The Greek god of sleep, Hypnos (Somnus to the Romans), had many
sons, but his son Morpheus was a god of dreams, delivering messages and
prophecies from the gods to mortals through the medium of dreams. With
winged power, Morpheus floated into the dreams of heroes and kings,
taking the shape of any human form at will, mimicking “their gait, their
face, their moods,” according to Ovid.^4 “In the arms of Morpheus” was to
be asleep, consorting with the gods.
The poppy plant was tended by the Sumerians at least five thousand
years ago, and it has likely been in continuous cultivation in the broad
Middle East ever since. While many poppy varieties are prized throughout
the world for their striking flowers, it is the Papaver somniferum that is
the source of opium and other alkaloids that transformed medicine, ignited
wars, and propped up dictatorships.
The source of opium is the “tears of the poppy,” the milky-white latex
that is contained within the walls of the poppy fruit, or seed pod. Opium
farmers have, for millennia, knifed the outer hull of the green seed pod
with parallel scratches, eliciting a milky exudate. The “tears” are allowed
to dry overnight, darkening, and collected by scraping the raised, beaded
prize. This tarry treasure has been pilfered from floral hosts in its crude
form for millennia, ingested by bronze-age farmers for its gut-soothing
and sleep-inducing powers, and only later distilled into its constitutive
composites, awaiting the invention of the hypodermic needle.
Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) introduced laudanum, a concoction of
sherry and opium, in 1680, and it was medicine’s great salve for several
hundred years. With the advent of modern chemistry in the early 19th
century, Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner, a German chemist, perfected the
purification of morphine from opium in 1804, becoming the first scientist
to refine an individual drug molecule from a donor plant.^5 Industrial
production of morphine by the German chemical giants, and later by
American companies in the 1830s, meant that self-medicated Westerners
could “narcotize” (Narke, Greek for stupor) themselves with over-the-
counter morphine and codeine, even into the 20th century. Nothing could
be more sublime than to be carried away on Morpheus’s wings when you
were in agony, in extremis.
A medicine typically becomes active in the body only when it enters the
bloodstream; physicians must therefore be cognizant about how a drug is