2010 French documentary "Le Jeu de la Mort" ("The Game of Death"), researchers recreated the Milgram experiment with an added critique of reality television by presenting the scenario as a game show pilot. Volunteers were given €40 and told that they would not win any money from the game, as this was only a trial. Only 16 of 80 "contestants" (teachers) chose to end the game before delivering the highest-voltage punishment.


title: Milgram experiment

text: The Discovery Channel aired the "How Evil are You?" segment of "Curiosity" on October 30, 2011. The episode was hosted by Eli Roth, who produced results similar to the original Milgram experiment, though the highest-voltage punishment used was 165 volts, rather than 450 volts. Roth added a segment in which a second person (an actor) in the room would defy the authority ordering the shocks, finding more often than not, the subjects would stand up to the authority figure in this case.


title: Milgram experiment

text: Charles Sheridan and Richard King (at the University of Missouri and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively) hypothesized that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a "cute, fluffy puppy" who was given real, albeit apparently harmless, electric shocks. Their findings were similar to those of Milgram: seven out of 13 of the male subjects and all 13 of the females obeyed throughout. Many subjects showed high levels of distress during the experiment, and some openly wept. In addition, Sheridan and King found that the duration for which the shock button was pressed decreased as the shocks got higher, meaning that for higher shock levels, subjects were more hesitant.


title: Opium

text: Opium (or poppy tears, scientific name: "Lachryma papaveris") is dried latex obtained from the seed capsules of the opium poppy "Papaver somniferum". Approximately 12 percent of opium is made up of the analgesic alkaloid morphine, which is processed chemically to produce heroin and other synthetic opioids for medicinal use and for the illegal drug trade. The latex also contains the closely related opiates codeine and thebaine, and non-analgesic alkaloids such as papaverine and noscapine. The traditional, labor-intensive method of obtaining the latex is to scratch ("score") the immature seed pods (fruits) by hand; the latex leaks out and dries to a sticky yellowish residue that is later scraped off and dehydrated. The word "meconium" (derived from the Greek for "opium-like", but now used to refer to newborn stools) historically referred to related, weaker preparations made from other parts of the opium poppy or different species of poppies.


title: Opium

text: The production methods have not significantly changed since ancient times. Through selective breeding of the "Papaver somniferum" plant, the content of the phenanthrene alkaloids morphine, codeine, and to a lesser extent thebaine has been greatly increased. In modern times, much of the thebaine, which often serves as the raw material for the synthesis for oxycodone, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, and other semisynthetic opiates, originates from extracting "Papaver orientale" or "Papaver bracteatum".


title: Opium

text: For the illegal drug trade, the morphine is extracted from the opium latex, reducing the bulk weight by 88%. It is then converted to heroin which is almost twice as potent, and increases the value by a similar factor. The reduced weight and bulk make it easier to smuggle.


title: Opium

text: The Mediterranean region contains the earliest archeological evidence of human use; the oldest known seeds date back to more than 5000BC in the Neolithic age with purposes such as food, anaesthetics, and ritual. Evidence from ancient Greece indicates that opium was consumed in several ways, including inhalation of vapors, suppositories, medical poultices, and as a combination with hemlock for suicide. Opium is mentioned in the most important medical texts of the ancient world, including the Ebers Papyrus and the writings of Dioscorides, Galen, and Avicenna. Widespread medical use of unprocessed opium continued through the American Civil War before giving way to morphine and its successors, which could be injected at a precisely controlled dosage.


title: Opium

text: At least 17 finds of "Papaver somniferum" from Neolithic settlements have been reported throughout Switzerland, Germany, and Spain, including the placement of large numbers of poppy seed capsules at a burial site (the "Cueva de los Murciélagos", or "Bat Cave", in Spain), which has been carbon-14 dated to 4200BC. Numerous finds of "P. somniferum" or "P. setigerum" from Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements have also been reported.


title: Opium

text: The first known cultivation of opium poppies was in Mesopotamia, approximately 3400BC, by Sumerians, who called the plant "hul gil", the "joy plant". Tablets found at Nippur, a Sumerian spiritual center south of Baghdad, described the collection of poppy juice in the morning and its use in production of opium. Cultivation continued in the Middle East by the Assyrians, who also collected poppy juice in the morning after scoring the pods with an iron scoop; they called the juice "aratpa-pal", possibly the root of "Papaver". Opium production continued under the Babylonians and Egyptians.


title: Opium

text: Opium was used with poison hemlock to put people quickly and painlessly to death. It was also used in medicine. "Spongia somnifera", sponges soaked in opium, were used during surgery. The Egyptians cultivated "opium thebaicum" in famous poppy fields around 1300BC. Opium was traded from Egypt by the Phoenicians and Minoans to destinations around the Mediterranean Sea, including Greece, Carthage, and Europe. By 1100BC, opium was cultivated on Cyprus, where surgical-quality knives were used to score the poppy pods, and opium was cultivated, traded, and smoked. Opium was also mentioned after the Persian conquest of Assyria and Babylonian lands in the .


