Where there's smoke: a 19th-century engraving of opium addicts - Archive Collection / Alamy Stock Photo There are rumours that swirl in the writing world: all the publishing houses of the UK now have ...

NEW DELHI, (IANS) – Opium nearly smoked out China, made Britain acquire tainted wealth, laid the foundation of the fortunes of many a notorious trading house, and made several early 19th-century ...

Bronze Age humans living in the Levant may have getting high on psychoactive drugs, according to a new study that found traces of opium in 3,500-year-old ceramic vessels from Tel Yehud, a Canaanite ...

Examination of an ancient alabaster vase in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian Collection has revealed traces of opiates, providing the clearest evidence to date of broad opium use in ancient ...

Part 1. Opium in antiquity. The mysterious origins of the opium poppy ; Papyruses and poppies ; A journey around the Mediterranean. Part 2. Opium and the birth of modern medicine. Classic cures, ...

After the mid-18th century, when the British East India Co. was importing tea from China, few could have guessed that the industry would be revolutionized by a different plant: the opium poppy. Over ...

It takes some daring to choose opium as your historical protagonist. The milky sap of the poppy flower has taken so many forms across so many centuries that its allure feels like a trap, a chasing of ...

Researchers discovered opium biomarkers in a 2,500-year-old alabaster vase using nondestructive techniques. The findings provide chemical proof that ancient Egyptians likely consumed opium ...

Scientists at Yale University extracted microscopic residues from an inscribed calcite-alabaster vessel that once belonged to Xerxes I and detected unmistakable traces of opium, Rossiyskaya Gazeta ...

Novelist/biographer Martin Booth's sprawling history of opium tracks the drug from its initial use as a powerful and effective, if often misused, medicine and anesthetic through the development and ...