Opium - What Kind of Drug Is It?

What Kind of Drug Is It?

Opium is the sticky white sap that flows from ripening seed pods of the Papaver somniferum plant. The plant's Latin name means "poppy" (Papaver) "that induces sleep" (somniferum). The word opium comes from the Greek word for sap. For more than 6, 000 years, humans have cultivated opium poppies and have used opium to relieve pain and to induce euphoria, a heightened sense of happiness and well-being. As of 2005, opium poppy plants are grown legally to supply painkilling, cough suppressing, and antidiarrheal medicines to people all over the world. Illegally, the plants are grown to produce cooked opium, morphine, and heroin—highly addictive substances that are abused for their mind-altering effects.

All of the heroin, morphine, codeine, and thebainepronounced thee-BAIN; one of the active alkaloids in opium, used to create synthetic painkillers. used in the world begins as opium. Raw opium, removed from the plant, is first refined by cooking. It is then chemically altered in various ways to produce the other products. In its crudest form, opium is smoked or eaten by people to get high. In fact, farmers who grow it illegally sometimes become high just by collecting the sap. More commonly, though, raw opium is passed through a series of chemical processes that isolate its morphine. The morphine is the plant's most psychoactive, or mind-altering, ingredient. Then the morphine is further refined into heroin. (Entries for codeine, heroin, and morphine are available in this encyclopedia.)

Official Drug Name: Opium; laudanum (tincture with alcohol); paregoric (tincture with camphor); Dover's powder.

Also Known As: Ah-pen-yen, Aunti, Aunti Emma, big O, black, black pill, black stuff, black hash (mixture with hashish), black Russian, block, Buddha (mixture with marijuana), chandoo/chandu, Chinese molasses, Chinese tobacco, dopium, Dover's deck, dream gun, dream stick, dreams, easing powder, fi-do-nie, gee, God's medicine, gondola, goric, great tobacco, gum, guma, hop/hops, joy plant, midnight oil, O, O.P., ope, pen yan, pin gon, pin yen, pox, skee, toxy, toys, when-shee, ze, zero

Drug Classifications: Schedule II, opiate

Morphine, codeine, and heroin are relatively recent alterations of basic opium. For much of its long history, opium was the primary drug of use and abuse. Its use has been recorded in many cultures in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States. Its power and strength were such that Italian explorer Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was instructed to bring back opium as he set off on his first voyage to the New World. When Europeans came to the Americas, they brought poppy seeds with them and began growing opium in the Western Hemisphere. More than 150 years ago, the drug caused a major war between Great Britain and China. In the early twenty-first century, the United States—and the United Nations—spent many millions of dollars trying to destroy illicit, or illegal, poppy fields.

Afghanistan produces almost 90 percent of the worlds illegal opium. Most of it is refined into heroin and sent to Europe, Russia, and the United States. Jeffrey L. Rotman/Corbis.
Afghanistan produces almost 90 percent of the world's illegal opium. Most of it is refined into heroin and sent to Europe, Russia, and the United States. © Jeffrey L. Rotman/Corbis.