title: Opium

text: From the earliest finds, opium has appeared to have ritual significance, and anthropologists have speculated ancient priests may have used the drug as a proof of healing power. In Egypt, the use of opium was generally restricted to priests, magicians, and warriors, its invention is credited to Thoth, and it was said to have been given by Isis to Ra as treatment for a headache. A figure of the Minoan "goddess of the narcotics", wearing a crown of three opium poppies, BC, was recovered from the Sanctuary of Gazi, Crete, together with a simple smoking apparatus.


title: Opium

text: The Greek gods Hypnos (Sleep), Nyx (Night), and Thanatos (Death) were depicted wreathed in poppies or holding them. Poppies also frequently adorned statues of Apollo, Asclepius, Pluto, Demeter, Aphrodite, Kybele and Isis, symbolizing nocturnal oblivion.


title: Opium

text: As the power of the Roman Empire declined, the lands to the south and east of the Mediterranean Sea became incorporated into the Islamic Empires. Some Muslims believe "hadiths", such as in "Sahih Bukhari", prohibits every intoxicating substance, though the use of intoxicants in medicine has been widely permitted by scholars. Dioscorides' five-volume "De Materia Medica", the precursor of pharmacopoeias, remained in use (which was edited and improved in the Arabic versions) from the 1st to 16th centuries, and described opium and the wide range of its uses prevalent in the ancient world.


title: Opium

text: Between 400 and 1200 AD, Arab traders introduced opium to China, and to India by 700. The physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi of Persian origin ("Rhazes", 845–930 AD) maintained a laboratory and school in Baghdad, and was a student and critic of Galen; he made use of opium in anesthesia and recommended its use for the treatment of melancholy in "Fi ma-la-yahdara al-tabib", "In the Absence of a Physician", a home medical manual directed toward ordinary citizens for self-treatment if a doctor was not available.


title: Opium

text: The renowned Andalusian ophthalmologic surgeon Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi ("Abulcasis", 936–1013 AD) relied on opium and mandrake as surgical anesthetics and wrote a treatise, "al-Tasrif", that influenced medical thought well into the 16th century.


title: Opium

text: The Persian physician Abū ‘Alī al-Husayn ibn Sina ("Avicenna") described opium as the most powerful of the stupefacients, in comparison to mandrake and other highly effective herbs, in "The Canon of Medicine". The text lists medicinal effects of opium, such as analgesia, hypnosis, antitussive effects, gastrointestinal effects, cognitive effects, respiratory depression, neuromuscular disturbances, and sexual dysfunction. It also refers to opium's potential as a poison. Avicenna describes several methods of delivery and recommendations for doses of the drug. This classic text was translated into Latin in 1175 and later into many other languages and remained authoritative until the 19th century. Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu used opium in the 14th-century Ottoman Empire to treat migraine headaches, sciatica, and other painful ailments.


title: Opium

text: Manuscripts of Pseudo-Apuleius's 5th-century work from the 10th and 11th centuries refer to the use of wild poppy "Papaver agreste" or "Papaver rhoeas" (identified as "P. silvaticum") instead of "P. somniferum" for inducing sleep and relieving pain.


title: Opium

text: The use of Paracelsus' laudanum was introduced to Western medicine in 1527, when Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known by the name Paracelsus, returned from his wanderings in Arabia with a famous sword, within the pommel of which he kept "Stones of Immortality" compounded from opium thebaicum, citrus juice, and "quintessence of gold". The name "Paracelsus" was a pseudonym signifying him the equal or better of Aulus Cornelius Celsus, whose text, which described the use of opium or a similar preparation, had recently been translated and reintroduced to medieval Europe. "The Canon of Medicine", the standard medical textbook Paracelsus burned in a public bonfire three weeks after being appointed professor at the University of Basel, also described the use of opium, though many Latin translations were of poor quality. "Laudanum" ("worthy of praise") was originally the 16th-century term for a medicine associated with a particular physician that was widely well-regarded, but became standardized as "tincture of opium", a solution of opium in ethanol, which Paracelsus has been credited with developing. During his lifetime, Paracelsus was viewed as an adventurer who challenged the theories and mercenary motives of contemporary medicine with dangerous chemical therapies, but his therapies marked a turning point in Western medicine. In the 1660s, laudanum was recommended for pain, sleeplessness, and diarrhea by Thomas Sydenham, the renowned "father of English medicine" or "English Hippocrates", to whom is attributed the quote, "Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium."


title: Opium

text: Use of opium as a cure-all was reflected in the formulation of mithridatium described in the 1728 "Chambers Cyclopedia", which included true opium in the mixture.


