Opium Addicted to Pleasure

This is the River Clyde in Glasgow.

250 years ago, this was one of Britain's great trading centres.

It was the hub of a huge empire

that stretched from the Caribbean to China.

An empire founded on trade

in which simple plants were transformed by human labour

to become hugely profitable global commodities.

The trade in sugar...

tobacco...

opium...

and whisky...

transformed our society, our bodies and our minds.

Over the centuries, we've learned to love these products.

Their smell, their taste, the effect they've had on us.

They've become increasingly guilty pleasures...

..which are still with us, still part of us.

Today, millions of us can't do without at least some of them.

So...

how did we become so hooked?

'The answer will take me on a journey across the world...'

Oh, my God! That's powerful.

'..and inside our minds and bodies too...' Bye!

HE SNIFFS

HE LAUGHS

Gosh, that's good, isn't it?

..in the pursuit of pleasure.

Today, in one form or another, we've all become users of opium.

Is that a contraction? We're going to wait until that has passed.

SHE GASPS

We're going to put in the epidural drugs.

It's going to take 15 minutes once I have put the medicines in

for them to start working.

Opium and its derivative cousins, like morphine,

brings pain relief to millions of patients,

and are some of the most widely used drugs on earth.

I'm going to squirt in the first dose of the good medicine.

These opium-derived medicines can be vital when lives hit crisis,

approach their end, or even as they begin.

What do the contractions feel like now?

I cannot feel anything.

-And do you have any pain?

-No.

-Fantastic.

I'm OK.

SHE GIGGLES

This is the birthing centre at St Thomas's Hospital in London.

Here, anaesthetist Dr Ben Fitzwilliam

is going take me through the arsenal of opiate-based drugs

he relies on every day.

So, Brian, we're very lucky

to have such a wide range of opioid drugs here.

We've got morphine,

perhaps the gold standard by which others are measured,

because it's so widely used.

We've got codeine-containing medicine here,

diamorphine here, which is heroin, which is derived from morphine,

a very potent opioid

that we use frequently in spinal and epidural anaesthesia.

In the hospital setting, we use all these opioids very frequently.

-Because you can monitor it very carefully in this situation.

-Yes.

Because patients ultimately could become addicted.

And that's the problem.

While opium-derived drugs like heroin

have the extraordinary power to ease suffering,

they also have a powerful dark side.

'For me, I'm all too aware of how opium can destroy lives.

'In my home country of Scotland,

'we are plagued with 50,000 heroin addicts.

'And at the root of this addiction is a simple plant -

'the papaver somniferum -

'opium poppy.'

The seeds of this modern-day addiction

were planted way back in the 18th century

during the height of Britain's trading empire.

Since then, man has been drawn to opium like moths to a flame.

It's fuelled the world's largest drug smuggling operation,

earned vast fortunes,

triggered war with China,

inspired medical breakthroughs,

and cast its spell on high and low society.

Opium is like nothing else on earth.

Both saviour and destroyer.

This is the story of how Britain unleashed

the most dangerous of addictions on the world,

and how the consequences still haunt us today.

At the heart of this tale is an ordinary plant.

Papaver somniferum.

The poppy.

'Opium is contained within the head of the flower.

'It can be found in fields and hedgerows

'in all four corners of the world.'

Its narcotic powers have been exploited for thousands of years.

There's evidence that papaver somniferum

may have been cultivated as long ago as 4,000 BC

in the cradle of civilisation itself - Mesopotamia.

SNIFFS Mmm....

In the early written records,

the Sumerians referred to a plant they called "hul gil" -

"the plant of joy."

In ancient Egypt, the Ebers Papyrus, an ancient medical text,

recommends smearing opium on the nipples of nursing mothers

to help small children sleep.

In the Odyssey,

Homer writes of those grieving for the relatives lost in Troy,

and how Helen, the beautiful daughter of Zeus,

pours a drug into the wine,

"to lull all pain and anger

"and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow."

But one country would know nothing but pain and anger,

and would never forget the sorrow from opium.

China.

What do they use the scorpions for?

To make soup or herbal drink.

Like today's city of Guangzhou,

ancient China had a sophisticated knowledge

of weird and wonderful medical cures.

So what does that do, the sea horse?

It's good for aphrodisiac, and then you make soup out of it.

Are they very popular, the sea horse?

Er, yes, if you have that kind of problem, then the...

