A dangerous drug made from the milky sap of the poppy opium has been with us for thousands of years used to relieve pain and bring sleep as a lethal pathway to addiction and a powerful and illegal trade tool so what is the story of opium and its derivatives move feen and heroin today on the forum I bring together 3 experts to trace its long history and explore its complex and often dark reputation and analyst of modern China and its medical history a cultural historian his track the evolution of drug use over the centuries and the former head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan so you joined us all after the b.b.c. News. Eunice with the b.b.c. News the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden has said the u.s. Congress must hold Donald Trump to account following the start of impeachment proceedings against the president Mr Biden said a rough transcript of a conversation between Mr Trump and Ukraine's leader showed that he had betrayed his oath of office during the phone call the president asked a lot of mayors Lenski to set up a corruption investigation into Mr Biden Mr Trump says allegations he acted improperly are a hoax David Willetts is in Washington last night the White House bowed to pressure and gave senior members of Congress the chance to examine the complaint by the whistleblower who 1st revealed the telephone call judging by the reactions of lawmakers from both sides the contents could prove more damaging to Mr Trump than the telephone transcript it's been reported here that the whistleblower also identified several White House officials as witnesses to potential presidential misconduct Democrats say they are increasingly convinced the president's behavior justified their drive for impeachment New South Wales has become the last Australian states to decriminalize abortion the newly passed law allows terminations up to 22 weeks or later if 2 doctors agree there have been weeks of debate as well as protests against the legislation the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney described the new law as a defeat for humanity but supporters say women seeking an abortion will no longer be treated like criminals penny shop as an opposition Labor m.p. None of us are in favor of abortion it's like saying we're in favor of heart attacks we just understand that the reality is that it's a medical procedure that they see down Saif Ali legally and excessively Saudi Arabia has warned that all options including a military response remain possible after the attacks on the kingdom's on. Industry earlier this month a Saudi government spokesman told the b.b.c. That everyone was trying to avoid war about Iran would be held accountable he said Saudi Arabia would wait until a thorough investigation was complete before deciding on any action a b.b.c. Investigation has found that children in Bangladesh as young as 7 being groomed to sow sex in one of the world's biggest licensed brothels has Frankie McCann like the brothel in down that Dia was officially sanctioned around 30 years ago which meant selling sex was legal for those over the age of 18 around 1000 children a believed to live in the brothel but a b.b.c. Investigation has found some of these are being forced into the industry by their parents and others in the District One woman told us she started work when she was just 11 years old the charity Save the Children has joined up with locals to set up schools and a safe home in the area World News from the b.b.c. . The latest stage of an emergency vaccination campaign has been launched in the Democratic Republic of Congo to combat a measles outbreak that's killed over 3 and a half 1000 people this year the World Health Organization and the Congolese government aim to vaccinate almost a 1000000 children across the country in just over a week. A commercial court in London is due to hear the latest stage of a legal battle which has left the Nigerian authorities facing the prospect of a $9000000000.00 compensation bill the government in a Blue Jays drawing to overturn a previous ruling that it should pay the money to an obscure firm which was due to build a gasser finery in southern Nigeria the British prime minister Boris Johnson has been accused of stoking dangerous divisions over bricks it after angry exchanges in Parliament opposition M.P.'s criticised his use of the words betrayal and surrender to describe the law which demands that he asked the e.u. For an extension to brag that he was also criticised for his comments over an opposition m.p. Who was murdered by a far right extremist days before the 2016 referendum make oddly reports bogus Johnson was rebuked by M.P.'s and his comments about the modern day. That the base meets on how many was to deliver breaks it sparked a furious reaction the coach Morgan issued a thinly veiled rebuke to her boss saying at the time a strong feelings we all need to remind ourselves of the effect of everything we say the Tony former cabinet minister Stephen Crabb said he was shocked by the Prime Minister's comments the Australian prime minister has defended his country's record on climate change in a speech at the un General Assembly he said his country was on track to meet its commitments on greenhouse gas emissions Australia is one of the highest emitters of carbon dioxide per capita b.b.c. News. The devil's drug or a precious commodity. Poison or a medical miracle a window into the sublime or a pathway to mental and physical ruin people have been praising and damning opium for as long as it has existed. RINGBACK Made from the simple juice of the poppy opium has been used since prehistoric times to relieve physical pain and quieten troubled minds this enabled medical breakthroughs and inspired some of the greatest dramatic poets and composers but opium and its later derivatives move fien and heroin have also brought addiction and misery and death it's destroying families it's corrupted entire countries and fuelled who and it's still making global headlines today from its mass production in Afghanistan to the opioid crisis in the United States RINGBACK RINGBACK. I'm Bridget Kendall and on today's edition of The Forum from the b.b.c. World Service I'll be tracking a pms known history and looking at how perceptions of it have changed over time and with me 3 experts to share their knowledge with us joining me from by Lynn in Germany is Doris beaten back the former head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan and creator of a recent exhibition on opium. So sure and is reader in modern history