title: Opium

text: Eventually, laudanum became readily available and extensively used by the 18th century in Europe, especially England. Compared to other chemicals available to 18th century regular physicians, opium was a benign alternative to arsenic, mercury, or emetics, and it was remarkably successful in alleviating a wide range of ailments. Due to the constipation often produced by the consumption of opium, it was one of the most effective treatments for cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea. As a cough suppressant, opium was used to treat bronchitis, tuberculosis, and other respiratory illnesses. Opium was additionally prescribed for rheumatism and insomnia. Medical textbooks even recommended its use by people in good health, to "optimize the internal equilibrium of the human body".


title: Opium

text: During the 18th century, opium was found to be a good remedy for nervous disorders. Due to its sedative and tranquilizing properties, it was used to quiet the minds of those with psychosis, help with people who were considered insane, and also to help treat patients with insomnia. However, despite its medicinal values in these cases, it was noted that in cases of psychosis, it could cause anger or depression, and due to the drug's euphoric effects, it could cause depressed patients to become more depressed after the effects wore off because they would get used to being high.


title: Opium

text: The standard medical use of opium persisted well into the 19th century. US president William Henry Harrison was treated with opium in 1841, and in the American Civil War, the Union Army used 175,000 lb (80,000 kg) of opium tincture and powder and about 500,000 opium pills. During this time of popularity, users called opium "God's Own Medicine".


title: Opium

text: One reason for the increase in opiate consumption in the United States during the 19th century was the prescribing and dispensing of legal opiates by physicians and pharmacists to women with "female complaints" (mostly to relieve menstrual pain and hysteria). Because opiates were viewed as more humane than punishment or restraint, they were often used to treat the mentally ill. Between 150,000 and 200,000 opiate addicts lived in the United States in the late 19th century and between two-thirds and three-quarters of these addicts were women.


title: Opium

text: Opium addiction in the later 19th century received a hereditary definition. Dr. George Beard in 1869 proposed his theory of neurasthenia, a hereditary nervous system deficiency that could predispose an individual to addiction. Neurasthenia was increasingly tied in medical rhetoric to the "nervous exhaustion" suffered by many a white-collar worker in the increasingly hectic and industrialized U.S. life—the most likely potential clients of physicians.


title: Opium

text: Soldiers returning home from the Crusades in the 11th to 13th century brought opium with them. Opium is said to have been used for recreational purposes from the 14th century onwards in Muslim societies. Ottoman and European testimonies confirm that from the 16th to the 19th centuries Anatolian opium was eaten in Constantinople as much as it was exported to Europe. In 1573, for instance, a Venetian visitor to the Ottoman Empire observed many of the Turkish natives of Constantinople regularly drank a "certain black water made with opium" that makes them feel good, but to which they become so addicted, if they try to go without, they will "quickly die". From drinking it, dervishes claimed the drugs bestowed them with visionary glimpses of future happiness. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire supplied the West with opium long before China and India.


title: Opium

text: Extensive textual and pictorial sources also show that poppy cultivation and opium consumption were widespread in Safavid Iran and Mughal India.


title: Opium

text: In England, opium fulfilled a "critical" role, as it did other societies, in addressing multifactorial pain, cough, dysentery, diarrhea, as argued by Virginia Berridge. A medical panacea of the 19th century, "any respectable person" could purchase a range of hashish pastes and (later) morphine with complementary injection kit.


title: Opium

text: Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (1822), one of the first and most famous literary accounts of opium addiction written from the point of view of an addict, details the pleasures and dangers of the drug. In the book, it is not Ottoman, nor Chinese, addicts about whom he writes, but English opium users: "I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had." De Quincey writes about the great English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), whose "Kubla Khan" is also widely considered to be a poem of the opium experience. Coleridge began using opium in 1791 after developing jaundice and rheumatic fever, and became a full addict after a severe attack of the disease in 1801, requiring 80–100 drops of laudanum daily.


title: Opium

text: The earliest clear description of the use of opium as a recreational drug in China came from Xu Boling, who wrote in 1483 that opium was "mainly used to aid masculinity, strengthen sperm and regain vigor", and that it "enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies". He also described an expedition sent by the Ming dynasty Chenghua Emperor in 1483 to procure opium for a price "equal to that of gold" in Hainan, Fujian, Zhejiang, Sichuan and Shaanxi, where it is close to the western lands of Xiyu. A century later, Li Shizhen listed standard medical uses of opium in his renowned "Compendium of Materia Medica" (1578), but also wrote that "lay people use it for the art of sex," in particular the ability to "arrest seminal emission". This association of opium with sex continued in China until the end of the 19th century.


title: Opium

text: Opium smoking began as a privilege of the elite and remained a great luxury into the early 19th century. However, by 1861, Wang Tao wrote that opium was used even by rich peasants, and even a small village without a rice store would have a shop where opium was sold.