HE LAUGHS

For thousands of years, opium was commonly used as a medicine.

But it was in the 15th century

that smoking its mysterious vapours became a source of pleasure.

Used as an aphrodisiac to escape into blissful sexual oblivion.

HE SPEAKS CANTONESE

You can see the carving, all of the carving.

Oh...that is stunning.

This is ivory.

-This is ivory?

-Yeah, real ivory.

Wow.

Beautiful antique opium smoking paraphernalia like this

gives you an idea of how the Chinese temperament

was once seduced by the timeless ritual and pleasures of the drug.

What are these boxes here?

These are opium box, sir.

They put, er...opium here.

-Ah, so that's...

-Sometimes they... carving the erotic picture here.

-Oh, erotic.

-Yeah.

-Ah...

-The sexy pictures.

-Yeah, sexy pictures, yes.

Ooh...

Let me see if I have my glasses.

-This is not an erotic...

-Ah, this is not a sexy picture.

-HE LAUGHS

-Well, I won't waste my time on it, then.

Yet with China's age came wisdom.

By the late 18th century,

they realised, for all opium's benefits,

it was too addictive to be trifled with.

In 1729, in the early days of British trade with China,

the Emperor Yongzheng banned the sale,

smoking and all trade in opium.

This would soon prove to be a huge problem for the British,

because we were quickly developing our own more genteel addiction.

First thing...

warm all the teawares up, and all the tea cups.

Then we can add the tea leaves,

with a small bamboo stick.

Higher and higher...

Is the ritual very important?

People say it is like a kind of meditation,

um...maybe it's kind of relaxing.

-Thank you.

-You're welcome.

Hope you like it.

Kan bei.

Kan bei. Thank you.

Tea -

the cup that cheers, but does not inebriate.

By the end of the 18th century, the British were already leaders

in the consumption of a nice cup of char,

importing six million pounds of tea from China a year.

Now, tea was one of those small daily luxuries

which the British absolutely counted on,

and Guangzhou, back then known as Canton,

was the only place foreign traders could buy tea in China.

Mmm...

That's so good.

Thank you.

The problem was,

over a 50-year period,

we paid the Chinese £27 million in silver bullion,

the only currency they would accept in exchange for tea.

During that same period, the Brits managed to sell

no more than £9 million worth of goods to the Chinese.

Our love of tea was sucking the silver

out of the British imperial economy.

Urgent action was needed.

So in 1793, with the blessing of His Majesty's Government,

a trade delegation headed to Peking,

and presented the 83-year-old emperor, Qianlong,

with our finest manufactured goods.

Wedgwood pottery.

Scientific instruments.

Woollen fabrics.

Matches of sulphur.

Even French hot air balloons.

The Chinese rejected them all.

This is what the emperor said in a letter to King George III.

"As your ambassador could see for himself,

"we possess all things, and of the highest quality.

"I set no value on strange and useless objects,

"and have no use of your country's manufactures."

Basically, as far as the Chinese were concerned,

Britain's fledgling industrial revolution

had produced noting but a whole load of undesirable tat.

With tea rapidly becoming unaffordable,

it was now that Britain's recent conquest of Indian Bengal

presented a solution.

One of the world's finest sources of opium.

With Britain spiralling into debt, something had to give,

and that something was respect for China's trade ban on opium.

I'm close to the mouth of the River Pearl delta,

not far from Canton.

I'm meeting Professor John Carroll,

who's going to explain how, in the early 19th century,

the British East India Company began what would become the largest

and most disgraceful drug-smuggling operation in history.

Let's open up this map and give you a better sense of the big picture,

and then the local picture as well.

Take some coins here.

Put Britain here,

put India here,

and then we'll put south China here.

The British realised that, because there was so much opium

produced right here on the east side of India,

that selling opium, or smuggling opium, to China made sense.

-So here they are, they're in the delta.

-Yes, right.

-And it's highly illegal.

-Right, right.

In 1729, it becomes illegal, but how do they get round it?

The product was sold to what were called country traders,

or private traders, who would then carry it into China.

-These were private British traders.

-Yes, yes.

What would happen is the ships would come from India,

they would come to the south China coast.

It was also important to keep in mind, though, that Canton,

today's Guangzhou, is a coastal area, lots of inlets and so on,

so it wasn't at all difficult

for the British to bring in the opium from India.