at the University of Essex in the u.k. Where she specializes in modern China and the history of medicine and joining me in the studio is the author and cultural historian Mike j. Whose books on the history of drug use include Hi society Welcome to all 3 of you and before we look at the history of a.p.m. Let's just cover some basics Mike what exactly is a pm and what effect is it said to have on the human body opium is a sup from the head of the opium poppy pot have a sauna for him which comes out as a kind of milky sap and then after a few days of exposure to oxygen turns into a hard resin which can be eaten or dissolved in alcohol and drunk or it can be smoked and from early times its effects have been noted that it's a excellent painkiller sedative it's also euphoria and it has physical effects like constipation for example and it's also been known for a long time that it's a substance here to be very careful about the dose of because they affect of doses rather close to the lethal one and sure let's just clarify pms relationship to move fien and heroin and how it differs Ok morphine named after movie of the guard of sleep was actually an active agent it was 1st isolated in Europe in the early 19th century. If you failed the same kind of medical functions as a pm but it produced a more predictable therapeutic results as it was treated and could to be measured exactly so the effect it's more rep it hereon harrowing is actually the trait name its technical term it's a dice a too wolfing it was the next generation 2nd generation of it was a derivative of morphine because it's a pure for me it's highly concentrated therefore it's stronger it's more powerful than morphine tourist during your years starting opium production in Afghanistan you must have become acquainted with the opium harvest a very labor intensive process yes yes indeed given the large areas under cultivation and the very dense growth of poppy harvesting is very labor intensive because each pod as Mike has described once the petals drop off the poppy pot is cut and call it the white liquid this out is then left to cool it turns brown and then the new scraped off this is roll pm now every pawed can be harvested all can be scored several times that is then very labor intensive in the large field at the time of the harvest up 240-0002 seasonal labor as are required to harvest the opium in Afghanistan it must be quite a sight to see the landscape covered with colorful Poppy France it is indeed very beautiful usually one field is in the same color so you have the huge red fields a white or pink fields So indeed it's a beautiful site there is no doubt about it and that's will be discovering in this program poppy farming is taking place all over the world at different points in history but Doris Why is Afghanistan become the largest opium producer in the world today. There are several reasons for it currently as you rightly say it is the main producer of opium and its derivative heroin This is not always been so the whole region from the eastern Mediterranean to India and later on to East Asia had all these poppy cultivation and therefore the agricultural knowledge of the techniques required to cultivate it and harvest but in the 19th century cultivation shifted within this region between countries depending also on international pressure that was exerted it here on either Turkey or Iran internal or external pressure now Afghanistan is an extraordinary poor country only 12 percent of its land area is arable land meaning can be used for agriculture opium is a very good cash crop it pays about $100.00 per kilogram prices can go up to $2300.00 per kilogram it is very easy to store it is very easy to transport and given also the continuous conflict existing in Afghanistan this became the major cash crop and at the same time also the livelihood for many poor and of course also rich families in Afghanistan given the lack of law currently ruling and the conflicts it is not a surprise that cultivation which is illicit moved into Afghanistan. So Doris because of our P.M.'s association with places like Afghanistan and also China in more recent history it's often thought of as a drug of the East isn't it but what about its original origins back quite different he yes indeed they are very different Yeah the earliest archaeological finds of one of the 700 species of the poppy plant probably grew in either North and Spain and Italy on Switzerland the earliest poppy seed found to date is about 7000 years old and was found near Cologne the German city on the Rhine so about 5000 years ago Poppy existed near the settlements on the lake of Constance around 3500 year or so ago there is a lot of evidence of poppy cultivation and trade in the Mediterranean that what seems to have happened according to the latest archaeological knowledge is that the opium poppy moved from the west to the east and this early archaeological evidence is also regional seeds the other sort of evidence as well. Well there are some paintings but they don't go back as far as that there are some pods which seem to have the shape of the poppy pot there are some paintings in northern Spain which seem to indicate that people then already depicted in cave paintings there are about 34000 years old superheros days Mark when we start getting written sources referring to opium use. References to Gyptian Parise but the 1st full descriptions that we get here in the classical period of Greece and Rome so around 2000 years ago and the descriptions by classical medical authorities like Galen and Cory's carried on being the trusted medical source of opinion. Right up until the 16th 17th century and these were just tell us about the use of many people at the time when they aware of its benefits and its dangers Yes they were it was used to manage pain and also sleep and also grief those are the contexts in which we hear about it it was often dissolved in wine as a kind of sleeping draft or a potion or a painkiller and putting those sources together you get a picture that fairly clear that this is something that you have to be very careful with because by mistake you can take too much and it's very easy to die of an overdose doors I believe we start seeing opium cropping up in Arab sources from around the 8th century onwards right during the Islamic golden ages schooled Yes indeed the famous physician al-Kindi from the 9th century or as he order from the 9th century they mention it and what is interesting is that they already mention it as a painkiller as described and even as a general