Where to buy opium in india

The Portuguese interlude, though brief, contributed significantly to altering the nature of Brit ish involvement in Malwa opium. The financial and commercial infrastructure of Daman was just no match for the facilities available in British India.

We also need to bear in mind that as most of the bulk dealers who shipped opium from Daman were based in Bombay, ultimately it was the British colonial port that reaped the benefits of the Daman trade. Lisbon: Impr. Nacional, , p.

The Portuguese in India. London: Allen, , vol. Peres da Silva was the first Indo-Portuguese Goan to head the government of Portuguese India and was given the designation of prefeito He was appointed by the regime installed in Portugal in under Maria II, but was forced to leave Goa by racist-absolutist elements in III, p.

Here he received the support and financial assistance of de Faria, and with the latter's help formed a provisional government which lasted till This might have been a desperate attempt on the part of de Faria to recover the business he had lost to Bombay merchants. As we have already noted, the opium trade, especially its smuggling component, reactivated the latent Portuguese sea-borne commercial network in Asia and East Africa.

The Indo-Portuguese traders were active participants in exchanges between the Indian sub-continent on the one hand and the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, East Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean on the other. Narcotic substances, particularly opium, created, and were part of, a complex web of relationships extending from the Mediterranean and East Africa to the South China Sea.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Indian opium was the single most valuable commodity sustaining these relationships. There was, besides, opium that moved from the Eastern Mediterranean to the western coast of India and thence to East Asia though some of it would have gone directly as well.

Turkish and Egyptian varieties were well known in Asia in the early modern period. Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India. London: Henry Sotheran and Co. A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India. London: W. Allen, , vol. VI, part I, p. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Egyptian opium, known locally as Misree literally, from Misr or Egypt was one of the varieties of the drug available at Gujarat ports.

However, it was Turkish opium that figured more prominently than Egyptian opium or the produce of other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean in the list of drugs that constituted part of the long-distance trade of the Eastern Mediterranean-Red Sea-Indian Ocean-South China Sea networks. As already mentioned earlier, small quantities of opium from Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey were being re-exported via Daman at the peak of the smuggling era.

Recent research on the subject would indicate that the smuggling enterprise stimulated opium cultivation in Iran and that the commodity was fairly important for the economy of the area in the latter half of the century 39 39 Cf. The history of opium in Iran and its global context. Talk delivered at department of history, University of Delhi, September 17, At the same time the involvement of Indo-Portuguese traders in the opium trade centred on Daman gave a stimulus to the slave trade between East Africa and the western coast of India in the first half of the nineteenth century.

We have referred to the Mozambique-Gujarat sector of the slave trade above. While this sector of the trade has been studied by, among others, Edward Alpers and Rudy Bauss, the history of the East Africa-Karachi segment remains somewhat obscure.

It is not sufficient to focus on the Gujarat coast to grasp the extent to which the opium trade encouraged the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. The slave trade of the Sind coast was a vital part of the overall trade between India on the one hand and East Africa and the Red Sea on the other. After all southern Sind still has a large, and socially cohesive, community of African slave descent, namely the Sidis 40 40 Cf.

III, provides valuable sociological insights about the Sidi community of Sind, their memories of their African past, and their assertiveness about the African roots of Sidi identity. The slave trade of Karachi was flourishing during the s and s.

It is no coincidence that these were the decades in which the port began attracting a large business in smuggled opium. There are frequent references to the slave trade of Karachi in reports prepared by the East India Company's officials on the eve of the annexation of Sind. A report on the port and town of Karachi, written just around the time that the city was occupied by the Company's troops in , mentions two "classes" of slaves brought from Africa, "The Siddees or Africans and Hubshees or Abyssinians [from Ethiopia".

According to the report slaves from various parts of the African coast were first brought to Muscat in the Persian Gulf from where they were transported to Karachi to be then "sent up the country for sale" 41 41 HART, S. Report on the Town and Port of Kurachee In: Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, new series, vol. XVII, part I. Occasionally there were also slaves from Eastern Europe, Georgians for instance, who were "brought down but only on a private order, their price being too high to admit of any speculations being made in them" 42 42 Ibidem.

The traffickers in human cargo and narcotics reinforced each other, casting their nets very wide, so as to include the eastern Mediterranean in the west and the farther edges of the South China Sea in the east. The clandestine trade in the two commodities for there was British pressure on the Portuguese by the mids to put an end to the slave trade moved along channels initially excavated by the Portuguese, large stretches of which often ran dry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but which witnessed a brief revival in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This brief revival eventually benefited British colonialism and, in a subordinate way, Asian indigenous elites, much more than it did the Portuguese economy for reasons that are well known. Nonetheless we are still far from having a comprehensive understanding of the implications of the opium trade of the nineteenth century for Portugal itself. To conclude, one would like to emphasize the need to be attentive to the histories of the knowledge of narcotics and of medicine, transmission of techniques, modifications of taste, and cultural practices pertaining to intoxication while probing the history of opium in the colonial era.