They would then transfer the goods right here along the coast

to smaller boats, sometimes known as scrambling dragons or fast crabs.

-Scrambling dragons and fast crabs?

-Fast crabs, yes.

They were smaller boats

that could make it up the coast much, much more easily.

And there was always somebody there

who was willing to help them bring in the drugs.

I would say that trade, whether it's illegal or legal,

-requires a confluence of mutual interests.

-Right.

And there were people at all levels of Chinese society throughout China.

-So there's a lot of pragmatism.

-Yeah.

A lot of pragmatism on all sides here.

Nobody made any effort to hide this.

but, I mean, it seems to me that, from an economic perspective,

this all made perfect sense.

Opium is the one good that the British had to offer the Chinese

that would make as much money as it did.

Opium shipments were initially capped at 5,000 chests per year

to keep the prices high.

Tea and opium were now locked together

in an intimate, economic embrace.

I spent most of my early life

avoiding contact with opiates in any form.

It was only back in the eighties on a theatrical tour of India

that I decided perhaps it was time, in a spirit of experimentation,

to try opium for myself.

As I was in India, I decided to embrace the culture

and I decided to take myself to an opium den.

And there was a very strict ritual about it.

The pipe was very much held directly over the lamp,

unlike the Chinese style, which held it to the side,

but the Indians held it directly over the lamp like that.

And it would heat, and you would take it in five breaths.

-So you went one, two, three, four...

-INHALES QUICKLY

-..and then on the fifth, you went...

-INHALES DEEPLY

You held it...

..and then you released,

and then you passed it to the next person.

The wallah would tease the opium with these long, thin needles,

tease it and then wind it into a tiny ball,

and then he would bring it, hold it over the flame into the bowl.

Also,

there was a guy who used to work your feet, he would massage you.

So you'd suddenly find this guy at the end of the bench

where you were lying, he would suddenly start working on your feet.

But the whole thing was a real ritual,

and you felt you were taking part in a ritual.

I really felt very, erm... very at one with the world.

I suppose I shouldn't be saying this on television,

but it was a rather good feeling.

GIRLS SHOUT

And I'm not the only Scot in China

who's been interested in the delights of opium.

In 1832, two Scotsmen,

while sampling the pleasures of a Chinese brothel, met.

Far from home, these two kindred spirits hit it off.

And they hatched a plan.

The men in question were James Matheson and William Jardine.

The company they formed, Jardine Matheson,

was set to change Britain's fledgling trade in opium forever.

In a rare, patriotic, but rather perverse moment,

they decided to choose the saltire as their logo.

Sentiment would play no further part in their business venture.

Drugs, after all, are about cold hard cash.

Up until this point, under British law,

only the British East India Company were to allowed to trade with China.

But in 1833, just one year after Jardine Matheson's union,

the trading monopoly was scrapped.

Adventurers and opportunists flooded to Canton like bees to a honey pot.

Yet Jardine and Matheson were ahead of the game.

The Scots had already set up shop outside the main city walls

in an area of Canton known as the Thirteen Factories.

This was where one addiction was traded for another.

Tea for opium.

So, Professor Yang, this is the area where it all happened.

This is where the famous Thirteen Factories were.

Foreign traders were restricted

to dealing only with special traders known as Ko Hong.

Both sides were in on the lucrative opium racket.

So how rich were people like these traders becoming?

Jardine Matheson.

How rich? SPEAKS MANDARIN

-Very rich.

-Very rich, yes. HE LAUGHS

To entice more users,

Jardine Matheson even stooped to employing a priest

to distribute small opium packets with chapters of the Bible.

GULPING

By 1836, the number of opium chests arriving from India

had shot up sixfold to 30,000 a year.

Jardine Matheson was responsible for about a quarter.

That's 500 metric tonnes of contraband.

China's smokers smoked for pleasure.

What could be wrong with supplying their growing demand?

The officially forbidden trade

was now the largest international commerce

in any single commodity anywhere in the world.

The reaction wasn't long in coming.

In 1839, Emperor Daoguang declared a war on drugs.

And here in Humen, at the mouth of the River Pearl,

they have built an opium war museum,

which tells quite a remarkable story.

So these are the Thirteen Factories.

It's how it all started.

The emperor ordered a series of drug raids on the western traders.

Here are our two heroes,

Mr William Jardine and Mr James Matheson,

described as "opium smugglers."