title: Opium

text: It is important to note that "recreational use" of opium was part of a civilized and mannered ritual, akin to an East Asian tea ceremony, prior to the extensive prohibitions that came later. In places of gathering, often tea shops, or a person's home servings of opium were offered as a form of greeting and politeness. Often served with tea (in China) and with specific and fine utensils and beautifully carved wooden pipes. The wealthier the smoker, the finer and more expensive material used in ceremony. The image of seedy underground, destitute smokers were often generated by anti-opium narratives and became a more accurate image of opium use following the effects of large scale opium prohibition in the 1880s.


title: Opium

text: Opium prohibition in China began in 1729, yet was followed by nearly two centuries of increasing opium use. A massive destruction of opium by an emissary of the Chinese Daoguang Emperor in an attempt to stop opium smuggling by the British led to the First Opium War (18391842), in which Britain defeated China. After 1860, opium use continued to increase with widespread domestic production in China. By 1905, an estimated 25 percent of the male population were regular consumers of the drug. Recreational use of opium elsewhere in the world remained rare into late in the 19th century, as indicated by ambivalent reports of opium usage. In 1906, 41,000 tons were produced, but because 39,000 tons of that year's opium were consumed in China, overall usage in the rest of the world was much lower. These figures from 1906 have been criticized as overestimates.


title: Opium

text: Smoking of opium came on the heels of tobacco smoking and may have been encouraged by a brief ban on the smoking of tobacco by the Ming emperor. The prohibition ended in 1644 with the coming of the Qing dynasty, which encouraged smokers to mix in increasing amounts of opium. In 1705, Wang Shizhen wrote, "nowadays, from nobility and gentlemen down to slaves and women, all are addicted to tobacco." Tobacco in that time was frequently mixed with other herbs (this continues with clove cigarettes to the modern day), and opium was one component in the mixture. Tobacco mixed with opium was called "madak" (or "madat") and became popular throughout China and its seafaring trade partners (such as Taiwan, Java, and the Philippines) in the 17th century. In 1712, Engelbert Kaempfer described addiction to "madak": "No commodity throughout the Indies is retailed with greater profit by the Batavians than opium, which [its] users cannot do without, nor can they come by it except it be brought by the ships of the Batavians from Bengal and Coromandel."


title: Opium

text: Fueled in part by the 1729 ban on "madak", which at first effectively exempted pure opium as a potentially medicinal product, the smoking of pure opium became more popular in the 18th century. In 1736, the smoking of pure opium was described by Huang Shujing, involving a pipe made from bamboo rimmed with silver, stuffed with palm slices and hair, fed by a clay bowl in which a globule of molten opium was held over the flame of an oil lamp. This elaborate procedure, requiring the maintenance of pots of opium at just the right temperature for a globule to be scooped up with a needle-like skewer for smoking, formed the basis of a craft of "paste-scooping" by which servant girls could become prostitutes as the opportunity arose.


title: Opium

text: The Chinese Diaspora in the West (1800s to 1949) first began to flourish during the 19th century due to famine and political upheaval, as well as rumors of wealth to be had outside of Southeast Asia. Chinese emigrants to cities such as San Francisco, London, and New York City brought with them the Chinese manner of opium smoking, and the social traditions of the opium den. The Indian Diaspora distributed opium-eaters in the same way, and both social groups survived as "lascars" (seamen) and "coolies" (manual laborers). French sailors provided another major group of opium smokers, having gotten the habit while in French Indochina, where the drug was promoted and monopolized by the colonial government as a source of revenue. Among white Europeans, opium was more frequently consumed as laudanum or in patent medicines. Britain's All-India Opium Act of 1878 formalized ethnic restrictions on the use of opium, limiting recreational opium sales to registered Indian opium-eaters and Chinese opium-smokers only and prohibiting its sale to workers from Burma. Likewise, in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants were permitted to smoke opium, so long as they refrained from doing so in the presence of whites.


title: Opium

text: Because of the low social status of immigrant workers, contemporary writers and media had little trouble portraying opium dens as seats of vice, white slavery, gambling, knife- and revolver-fights, and a source for drugs causing deadly overdoses, with the potential to addict and corrupt the white population. By 1919, anti-Chinese riots attacked Limehouse, the Chinatown of London. Chinese men were deported for playing keno and sentenced to hard labor for opium possession. Due to this, both the immigrant population and the social use of opium fell into decline. Yet despite lurid literary accounts to the contrary, 19th-century London was not a hotbed of opium smoking. The total lack of photographic evidence of opium smoking in Britain, as opposed to the relative abundance of historical photos depicting opium smoking in North America and France, indicates the infamous Limehouse opium-smoking scene was little more than fantasy on the part of British writers of the day, who were intent on scandalizing their readers while drumming up the threat of the "yellow peril".


