Doctors in the 19th century had few tools to actua...  ...racle drug that seemed to make everything better- opium . It was widely used in the American Civil War to...  ...late 1800s, women made up more than 60 percent of opium addicts. “Uterine and ovarian complications...  ...complications cause more ladi...

For thousands of years, humans have used the extra...  ...ppy plant for pain relief. In the last 200 years, opium and the more refined morphine and its derivatives...  ...d for the same effect.But what if we could refine opium to only effect the mu receptors and not the other...

A couple hundred years ago, before aspirin and dru...  ...'s easy to see how, as the drug was a tincture of opium in alcohol. In the first half of the 18th century...  ...rote a whole book—Confessions of an English Opium -Eater (1821)—on his use of opium and its deri...

Beginning in the Middle Ages, England imported ton...  ...l resources -until the British began selling them opium produced in India. The flow of gold and silver be...  ...everse, until 12 million Chinese were addicted to opium . The Chinese government banned the drug in 1729 a...  ...in South China were closed,...

Smoking opium was a widespread practice in Asia over a hundred...  ...s collector Steven Martin, author of the new book Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Add...  ...ion, tells the story of how his research into the opium smoking tools he collected led to his us...

Photographer Rafaela Persson has lived in Afghanis...  ...Afghanistan is the world’s biggest producer of opium , from which heroin is derived. According to a stu...  ...ns have become the leading consumers of their own opium .  Approximately one million Afghans, or eight pe...  ...t studies show that 50 perce...

The Opium Museum is, at the heart, about the trade in rare...  ...he heart, about the trade in rare antiques, since opium smoking paraphernalia was outlawed. Still, there...  ...till, there are pages and pages of the history of opium and its use in countries all over the wor...