Neat.

The Chinese army locked the British traders in the Thirteen Factories,

and forced them to surrender.

42,000 opium pipes,

and 20,000 chests of opium,

with a street value of £2 million sterling were seized.

All of these pictures denote the scale of the suffering

that people went through as a result of the overindulgence in opium.

There's a mother crying with her child there,

and a slightly emaciated figure who looks really quite far gone.

The confiscated opium was smashed up and dumped into massive pits.

And on the 3rd of June, it was chemically burnt by adding lime.

Eventually, it was washed out to sea.

Apparently, the stink was appalling.

Outraged, William Jardine headed to London.

He was satirised at the time as, "A Scotsman, one McDruggy,

"fresh from Canton, with a million from opium in each pocket,

"denouncing corruption and bellowing, 'Free trade.' "

It didn't take much persuasion for the British Government

to send the Royal Navy.

After all, opium and tea were now responsible

for one-sixth of the British Empire's income.

ALL CHATTER IN CHINESE

It was time to teach the Chinese aggressors

a friendly lesson in international cooperation...

at gunpoint, if need be.

In June, 1840, the fleet arrived,

not far from the museum here in Humen...

..16 warships with 27 transports, carrying 4,000 men,

not forgetting the Nemesis,

an iron-clad steamer,

armed with the first weapon of mass destruction -

a Congreve rocket launcher which dispatched exploding warheads.

The Chinese had made preparations too.

They'd spent years reinforcing the forts that guarded the mouth of the Pearl River

with batteries of cannon.

They gave the forts imposing names as well -

the Fort of Eternal Peace,

the Fort of Consolidated Security,

the Forts of Suppressing, Overawing and Quelling Those From Afar.

Big names,

but the Chinese had no modern weaponry at all,

just beautifully-crafted cannons on immovable stands.

Now, I've managed to destroy most of the Royal Navy,

yet, in reality, sadly, in 1840, it couldn't have been more different.

The Chinese defences and their armada of war junks

were blown away by the British gunboats

in just five and a half hours.

GUNS FIRE

And that was just the beginning.

Over the next two years, the British headed north,

up the coast towards Shanghai.

With Chinese troops doped up to their eyes,

the sheer firepower of the British was overwhelming.

It was slaughter.

The might of the Chinese Empire and the army that served it

was on her knees.

On the 29th of August, 1842, near the town of Nanking,

on board the HMS Cornwall, gunboat diplomacy prevailed.

The Chinese signed what historians would later call

"the most unequal treaty".

They agreed to open five ports to foreign trade,

pay a crippling 21 million

in silver dollars to the British government...

..compensation for loss of opium earnings with interest,

and, of course, the cost of the war.

And the prize of the Treaty of Nanking?

Hong Kong Island.

Gifted to the British,

this was the perfect hub for Her Majesty's merchants

to upscale the trade in opium with China.

The floodgates were open.

Hong Kong Island grew into one of the greatest commercial centres of all time,

and all this blossomed...

from a cloud of opium smoke.

Even to this day, Jardine Matheson,

now a multi-million pound multinational,

is based here in the heart of city.

Its founders became the richest men in Scotland.

The Times would later describe the Opium War

as the most disgraceful war in our history.

The British lost 69 men

and killed between 20,000 and 25,000 Chinese.

While the Chinese were counting the cost of opium addiction,

we were counting the Emperor's silver,

sent back to the UK and publicly wheeled into the Bank of England.

At the time of the Opium Wars,

the British were culpably ignorant of the havoc

they were creating in the brains of the Chinese people.

Today, modern science has given us a far deeper understanding

of the power of opium.

'I'm meeting Professor David Nutt,

'former drugs advisor to the government.

'He knows more than most about the dual personality of opium

'and how its pain-relieving qualities are closely tied

'to its addictive pleasure.'

Now, here's a brain.

So this is the brain stem and the spinal cord.

You tread on a nail and the pain fibres send messages up to here.

This is the part of the brain called the thalamus.

And that's where pain is regulated.

What opium does is it basically puts a block there

to stop those pain fibres getting into the brain.

But the suffering from pain

comes more from this frontal part of the brain,

and this is the part of the brain

which engages you in all your emotional activities.

We also now know that opium does dampen down that part of the brain,

and part of that is why it's pleasurable,

because it dampens down other miseries in your life.