title: Opium

text: A large scale opium prohibition attempt began in 1729, when the Qing Yongzheng Emperor, disturbed by "madak" smoking at court and carrying out the government's role of upholding Confucian virtues, officially prohibited the sale of opium, except for a small amount for medicinal purposes. The ban punished sellers and opium den keepers, but not users of the drug. Opium was banned completely in 1799, and this prohibition continued until 1860.


title: Opium

text: During the Qing dynasty, China opened itself to foreign trade under the Canton System through the port of Guangzhou (Canton), with traders from the East India Company visiting the port by the 1690s. Due to the growing British demand for Chinese tea and the Chinese Emperor's lack of interest in British commodities other than silver, British traders resorted to trade in opium as a high-value commodity for which China was not self-sufficient. The English traders had been purchasing small amounts of opium from India for trade since Ralph Fitch first visited in the mid-16th century. Trade in opium was standardized, with production of balls of raw opium, , 30% water content, wrapped in poppy leaves and petals, and shipped in chests of (one picul).


title: Opium

text: Chests of opium were sold in auctions in Calcutta with the understanding that the independent purchasers would then smuggle it into China.


title: Opium

text: China had a positive balance sheet in trading with the British, which led to a decrease of the British silver stocks. Therefore, the British tried to encourage Chinese opium use to enhance their balance, and they delivered it from Indian provinces under British control. In India, its cultivation, as well as the manufacture and traffic to China, were subject to the British East India Company (BEIC), as a strict monopoly of the British government. There was an extensive and complicated system of BEIC agencies involved in the supervision and management of opium production and distribution in India. Bengal opium was highly prized, commanding twice the price of the domestic Chinese product, which was regarded as inferior in quality.


title: Opium

text: Some competition came from the newly independent United States, which began to compete in Guangzhou, selling Turkish opium in the 1820s. Portuguese traders also brought opium from the independent Malwa states of western India, although by 1820, the British were able to restrict this trade by charging "pass duty" on the opium when it was forced to pass through Bombay to reach an "entrepot".


title: Opium

text: Despite drastic penalties and continued prohibition of opium until 1860, opium smuggling rose steadily from 200 chests per year under the Yongzheng Emperor to 1,000 under the Qianlong Emperor, 4,000 under the Jiaqing Emperor, and 30,000 under the Daoguang Emperor. The illegal sale of opium became one of the world's most valuable single commodity trades and has been called "the most long continued and systematic international crime of modern times". Opium smuggling provided 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire's revenue and simultaneously caused scarcity of silver in China.


title: Opium

text: In response to the ever-growing number of Chinese people becoming addicted to opium, the Qing Daoguang Emperor took strong action to halt the smuggling of opium, including the seizure of cargo. In 1838, the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests of opium in Guangzhou. Given that a chest of opium was worth nearly in 1800, this was a substantial economic loss. The British queen Victoria, not willing to replace the cheap opium with costly silver, began the First Opium War in 1840, the British winning Hong Kong and trade concessions in the first of a series of Unequal Treaties.


title: Opium

text: The opium trade incurred intense enmity from the later British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. As a member of Parliament, Gladstone called it "most infamous and atrocious" referring to the opium trade between China and British India in particular. Gladstone was fiercely against both of the Opium Wars Britain waged in China in the First Opium War initiated in 1840 and the Second Opium War initiated in 1857, denounced British violence against Chinese, and was ardently opposed to the British trade in opium to China. Gladstone lambasted it as "Palmerston's Opium War" and said that he felt "in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China" in May 1840. A famous speech was made by Gladstone in Parliament against the First Opium War. Gladstone criticized it as "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace". His hostility to opium stemmed from the effects of opium brought upon his sister Helen. Due to the First Opium war brought on by Palmerston, there was initial reluctance to join the government of Peel on part of Gladstone before 1841.


title: Opium

text: Following China's defeat in the Second Opium War in 1858, China was forced to legalize opium and began massive domestic production. Importation of opium peaked in 1879 at 6,700 tons, and by 1906, China was producing 85 percent of the world's opium, some 35,000 tons, and 27 percent of its adult male population regularly used opium13.5million people consuming 39,000 tons of opium yearly. From 1880 to the beginning of the Communist era, the British attempted to discourage the use of opium in China, but this effectively promoted the use of morphine, heroin, and cocaine, further exacerbating the problem of addiction.


