Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium
By Lucy Inglis
440 pages including notes and index
Published by Picador (hardback £25)
I asked for a review copy of this book because I read a review in a supplement to either The Times or The Sunday Times in late July and it sounded fascinating. And it is, in parts, and worth reading for the very best anecdotes that include St Paul's Cathedral architect Christopher Wren administering the first known transfusion to a dog, a familiar-sounding rant from the 18th century berating the British government for failure to invest in building roads and bridges and other infrastructure and the mention towards the end that some people are now using medication designed to sedate elephants to get high.
To someone who has never consumed a drug stronger than the stuff a pharmacist will sell you in Luxembourg if you ask for the equivalent of Benylin to help deal with the effects of a very bad cold this is literally incredible. Nor did I know that opium poppy was administered as a suppository in ancient times. The author's brief account of the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the mid-19th century is as articulate and informative as any other I've read. I had entirely forgotten, incidentally, that the Opium Wars ultimately derived from the insatiable British appetite for that other well known everyday drug, tea.
My only negative points about the book relate to its length. It is just too long. Fulll disclosure here, it is not absolutely necessary to read a book from cover to cover to give a sound review. My personal record from sampling pages to finishing a review is about 10 minutes. But I promised the book's publicist that I would read it properly, and I did. But I found myself regularly looking at the page count to see how far I had left to go.
There is too much unnecessary general history. There are far too many citations of names, places and events that are simply impossible to remember. I think the book would have worked much much better at half the length. But I did recommend it, to my wife and to a friend who is a UK medical GP, before realising that for him reading it would be like taking a busman's holiday. There are one or two slightly annoying typoes but no one is perfect, and I bet this review contains one or two of its own.
One thing that lodged in my brain from very early on in my reading led me to mentally compose an open memo to governments everywhere. Man (and it seems that man is usually the instigator of drug-taking in many relationships) has been looking to render himself drunk and/or stoned since time began. Isn't it about time that we stopped trying to stop him?
It seems to this lay observer that much of the horror that surrounds drugs comes not from the effect of drugs themselves (though I certainly don't fancy trying elephant sedative) but from the criminality involved. Remove that and drugs become part of the entertainment industry. But then think of the loss of jobs and power that that would entail on the government and enforcement side of the equation.