So, you know, you've got to pay tax

or you've got to sort out your divorce, etc.

So the actual pain of a tack in your foot

is equal to the tax that you also have to pay.

-Yes, in terms of your reaction to it, absolutely.

-Really?

It's all dealt with in this part of the brain called the anterior cingulate.

So opium is a plant chemical,

which mimics a natural hormone in the brain we call endorphins.

And endorphins are there to deal with pain,

and, possibly, to give pleasure.

But what opium does is it does what the natural substance does

but much better.

So it really is good at taking away pain,

which is why we use it as a painkiller, but, also,

it can give more pleasure than the natural substance.

So we sometimes say it hijacks the natural system

so that the person then doesn't feel normal responsiveness

unless they're taking opium.

So that's why they become dependant on it.

It's this ability of opium to aggressively barge in,

push the natural endorphins aside,

and kidnap our pain and pleasure receptors that make it so dangerous.

The euphoric high that comes with taking opium

is like nothing our brain has experienced before.

And that makes it irresistible.

By the early 19th century,

opium's dark spell wasn't just confined to the East.

In Britain, the drug's delights

were beginning to seduce the upper echelons of society.

Then, on the 18th of August, 1821,

subscribers to the London Magazine opened the latest edition

to discover an article entitled

the Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater.

Doubtless, they read it with a nice cup of tea imported from China.

The article was anonymous.

In his article, which I have here,

the author asserted that not only was he an English opium-eater,

but he was also one of many.

He said he'd conducted an informal survey with London chemists,

who told him that the number of amateur opium-eaters

was actually immense.

Within a few months, the author of this popular and outrageous text

unmasked himself.

He was...

Thomas De Quincey,

and he wrote it sitting up there in that very window.

An impoverished English journalist, De Quincey was in his mid-30s.

As the article revealed, like everyone in Britain,

he didn't eat his opium at all - he drank it,

in the form of a medicine known as laudanum.

De Quincy recalls his first experience of opium

as an undergraduate at Oxford suffering from toothache.

"In an hour, oh! Heavens! What a revulsion!

"What a resurrection from the lower depths of the inner spirit!

"What an apocalypse of the world within me.

"That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes.

"This negative effect was swallowed up

"in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.

"Here was a panacea for all human woes.

"Here is the secret of happiness."

Confessions Of An Opium-Eater became a huge hit. Why?

Because De Quincey was one of the first to describe both beautifully and seductively

the effects of the drug on the mind.

He used to visit the opera here in Covent Garden while under the influence.

He tells us how opium rendered the choruses sublime,

losing his sense of the passage of time.

OPERATIC SINGING

Byron, Shelly, Keats.

Because of its effect on the creative mind,

opium soon became the drug of choice for many a writer.

Even De Quincey talks of fantastic imagery of the brain -

cities and temples beyond the splendours of Babylon.

But it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge that truly captured in words

the exotic world that opium painted on the mind.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

"A stately pleasure-dome decree

"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

"Through caverns measureless to man

"Down to a sunless sea.

"So twice five miles of fertile ground

"With walls and towers girdled round

"Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

"Through wood and dale the sacred river ran

"Then reached the caverns measureless to man

"And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean

"And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

"Ancestral voices prophesying war!

"A damsel with a dulcimer

"In a vision once I saw

"It was an Abyssinian maid,

"On her dulcimer she played,

"Singing of Mount Abora.

"Could I revive within me

"Her symphony and song

"To such a deep delight 'twould win me

"That with music loud and long

"I would build that dome in air

"That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!

"And all who heard them should see them there,

"And all should cry, Beware! Beware!"

While writers and poets were exploring the creative delights of opium,

scientists were working to improve its medical potency.

They'd recently isolated opium's most active chemical -

morphine.

But it wasn't until 1851, here in Edinburgh,

that a brilliant Scottish invention

would unleash morphine's medical potential.

This in turn would revolutionise medicine

and our addiction to the pleasures of opium.

The invention was the hypodermic syringe.

Its creator? Scottish doctor Alexander Wood.

'And here at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh,

'they hold two of Wood's original syringes.'

The one on the right is the one

that was used for the first injection, as far as we know.

-This one here.

-Yeah.

How did the syringe work?

Well, basically, what you've got is a cotton wool wad inside there,

-it's a forward and backward operation, much like a modern one, really.

-Right.

And you can see there is a little screw there.