The wide geographical scope of the exchanges involved in moving the commodity from producers to consumers created a historically new situation that has not been adequately explored.

The French enclaves are completely forgotten after the mid-eighteenth century, having been visible for a very brief period-less than half a century, c. Researchers from mainland India i. In: Indu Banga, ed. Ports and Their Hinterlands in India New Delhi: Manohar, , p. Yet, we need to recover the history of the relationships that linked the Indo-Portuguese world to both the Indian subcontinent as well as to the wider world of the seas and oceans if we are to break out of the narrow confines of 'national' histories.

To know the shadowy world of narcotrafficking in the nineteenth century is, then, to know also the ill-defined world of the lascars and other such people and communities and their historical experiences; their destinies too need to find a place in studies that attempt to explore global history. To come back to the centrality of opium to the global history of capitalism as an integral part of the histories of other colonial commodities such as tea, sugar and cotton.

Opium exports from India to China steadily increased from the s to finance the purchase of Chinese tea by the East India Company for the British market.

Simultaneously there was the growth of the export of raw cotton from Bombay to China. By the turn of the century it was no longer necessary to carry bullion to China for the Company's tea investments. The massive increase in the importation of tea into Britain was facilitated by Pitt's Commutation Act of that substantially lowered duties imposed on the commodity. The expansion of the British market for tea was accompanied by a corresponding increase in the consumption of sugar.

Tea and sugar went hand-in-hand. Sidney Mintz has shown that the century from to witnessed the "popularization of sweetened tea" in the United Kingdom. New York: Penguim, first published, , p. He observes that "Children learned the sugar habit at a very tender age: sweetened tea was a part of every meal At this time Britain obtained most of its sugar from its colonies in the Caribbean where it was produced by slave labour. As we know this slave labour was in turn obtained from Africa through the long-established Atlantic slave trade.

The existence of the Atlantic slave trade made possible the use of slave labour on a scale that was unprecedented in modern times, for the production of cotton in the southern states of America. The cotton produced in the southern states of America became the main source of supply of raw material for the Lancashire cotton industry. Abrir menu Brasil. Abrir menu. Amar Farooqui About the author. Abstract: As is well known, opium was a major colonial commodity.

John Dunlop, British collector of Ahmadabad in Gujarat, remarked in , Until about 4 years ago the merchants of Guzerat [Gujarat] were but little acquainted with the profits, or indeed the destination of the opium which they supplied, to Bom bay, or Portugueze merchants, according to the orders they might receive and their profits were confined to the commission of Agents, or at the utmost to driving the best bargain in their power, with those persons whom only they saw in the transaction.

Nacional, An Historical Sketch of Goa, HART, S. I, second edition, Bastora: Typ. Rangel, IV, Bastora: Typ. III, Bastora: Typ. II, Bastora: Typ. ORTA, Garcia da. Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, tr.

Thomaz, eds. A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, vol. VI, London: W. Allen, WONG, J. Denis L. It is worth bearing in mind that when in the East India Company's medical board at Calcutta undertook a comparative chemical analysis of various varieties of opium marketed in China, samples of Turkish opium were among the five types of the drug others being varieties produced in India that were examined to determine their respective narcotic properties.

In historical literature the Gujarati component of the Indo-Portuguese traders has received very little attention, as compared to the Goan Indo-Portuguese merchants. Adding to their owes is the havoc created by opium-addicted parrots. Farmers complain that parrots addicted to opium take turns to destroy their crops despite multiple attempts of scaring them away.

In addition to the poppy crop, the parrots tear apart poppy seed pods to get to the opium inside. These parrots have become addicted to the crop as they return to the field times a day and feed on the morphine oozing out of the bud after we split the poppy buds to help them ripe, added Sahu.

He said that farmers have been complaining about parrots for over years now to the authorities, but to no avail. Also read: India lost more jobs due to coronavirus lockdown than US did during Depression. India needs free, fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism even more as it faces multiple crises. But the news media is in a crisis of its own. There have been brutal layoffs and pay-cuts. The best of journalism is shrinking, yielding to crude prime-time spectacle.

ThePrint has the finest young reporters, columnists and editors working for it. Sustaining journalism of this quality needs smart and thinking people like you to pay for it. Whether you live in India or overseas, you can do it here. Support Our Journalism. Sunday, 14 November, Sign in. The results, however, clearly and conclusively indicate that opium of exceptionally good quality can be obtained in India. Indian opium has a great advantage over Turkish and Iranian opium, in so far as Turkish opium contains less than 1 per cent of codeine on the average, and Iranian opium about 2.