title: Opium

text: Scientific evidence of the pernicious nature of opium use was largely undocumented in the 1890s, when Protestant missionaries in China decided to strengthen their opposition to the trade by compiling data which would demonstrate the harm the drug did. Faced with the problem that many Chinese associated Christianity with opium, partly due to the arrival of early Protestant missionaries on opium clippers, at the 1890 Shanghai Missionary Conference, they agreed to establish the Permanent Committee for the Promotion of Anti-Opium Societies in an attempt to overcome this problem and to arouse public opinion against the opium trade. The members of the committee were John Glasgow Kerr, MD, American Presbyterian Mission in Canton; B.C. Atterbury, MD, American Presbyterian Mission in Peking; Archdeacon Arthur E. Moule, Church Missionary Society in Shanghai; Henry Whitney, MD, American Board of Commissioners for foreign Missions in Foochow; the Rev. Samuel Clarke, China Inland Mission in Kweiyang; the Rev. Arthur Gostick Shorrock, English Baptist Mission in Taiyuan; and the Rev. Griffith John, London Mission Society in Hankow. These missionaries were generally outraged over the British government's Royal Commission on Opium visiting India but not China. Accordingly, the missionaries first organized the Anti-Opium League in China among their colleagues in every mission station in China. American missionary Hampden Coit DuBose acted as first president. This organization, which had elected national officers and held an annual national meeting, was instrumental in gathering data from every Western-trained medical doctor in China, which was then published as William Hector Park compiled "Opinions of Over 100 Physicians on the Use of Opium in China" (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1899). The vast majority of these medical doctors were missionaries; the survey also included doctors who were in private practices, particularly in Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese who had been trained in medical schools in Western countries. In England, the home director of the China Inland Mission, Benjamin Broomhall, was an active opponent of the opium trade, writing two books to promote the banning of opium smoking: "The Truth about Opium Smoking" and "The Chinese Opium Smoker". In 1888, Broomhall formed and became secretary of the Christian Union for the Severance of the British Empire with the Opium Traffic and editor of its periodical, "National Righteousness". He lobbied the British Parliament to stop the opium trade. He and James Laidlaw Maxwell appealed to the London Missionary Conference of 1888 and the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 to condemn the continuation of the trade. When Broomhall was dying, his son Marshall read to him from "The Times" the welcome news that an agreement had been signed ensuring the end of the opium trade within two years.


title: Opium

text: Official Chinese resistance to opium was renewed on September 20, 1906, with an antiopium initiative intended to eliminate the drug problem within 10 years. The program relied on the turning of public sentiment against opium, with mass meetings at which opium paraphernalia were publicly burned, as well as coercive legal action and the granting of police powers to organizations such as the Fujian Anti-Opium Society. Smokers were required to register for licenses for gradually reducing rations of the drug. Action against opium farmers centered upon a highly repressive incarnation of law enforcement in which rural populations had their property destroyed, their land confiscated and/or were publicly tortured, humiliated and executed. Addicts sometimes turned to missionaries for treatment for their addiction, though many associated these foreigners with the drug trade. The program was counted as a substantial success, with a cessation of direct British opium exports to China (but not Hong Kong) and most provinces declared free of opium production. Nonetheless, the success of the program was only temporary, with opium use rapidly increasing during the disorder following the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916. Opium farming also increased, peaking in 1930 when the League of Nations singled China out as the primary source of illicit opium in East and Southeast Asia. Many local powerholders facilitated the trade during this period to finance conflicts over territory and political campaigns. In some areas food crops were eradicated to make way for opium, contributing to famines in Kweichow and Shensi Provinces between 1921 and 1923, and food deficits in other provinces.


title: Opium

text: Beginning in 1915, Chinese nationalist groups came to describe the period of military losses and Unequal Treaties as the "Century of National Humiliation", later defined to end with the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.


title: Opium

text: In the northern provinces of Ningxia and Suiyuan in China, Chinese Muslim General Ma Fuxiang both prohibited and engaged in the opium trade. It was hoped that Ma Fuxiang would have improved the situation, since Chinese Muslims were well known for opposition to smoking opium. Ma Fuxiang officially prohibited opium and made it illegal in Ningxia, but the Guominjun reversed his policy; by 1933, people from every level of society were abusing the drug, and Ningxia was left in destitution. In 1923, an officer of the Bank of China from Baotou found out that Ma Fuxiang was assisting the drug trade in opium which helped finance his military expenses. He earned from taxing those sales in 1923. General Ma had been using the bank, a branch of the Government of China's exchequer, to arrange for silver currency to be transported to Baotou to use it to sponsor the trade.


title: Opium

text: The opium trade under the Chinese Communist Party was important to its finances in the 1940s. Peter Vladimirov's diary provided a first hand account. Chen Yung-fa provided a detailed historical account of how the opium trade was essential to the economy of Yan'an during this period. Mitsubishi and Mitsui were involved in the opium trade during the Japanese occupation of China.


title: Opium

text: Mao Zedong government is generally credited with eradicating both consumption and production of opium during the 1950s using unrestrained repression and social reform. Ten million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops. Remaining opium production shifted south of the Chinese border into the Golden Triangle region. The remnant opium trade primarily served Southeast Asia, but spread to American soldiers during the Vietnam War; based on a study of opiate use in soldiers returning to the United States in 1971, 20 percent of participants were dependent enough to experience withdrawal symptoms.