That needle screws onto the front end of the syringe there

-and then you've got a little...

-Plunger.

You've got a little plunger.

-So...

-Very delicate.

Yeah, it's very, very delicate.

The needle was Woods' innovation?

Attempts had been made to introduce things intravenously

for a very long time by pushing it through the skin using a lance,

but it's the marrying, really, of the needle and the syringe unit itself.

He recognised that you could use that locally as well as generally.

So it went into the bloodstream.

Yeah. That marriage between use of morphine

and the syringe was quite powerful.

Morphine was around ten times more potent than raw opium,

and, with Woods' syringe,

it made it possible to deliver huge quantities of the drug to the brain.

With the belief that injecting morphine removed its habit-forming properties,

by the 1860s, its use by doctors swept the country.

Quick to teach their patients how to inject themselves,

it wasn't long before the upper classes in Paris and London

turned to morphine for pleasure.

-Mike?

-Brian.

-Hi. How are you?

-Good, thanks.

-Good to see you.

-Ah! Oh, here we are. High tea, how lovely.

-Yeah.

'Author Mike Jay is a leading expert in 19th-century high society.'

I gather that, going to the opera,

it was a fairly common habit to take some opium

in order to enhance the whole experience, is that right?

Yes, it was quite a common sight for women, particularly,

at the opera and theatre.

So is this something they would do, like have a cigarette outside nowadays,

they would go off in a quiet corner somewhere?

Or was it something they did before they actually went to the opera?

Of course, women in those days weren't allowed to smoke cigarettes

and they weren't allowed to drink...

-Oh!

-..so it was their only option in public.

-It would be something they'd do discreetly under the table.

-Right.

-So ladies would take out their accoutrements...

-That's right.

I mean, here's a really beautiful example you can see.

A lovely silver engraved case.

-And inside here you've got...

-My goodness.

That's the vial that would have contained the morphine.

There's the syringe and plunger and a couple of little needles here.

-That's rather beautiful, isn't it?

-Yeah, it's gorgeous, isn't it?

This kind of kit, obviously, was expensive,

and people used it as a kind of display of wealth.

-That's a hell of a long needle.

-It is, isn't it?

How far in would that go?

It was all intramuscular injection,

so there was no searching for a vein or anything.

Once you had it set up like that,

you could simply pop it into your leg under the table

-and nobody would notice.

-Gosh.

While the upper crust were feeling even more elevated than normal,

the working class were experiencing their own opium boon.

Working mothers, factory and farm workers,

even soldiers, were switching from gin, rum

and home-distilled spirits to opium in a vast array of preparations.

And Mike's taken me to a highly-secure vault,

a secret location, where they still hold everything

from opium drinks and pills to sweets -

all now Class A contraband.

This is actually a lump of opium.

-That was...

-You're kidding me. This is?

-Yes.

That's a heck of a big poppy, isn't it?

'He's going to reveal the shocking truth

'about just how widely spread opium's use had become

'by the mid-1850s.'

Here's opium in the form of sweets.

They're like a kind of sugary cough sweet.

Opiate confectionery.

There's a huge range of opium preparations made,

particularly for children, like these ones here.

This is Mrs Winslow's Syrup

and the Atkinson's Infants' Preservative.

-Infants' Preservative?

-Yeah, I mean, think of it as the Calpol of its day.

It was very effective against coughs,

that's what it was mostly marketed for,

but also people would dose up their children and, you know,

make them more docile and quieter.

There were frequent scandals when childminders,

who had enormous numbers of screaming children to deal with,

some of them, if they were unscrupulous,

would simply dose all the kids up with opium and keep them asleep all day.

This is the poster for what we have here,

which is Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup,

and you can see this is specifically for children teething.

-Ah. There's suitably stoned children dealing with their teething troubles.

-That's right.

It's packaged for children,

but it's the same as the laudanum that the men would take after a day's work. It's the same.

It seems now outrageous, this stuff, but then it was perfectly normal.

In one of Thomas De Quincey's informal surveys,

he was told by a local chemist in the cotton spinning area of Lancashire

that, on a Saturday night, the demand for opium was immense.

Laudanum was cheaper than alcohol,

cheap enough for the lowest paid worker to escape their harsh, mundane lives.

This book is by the 19th-century novelist Charles Kinsley,

and it takes us into the world of working folk.

And I've just found this very telling verse

which reveals just how common opium use was.