anaesthetic There is also then the Persian great of each and the famous Persians color of the 10th century a.d. Who also describes it but sources go even further back 1500 b.c. Before Christ that's now 3 and a half 1000 years ago the oldest Egyptian book on medicine describes opium as a medication against infant Teil colic and also as an anesthetic already so one of my friends said already that the history of medicine is also the history of all pill doors how how was it that opium made its way to the east in the 1st instance. Movie assume I mean as far as you know that it was traded opium was certainly all these precious commodity so it was traded all across the military any and then it probably moved. From the eastern Mediterranean to India and then on words by traders by ship by even people walking across the deserts so opium starts making its way to the east through these trading routes and then if we roam to the 16th century we have European colonial powers such as the Portuguese the doctrine the British becoming involved in the international opium trade and an important part of this trade involved transporting the lucrative crop of Indian grown opium to China a route that the person should mention came to dominate in the late 17 hundreds should Can you explain why it had become such a key trading commodity for the Europeans and especially for the British actually before the British or Europeans got involved in trading with China it was that I read be ans. Merchants who 1st 4 to come to China although initially the Di Monk was very small it was mainly in China it was mainly used for medicinal use the Portuguese were also trading in Southeast Asia and the British got into it quite late really sort of $790.00 s. And to a time the British imported large quantity of Chinese tea and in order to pay for that increasing amount of tea the British need to say oh more to China there is one thing the Chinese did want a was India. After opium was firsts imported into China in such a large quantity it was expensive a high quality commodity and the saw the improvement in the quality of a few days every increasingly monks. And sudden something would happen you know 1819 the British East Indian company started by all of moving pm which is cheaper. And them flawed it's China raise these cheap alternative it's cheaper. And that's definitely helped to expand the market is very allowed ordinary people to participate in the opium smoking and when this expanded to move ordinary people out of the elite this then became a worry and a problem for the Chinese government by this time opium and become a scapegoat for political and economic problems in China so they had turned opium pretty into a political agenda it was that was there a social worry about this as as the role of opium in Chinese society expanded there was all Cubans over opium smoke and of course tomorrow decay and decreased productive day because all songs of families went to open houses instead of you working in the fields it was seeing as sun sort of threats to the social order by the Confucian States well by $7093.00 the British had a complete monopoly on all opium production in India and despite an earlier Chinese ban on the importation of i.p.m. The British continued to smuggle it into China via intermediaries in vast quantities and this conflict eventually led to what became known as the 1st i.p.m. War between Britain and China in 18009 he is an extract of an extraordinary public letter that the Chinese official shoe raged to the British sovereign Queen Victoria shortly before the war broke out announcing that China would no longer tolerate British opium imports into the country. There are those who smuggle opium to seduce the Chinese people and so cost the spread of the poison to all provinces such persons who only care to profit themselves and disregard their harm to others are not tolerated by the laws of heaven and are unanimously hated by human beings let us ask where is your conscience I've heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries how much less to China might that Chinese official has got a point hasn't he there's this British monopoly and opium making had become very prevalent in China and causing a problem for the Chinese authorities you can sort of feel the outrage Koncz here yes you can and it's building towards this moment in the 1st opium war when you know there's a 2 countries in the world who both believe the greatest nation on the planet and they don't know very much about each other and they're about to come into conflict when the British victory in this conflict in 142 resulted not only in the island of Hong Kong being ceded to the British but in China being forced to accept the opium imports they believed were ruining their country and the so cool 2nd opium war fought by the British and the French against the Chinese in 856 opened up imports still further. How did these wars affect how opium and China was seen by the rest of the world modern China had become synonymous. I think it was Mike who came up with that term that China is a patient in there oh in they so cool it's truck plague that has contaminated rest of the globe in this case China was the single most important down point in history of a culture a civilization that was destroyed by intoxicants this is where the phrase sick man of Asia came from right there idea that opium had fatally weakened the Chinese body Yes Yes So you know I kind of had to reduce the Chinese entire nation into at the smoking themself to death while there the descent into chaos. How does the how do the Chinese see this period today how do they talk about it. Well it's very useful nationalistic to schools because in the next room the state schools it was that the breach its in its most in its pursuit to financial gain from put on the sovereignty of China in the 19th century and to enforce the shameful treating opium which reduced the country to a state of flavoring and Chinese intellectuals had argued that China needs reform to catch up with the rest of the what. Mike smoking a.p.m. Was seen is uniquely Chinese originally wasn't it how did this change perceptions of the drug when the practice moved to the west I think it's a very striking example of how the way in which the drug is consumed really changes its image and how people see it opium in the West had always been a medicine it was something that you could buy at this point you know in the corner shops and grocers as well as farms as most people would have a bottle of laudanum in the hall from coverage a