title: Opium

text: There were no legal restrictions on the importation or use of opium in the United States until the San Francisco Opium Den Ordinance, which banned dens for public smoking of opium in 1875, a measure fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and the perception that whites were starting to frequent the dens. This was followed by an 1891 California law requiring that narcotics carry warning labels and that their sales be recorded in a registry; amendments to the California Pharmacy and Poison Act in 1907 made it a crime to sell opiates without a prescription, and bans on possession of opium or opium pipes in 1909 were enacted.


title: Opium

text: At the US federal level, the legal actions taken reflected constitutional restrictions under the enumerated powers doctrine prior to reinterpretation of the commerce clause, which did not allow the federal government to enact arbitrary prohibitions, but did permit arbitrary taxation. Beginning in 1883, opium importation was taxed at to per pound, until the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909 prohibited the importation of opium altogether. In a similar manner, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, passed in fulfillment of the International Opium Convention of 1912, nominally placed a tax on the distribution of opiates, but served as a "de facto" prohibition of the drugs. Today, opium is regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration under the Controlled Substances Act.


title: Opium

text: Following passage of a Colonial Australian law in 1895, Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 addressed opium addiction among Aboriginal people, though it soon became a general vehicle for depriving them of basic rights by administrative regulation. By 1905 all Australian states and territories had passed similar laws making prohibitions to Opium sale. Smoking and possession was prohibited in 1908.


title: Opium

text: Hardening of Canadian attitudes toward Chinese opium users and fear of a spread of the drug into the white population led to the effective criminalization of opium for nonmedical use in Canada between 1908 and the mid-1920s.


title: Opium

text: In 1909, the International Opium Commission was founded, and by 1914, 34 nations had agreed that the production and importation of opium should be diminished. In 1924, 62 nations participated in a meeting of the Commission. Subsequently, this role passed to the League of Nations, and all signatory nations agreed to prohibit the import, sale, distribution, export, and use of all narcotic drugs, except for medical and scientific purposes. This role was later taken up by the International Narcotics Control Board of the United Nations under of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and subsequently under the Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Opium-producing nations are required to designate a government agency to take physical possession of licit opium crops as soon as possible after harvest and conduct all wholesaling and exporting through that agency.


title: Opium

text: From 1897 to 1902, Paul Doumer (later President of France) was Governor-General of French Indochina. Upon his arrival the colonies were losing millions of francs each year. Determined to put them on a paying basis he levied taxes on various products, opium among them. The Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who could or would not pay these taxes, lost their houses and land, and often became day laborers. Evidently, resorting to this means of gaining income gave France a vested interest in the continuation of opium use among the population of Indochina.


title: Opium

text: Before the 1920s, regulation in Britain was controlled by pharmacists. Pharmacists who were found to have prescribed opium for illegitimate uses and anyone found to have sold opium without proper qualifications would be prosecuted. With the passing of the Rolleston Act in Britain in 1926, doctors were allowed to prescribe opiates such as morphine and heroin if they believed their patients demonstrated a medical need. Because addiction was viewed as a medical problem rather than an indulgence, doctors were permitted to allow patients to wean themselves off opiates rather than cutting off any opiate use altogether. The passing of the Rolleston Act put the control of opium use in the hands of medical doctors instead of pharmacists. Later in the 20th century, addiction to opiates, especially heroin in young people, continued to rise and so the sale and prescription of opiates was limited to doctors in treatment centers. If these doctors were found to be prescribing opiates without just cause, then they could lose their license to practice or prescribe drugs.


title: Opium

text: Abuse of opium in the United States began in the late 19th century and was largely associated with Chinese immigrants. During this time the use of opium had little stigma; the drug was used freely until 1882 when a law was passed to confine opium smoking to specific dens. Until the full ban on opium-based products came into effect just after the beginning of the twentieth century, physicians in the US considered opium a miracle drug that could help with many ailments. Therefore, the ban on said products was more a result of negative connotations towards its use and distribution by Chinese immigrants who were heavily persecuted during this particular period in history. As the 19th century progressed however, doctor Hamilton Wright worked to decrease the use of opium in the US by submitting the Harrison Act to congress. This act put taxes and restrictions on the sale and prescription of opium, as well as trying to stigmatize the opium poppy and its derivatives as "demon drugs", to try to scare people away from them. This act and the stigma of a demon drug on opium, led to the criminalization of people that used opium-based products. It made the use and possession of opium and any of its derivatives illegal. The restrictions were recently redefined by the Federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970.


title: Opium

text: Opium production in China and the rest of East Asia was nearly wiped out after WWII, however, sustained covert support by the United States Central Intelligence Agency for the Thai Northern Army and the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang army invading Burma facilitated production and trafficking of the drug from Southeast Asia for decades, with the region becoming a major source of world supplies.