"Yoo goo into druggist's shop o' market-day, into Cambridge,

"and you'll see the little boxes, doozens and doozens,

"a'ready on the counter. Oh, ho-ho!

"Well, it keeps women-folk quiet, it do,

"and it's mortal good against pains.

"But what is it?

"Opium, bor' alive, opium."

Between 1825 and 1850,

imports of opium to Britain rose 400%.

It was sold as a treatment for almost every medical ailment,

but, above all, for pleasure.

And in the 1870s, the first discreet clinics appeared

for so-called morphinomaniacs -

users who were unable to give up the faster, more intense high

from injecting morphine.

The bitter irony was,

the more that people took the drug in the pursuit of pleasure,

the more it was killing their naturally ability to feel it -

something that today's science is only just starting to unravel.

I've come to the University of Dundee.

Here, a pioneering study

is unlocking the secrets of what causes addiction.

So where do I go?

'They're looking deep inside the brains of opiate addicts

'and comparing them with non-addicts,

'which is where I'm helping out.'

Bye.

'While in the MRI scanner, participants play a simple game

'to test feelings of pleasure through reward.'

-Are you OK there, Brian?

-Yes, I'm fine.

Okeydoke. It's just about to start, just in ten seconds.

'The aim is to understand how opiate drugs

'take over the brains of addicts

'and their ability to experience the normal pleasures of everyday life.'

If you wake up in the morning

and the sky is blue, which is usually not very common in Dundee...

you feel good about yourself

and you feel good about the fact that you had a good breakfast.

Those are natural rewards, those are the bits and pieces that keep us going.

Now, imagine the drugs hijacking that reward system.

Remarkably, the study is already revealing

that, even when addicts are clean,

this stranglehold over the brain's pleasure system remains in place.

These are the areas of the brain where,

if you have a natural reward or you win something

or you feel good about yourself, it tends to light up.

What you notice straightaway

is that people with a history of substance misuse

tend to have a slightly less active...

Considerably less.

Considerably less. What that is telling us

is they are not able to appreciate or experience natural rewards.

The brains of addicts are so drastically rewired

that it's difficult for them to experience pleasure

without opiate drugs. This is why addiction is a lifelong problem.

And back in late 19th-century Britain, the price of pleasure

from opium's dark side was becoming a serious public concern.

It was then that the search began for a miracle drug

that had all the pain-killing properties of morphine and opium,

but without the addiction.

In 1874, at St Mary's Hospital, London,

chemist Alder Wright attempted to modify morphine.

His experiment was simple.

He took morphine and added acetic acid.

This liquid he then heated to 85 degrees for several hours.

Next, he added ether to dissolve whatever he had made.

After a few more chemical steps...

..which we can't reveal here,

a substance precipitated out as flakes.

Yet Wright didn't realise the importance of what he had made

because of his testing methods.

Wright gave some of this stuff to his dog to test it out

and he must have given the dog far too much

because the dog became very sick and vomited

and so Wright sort of thought, "Well..."

Was it the favourite family dog?

That I don't know, but the dog sure got sick.

And so he wrote up the experiment

but he put the substance aside and didn't study it again.

However, some 15 or so years later,

a chemist working from a German company

called Farbenfabriken Friedrich Bayer

discovered Wright's description of his synthesis

in the published literature and they tried it for themselves.

So, as many good 19th-century chemists did...

..they tasted it to see what it did.

And one of them said that it made him feel absolutely wonderful

and they were going to call it wunderlich,

the German for "wonderful".

But another of his colleagues who had taken it said,

"This makes me feel heroisch,"

"heroic",

and so they called it heroin.

Ha!

And that's what we still call it today.

-Oh, my goodness.

-And if you look at some of the old formulations,

here are some tablets that Bayer issued,

and this would have been used to relieve pain,

but it was also used to treat cough.

This is an advert for stuff they called Glykeron or Glyco-Heroin.

The adult dose, it says, is one teaspoonful every two hours.

For children of ten years or more, the dose is from one-quarter

to one-half of a teaspoonful.

And for children of three years or more, five to ten drops.

So you can see that this was being marketed

for a wide range of individuals, young and old.

Bayer stated the new drug,

which was five times more potent than morphine,

had been cleared of all addictive properties.

Whether for medical or recreation use,

heroin medicines were sold in millions over the counter

with little regulation in the East or West.

