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The plant whose profile most closely resembles that of the opium poppy is the coca bush (Erythroxylum coca), the leaves of which can also be processed into the addictive drug cocaine. But for most of its long history coca was a grassroots psychoactive, used by indigenous populations in South America, where large numbers of people continue to use it in that fashion to this day. However, chewers of coca were not responsible for transforming the leaves of the bush into cocaine. It was a German chemist who isolated the cocaine alkaloid in 1855, though the drug did not become a trade commodity until later in the nineteenth century, some 300 years after opium. So, in effect, cocaine followed in the footsteps of opium, which had long since established certain patterns which, as the historian Alfred McCoy observes, have been repeated, years or even decades later, in the Andes coca zone

Opium, therefore, is quite distinctive in its social history. The lumping together of opioids with other psychoactives, as a “drug. is not just misleading; it has also led to profoundly mistaken public health approaches, depriving people of some substances, like cannabis and peyote, that are now known to have many beneficial properties. Indeed, the only effective means of combating the continuing spread of opioids may lie in forging alliances with other plants-that is by making grassroots psychoactives like cannabis and peyote more easily available.

Of course, opium also has innumerable beneficial uses, perhaps more so than any other psychoactive. It is precisely because of its extraordinary properties that opium also possesses the ability to generate a continually ascending series of more addictive forms. from the ma jun of the Middle Ages to chandu, morphine, heroin and oxycodone. Opium’s ability to spin off new and more potent versions of itself-even synthetic analogues like fentanyl-is one of the many tricks that the genie has often used to break out of its bottle. Once it escapes, it has a way of quickly transcending class and spreading from elites to those at the other end of the social ladder. This pattern too has repeated itself many times over throughout history.

Excerpted from Pages 27 to 28 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Historiesby Amitav Ghosh