The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-02-27
THE EARLY HISTORY OF OPIUM

The medicinal properties of poppy juice. date from remote period. Re calling the highly developed culture
 of the ancient Egyptians one is in clined to irnagfue that the narcotic properties of opium were known to
 them; but the investi gations of Unger l18579y have failed to trace
 any acquaintance with opium in Ancient Egypt and Dr.. Ember, of l the Semitic Department of Johns
 Hopkins University, knows of DO
 reference to it in Egyptian literature According to some Hebrew scholars,
 there is a reference to poppy juice in
 the Bible. In several passages in the 1 Old Testament the word 9rosh'' is men I toned Professor Haupt is convinc-
 ed that "roshs' means the poppy, and so also is Professor Post. In the
 TaImud we have one reference to
 opium. under the name opinion" but l that word was clearly borroWed from Greek. In the classical Hindoo 1it-
 erature there is found no reference to
 it. From the time of the Mogu1 Con
 quest on there appears a word l tsKhash-khash'' which means poppy | seed, and 'tKhash h-khasharaSa, Juice of
 the poppy In this it Is easy to rec ognize our modern word hashish; and so it seems that at that early date
 the narcotics opium and cannabis fndica were confused with each other l
 in Asia. Minor. From there it was | carried to Greece at a later period.
 It is not at all certain whether
 Hippocrates was acquainted with the
 Juice of the poppy. According to | Woettons 4la refers to substance l a =pur gative as we'll as narcotic action. Some think that it was opium; others believe that he was referring to an
 other plant. In any case he made
 but very little use of the drug The I first authentic reference to the milky
 juice of the poppy we find by Theophrastus at. the beginning of the third century B. O., when he speaks
 of it as "meconion.', Scribonius Largus l in his 'sCompositiones Medicanen- torun, about the year 40 of the I present era, describes the method of procuring opium from the capsules of 4 the poppy and about the year 774s of I the same century Dioscorides makes
 a distinction between the juice of the capsules and the extract of the whole
 plant. He describes the method of
 incising the capsules, and refers to
 aLdu1terat1ons of the drug with the
 milky juices of other plants so that I it is evident that the collection of
 opium was quite an industry in Asia II Minor at that time Plinky devotes
 some space to a description of opium
 and it's medicinal use, and the drug
 is mentioned repeatedly by Celsius in 1
 other Latin writers. Galen spoke en- Enthusiastically of the virtues of opium
 confections, and the drug was soon so popular in Rome that it fell into
 the hands of shopkeepers and timer
 ant quacks.
 The introduction of the drug to the
 natives of the east was through the tt Arabs, and in the first instance to
 Persia. Its introduction into India = seems to have been connected with 3I7x. oR AE--I-
 The Arabic physicians used opium very extensively. and even wrote spe- : cial treatises some of its prepara,- } tons The earliest mention of opium as product of India is by the f traveller Barbosas in 1511. A Portu- 3 guese historian. Pyres. in letter to ] Manuel, king of Portugal. in 1516, < speaks of the opium of Egypt and q Bengal.
 Opium is supposed to have been l brought to China first by the Arabs, ! who are known to have traded with , the southern parts of the empire as ! early as the ninth century. Later,
 says the Journal of the American f Medical Associatio on. the Chinese be . gan to import the drug in their junks :, from India- It was not before the second half of the eighteenth century ! that the Importation of opium began f to increase rapidly through the : hands of the Portuguese, and a lit ? tie later through the famous East , ,' India Company. In TITO the English established an opium depot in Lark's
 Bay, south of Meca,bo, and the traffic -' rapidly increased, so that very soon
 the Chinese authorities began to e complain, and in 1920 an edict was
 Issued forbidding any vessel having 7, opium on board to enter the Canton = river. A system of confraband fol q lowed. then political friction between s England and China, and the so-called l. Opium War. which cuITnfnated in the s Treaty of Ranking (18423 by which Q five ports of China. were opened tc f foreign trade, and in 1858 opium wal s'i admitted as legal article of com, E merce. By that time the vice o1