And while heroin was thought to be safe,

one group of Western crusaders started to raise alarm bells

about the addictive nature of opium.

The Christian missionaries

had documented the first real research from China,

a country the British were now flooding

with over 100,000 chests of opium a year.

The World Missionary Conference, gathered here in Edinburgh in 1910,

lobbied for the worldwide restriction of the drug.

What kind of evidence were the missionaries bringing back?

The missionaries were very instrumental

in bringing back information, detailed information,

about addiction and the destructive effects of addiction.

For example, a man with three wives

could sell both wives and children in order to get his hands on opium.

-Selling his wife for opium?

-Yes.

Selling his entire house. So it's bringing down families.

It's destroying the fabric, the very fabric, of Chinese society.

And it went right down through society, it percolated all the way down...?

Yes, from the elite to... We have a saying -

"From the Emperor's dowager to the coolies on the street,

"from women to children."

Historians estimate about 13 to 14 million of Chinese people

were smoking, were addicted, to opium.

In fact, China was dying.

So how did the missionaries treat the addicts in China?

Many of them carried morphine pills,

and later, heroin, to China in order to cure the addicts.

-So...

-How would you cure the addicts with...?

You say you replace opium smoking with a pill

and this pill would help you to reduce your appetite for opium.

Ad the pill is morphine in the beginning and then it was heroin, so...

-Which is also addictive.

-Exactly. And they both came from opium.

-So this is really ironic.

-It's so cruel.

-It is. It is.

-These pills, what were they called?

-Jesus pills.

BOTH: Jesus pills.

-Because they came from the missionaries.

-Yes.

Jesus loves you and therefore he would like you to have this little pill...

And that will get rid of your opium addiction.

Even though the missionaries were sublimely ignorant

of the devastating effect of heroin on addicts,

their continued pressure eventually forced the British government

to cease all opium trade with China by 1918.

'But China has not forgotten.'

I mean, I didn't know anything about the Opium Wars.

I never learned it in school, nobody taught me about the Opium Wars.

-In China, of course, it's very different.

-Mm-hm.

Textbooks from elementary school to middle school to high school

to university highlight the wrongdoings

of the so-called imperialists.

Students will be led to the site where the Opium War took place.

It has become part of what they call the patriarchal education programme

to educate Chinese youth like me

so that we remember what you had done to us.

By the beginning of the 20th century,

China had finally rid itself of the drug cartels,

and in the UK, opium was banned,

but, ironically, the very drug invented to cure opium addiction -

heroin - would, by the late 20th century,

create a whole new crisis, but this time,

it would be on the streets of Great Britain.

Perhaps a case of what goes around comes around.

In my home town of Dundee,

we now have over 3% of people hooked on drugs like heroin.

Indicative of a national problem, it's estimated

the total economic and social cost of drug abuse in Scotland

is £3.5 billion a year.

Legislation simply hasn't solved the problem.

The number of opiate addicts in Scotland are at an all-time high.

So can science provide answer?

Enter neurobiologist Tim Hales.

OK, that looks good.

In Dundee, Tim's studying the effects of opiates

on the brain at a cellular level.

A recent breakthrough in the study of opium receptors may hold the key.

What's new is we now, in 2012,

have a molecular model of the receptor

to which morphine and heroin interact.

That's a little bit like a car mechanic having a workshop manual for a car.

And this is what we have here? Is that...?

So this is a structural model of the opiate receptor.

Part of the problem is that this receptor

that is responsible for the actions of opiates

is responsible for both the positive and the negative effects of opiates.

So what we've got to try and do is figure out

how does that receptor interact with different pathways in the brain

-to cause addiction...

-Right.

..and how does the receptor interact with pathways in the brain

that are responsible for the painkilling effects?

The idea would be to try and design drugs that are pain-killing

but not addictive.

Over the last 200 years,

opium's relationship with man has forged an incredibly dramatic story.

On the one hand, as an object of commerce,

the illicit trade and exploitation of opium

has created dubious untold wealth

for a succession of predatory opportunists...

..created at the expense and destabilisation of whole societies.

On the other hand, opium remains a remarkable drug

and, when controlled with care,

it allows doctors to ease so much suffering,

from our dying breath to the birth of a new life.

But for this little soul, only time will tell if advances in science

will create a pain-free world without addiction,

a world where opiates really are the milk of human kindness.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd