Opium could also readily be bought on the street-markets of Rome. By the eighth century AD, opium use had spread to Arabia, India and China. The Arabs both used opium and organised its trade.
300 B.C.
Opium used by Arabs, Greeks, and Romans as a sedative and soporific.
A.D. 400
Opium thebaicum, from the Egyptian fields at Thebes, is first introduced to China by Arab traders.
1500
The Portugese, while trading along the East China Sea, initiate the smoking of opium. The effects were instantaneous as they discovered but it was a practice the Chinese considered barbaric and subversive.
It’s quite possible that opium is what brought Ezra’s parents to Baghdad. That’s not to say the Hettenas were using it or even selling it. But in Bombay, the big business was opium,2 and David Sassoon was if nothing else, a businessman. Nearly one third of Bombay’s trade revenues came from opium, and opium was the first and perhaps the biggest of the twin pillars of Sassoon’s success, along with cotton. David Sassoon & Co. was involved with opium from its earliest days, a fact that is often glossed over in fawning family biographies. Sassoon packed his son, Elias, off to China to pursue the opium trade in 1844, some 12 years after the family settled in Bombay.
Chests full of opium were shipped off to feed the cravings of China’s legions of addicts. The drug almost single-handedly financed Britain’s rule of India. So lucrative was the trade that Britain went to war with China – twice -- to keep the opium markets open. Until Britain began importing Indian opium to China, silver had been draining out of Her Majesty’s Treasury to satisfy the country’s thirst for tea and Chinese silks and porcelain. Opium sent the silver flowing back to Britain, and into the pockets of Jewish merchants in Bombay like David Sassoon.
Sassoon’s success in the opium trade continues to provide fuel centuries later for anti-Semitic rants from people who like to blame their problems on the Jews. The truth is that Sassoon did not monopolize the opium trade, as he is alleged to have done. It was far too lucrative for one person to control. Scottish companies like Jardine & Matheson played a bigger role, but no one likes to blame the Scots. It is true, however, that Sassoon did play a dominant role in what was seen even then as an unsavory business.
Opium in Iran is widely available, and the country has the highest per capita number of opiate addicts in the world[1] at a rate of 2.8% of Iranians over age 15.[1] The Iranian government estimates the number of addicts at 2 million.[2] Opium and heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan—known collectively as the Golden Crescent—pass through Iran's eastern borders in large amounts.[2] Total annual opium intercepts by the Iranian authorities are larger than in any other country,[3] but the government admits that they can only intercept a tiny proportion of the thousands of tonnes that are trafficked through Iran every year.[2] Opium costs far less in Iran than in the West,[2] and is even cheaper than beer.[1] In Zahedan, an Iranian town near the Pakistani border, 3 grams of opium can be purchased for 10,000 Iranian rials, equivalent to $1 USD, and 1 kg costs the equivalent of $330.[4] In Zabol, $1 buys 5 grams of Afghan opium.[4] In addition to having a low price, opium is popular because alcohol is haram (forbidden in Islam), and more tightly controlled by the Iranian Government. According to official Iranian government reports, within Tehran the daily consumption of opium is 4 metric tons.[5] According to UNODC estimates, 450 metric tons of opium are consumed in Iran each year.[6]
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