title: Opium

text: During the Communist era in Eastern Europe, poppy stalks sold in bundles by farmers were processed by users with household chemicals to make "kompot" ("Polish heroin"), and poppy seeds were used to produce "koknar", an opiate.


title: Opium

text: Globally, opium has gradually been superseded by a variety of purified, semi-synthetic, and synthetic opioids with progressively stronger effects, and by other general anesthetics. This process began in 1804, when Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner first isolated morphine from the opium poppy.


title: Opium

text: The process continued until 1817, when Friedrich Sertürner published the isolation of pure morphine from opium after at least thirteen years of research and a nearly disastrous trial on himself and three boys. The great advantage of purified morphine was that a patient could be treated with a known dose—whereas with raw plant material, as Gabriel Fallopius once lamented, "if soporifics are weak they do not help; if they are strong they are exceedingly dangerous."


title: Opium

text: Morphine was the first pharmaceutical isolated from a natural product, and this success encouraged the isolation of other alkaloids: by 1820, isolations of noscapine, strychnine, veratrine, colchicine, caffeine, and quinine were reported. Morphine sales began in 1827, by Heinrich Emanuel Merck of Darmstadt, and helped him expand his family pharmacy into the Merck KGaA pharmaceutical company. Codeine was isolated in 1832 by Pierre Jean Robiquet.


title: Opium

text: The use of diethyl ether and chloroform for general anesthesia began in 1846–1847, and rapidly displaced the use of opiates and tropane alkaloids from Solanaceae due to their relative safety.


title: Opium

text: Heroin, the first semi-synthetic opioid, was first synthesized in 1874, but was not pursued until its rediscovery in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann at the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany. From 1898 to 1910 heroin was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. Because the lethal dose of heroin was viewed as a hundred times greater than its effective dose, heroin was advertised as a safer alternative to other opioids. By 1902, sales made up 5 percent of the company's profits, and "heroinism" had attracted media attention. Oxycodone, a thebaine derivative similar to codeine, was introduced by Bayer in 1916 and promoted as a less-addictive analgesic. Preparations of the drug such as oxycodone with paracetamol and extended release oxycodone remain popular to this day.


title: Opium

text: A range of synthetic opioids such as methadone (1937), pethidine (1939), fentanyl (late 1950s), and derivatives thereof have been introduced, and each is preferred for certain specialized applications. Nonetheless, morphine remains the drug of choice for American combat medics, who carry packs of syrettes containing 16 milligrams each for use on severely wounded soldiers. No drug has been found that can match the painkilling effect of opioids without also duplicating much of their addictive potential.


title: Opium

text: Opium was prohibited in many countries during the early 20th century, leading to the modern pattern of opium production as a precursor for illegal recreational drugs or tightly regulated, highly taxed, legal prescription drugs. In 1980, 2,000 tons of opium supplied all legal and illegal uses. Worldwide production in 2006 was 6610 tonnes—about one-fifth the level of production in 1906; since then, opium production has fallen.


title: Opium

text: In 2002, the price for one kilogram of opium was for the farmer, for purchasers in Afghanistan, and on the streets of Europe before conversion into heroin.


title: Opium

text: Recently, opium production has increased considerably, surpassing 5,000 tons in 2002 and reaching 8,600 tons in Afghanistan and 840 tons in the Golden Triangle in 2014. Production is expected to increase in 2015 as new, improved seeds have been brought into Afghanistan. The World Health Organization has estimated that current production of opium would need to increase fivefold to account for total global medical need. Solar energy panels in use in Afghanistan have allowed farmers to dig their wells deeper, leading to a bumper crop of opium year after year.


title: Opium

text: Opium poppies are popular and attractive garden plants, whose flowers vary greatly in color, size and form. A modest amount of domestic cultivation in private gardens is not usually subject to legal controls. In part, this tolerance reflects variation in addictive potency. A cultivar for opium production, "Papaver somniferum L. elite", contains 91.2 percent morphine, codeine, and thebaine in its latex alkaloids, whereas in the latex of the condiment cultivar "Marianne", these three alkaloids total only 14.0 percent. The remaining alkaloids in the latter cultivar are primarily narcotoline and noscapine.


title: Opium

text: Seed capsules can be dried and used for decorations, but they also contain morphine, codeine, and other alkaloids. These pods can be boiled in water to produce a bitter tea that induces a long-lasting intoxication. If allowed to mature, poppy pods (poppy straw) can be crushed and used to produce lower quantities of morphinans. In poppies subjected to mutagenesis and selection on a mass scale, researchers have been able to use poppy straw to obtain large quantities of oripavine, a precursor to opioids and antagonists such as naltrexone. Although millennia older, the production of poppy head decoctions can be seen as a quick-and-dirty variant of the Kábáy poppy straw process, which since its publication in 1930 has become the major method of obtaining licit opium alkaloids worldwide, as discussed in Morphine.