The results encouraged the Government of India and the Opium Department and, therefore, from onwards further experiments were conducted in order to determine the varieties of poppy, the kinds of manure and soils, and the methods of cultivation best suited for the production of opium of good quality.

Useful results have been obtained. It is now definitively proved that the first and second exudations from the lanced poppy head bring with them the bulk of morphine, and that it is possible to divide the whole produce of the crop into two parts, the first half for medical purposes and the second for Excise purposes. The first scarification is always the richest, the second is distinctly poor in morphine and in subsequent scratchings the morphine gradually decreases.

Herein lay the reasons why Indian opium had so far been said to be poor in morphine. In Turkey, only one scarification is made apparently, when the cultivator catering for the medical market obtains by his single serpentine scarification nearly all the opium suitable for his purpose.

In India, the cultivator rarely makes less than four. When all these scratchings including the first one, are mixed together, even though these may be rich in morphine, the total bulk of opium becomes low in morphine content. It is now established that India can produce plenty of medicinal opium of high morphine content so long as care is taken that cultivators do not mix the opium from the first and subsequent scarifications.

The method of collecting opium of first and subsequent lancings has been practised by the cultivators in India for the last two years with good results. We can supply opium to all the countries in the world who want it from India with any morphine percentage ranging from 9 to over 12 per cent.

These countries had nothing but good words to say both for the quality of the drug supplied, the method of packing and dispatching and the promptness in executing all the orders. Work has also been carried out to determine whether the amount of codeine and narcotine also varies in the opium of successive lancings and increases in proportion with the falling off in morphine content in the successive lancings, since codeine and morphine are very similar in chemical constitution.

In general, however, it is seen that the percentage of codeine does not vary very much in the opium of successive lancings. It shows a slight increase in the later lancings but the increase is not sufficient to account for the falling off in the morphine content. Narcotine, however, falls off in a manner very similar to what we have observed in the case of morphine but the falling off is not so marked.

It follows that the opium of the first and second lancings will still contain practically as much codeine as ordinary Indian opium and thereby will keep up the reputation of Indian opium for high codeine content.

The poppy is a delicate plant and needs utmost care and attention during the entire period of its growth from the seedling stage until the capsules ripen.

Unfortunately, the poppy plant has many enemies against which it has to fight during its life period. Apart from natural calamities like sunburning, hail and frost, it has also to suffer from many insects, birds and other animals. Fungus and virus diseases also take their toll.

No sooner do the seeds germinate and the seedlings sprout two to four leaves, than a small insect locally known as Dhirku or Gadhiya starts the trouble. This insect hops from one plant to another and clips off the young terminal shoot with the result that the plant is incapacitated for normal growth. The cutworm plate V, fig. Its ravages extend in the dry season from November to January.

These cutworms remain burrowed in the soil during the day and come out only at night to carry on their depredations.

In the night I have seen hundreds of these worms on the leaves of the plants which they cut plate V, fig. The entire leaf is eaten away by these cutworms except the midrib plate V, fig. The loss from this worm is sometimes enormous.

The only remedy is to flood the fields with water. By doing so these cutworms float on the surface and are picked by their enemies-the birds. The cricket, Gryllotalpa vulgaris is often a very serious pest, cutting over with its mandibles plants almost fully grown.

The caterpillars of a moth also prove very serious enemies to the growing crops, their ravages extending from December to February. In this case also irrigation dislodges them from their soil haunts and they are eaten away by their natural enemies: the Indian crow and myna. Rats, rabbits, monkeys, blue bulls and parrots also destroy the crop considerably. The poor cultivator has to save his crop during the day from monkeys and parrots and during the night from rabbits and blue bulls.

In good irrigated fields, rats are not a great menace because they are easily dislodged from poppy fields. They run to make their homes in an adjoining field where they find less danger from water and better food like wheat or gram. The damage from blue bulls is sometimes very great. Once they get addicted to the poppy leaves and stems containing latex they will not eat anything else.

Apart from eating them, they also destroy the plants by breaking them with their strong hoofs while running through fields. Hindus consider it irreligious to kill them. They consider killing it as bad as killing a cow. In sunburning Moorka or Joorka , the leaves get dried and wither, with more or less discoloured purplyblack or brownish veins, the pith decaying from above downward. Plants exhibit these symptoms, both in poor and rich soils, when the weather is hot and there is a deficiency of moisture in the soil.

Under these conditions the roots fail to keep pace with the leaf transpiration. Frost is also sometimes very destructive. During heavy frost the thermal balance of the protoplasm of the cells is lost.

The protoplasm, in such cases, shrinks and the cells die. The only remedy for this appears to be to water the fields profusely the morning after the frost when the plants will again try to regain their proper balance and the crop may be saved. There is hardly any remedy against hail except the prayers of the cultivators. The most serious poppy mould is Peronospora arborescens.

It is, however, not so destructive as its other species Peronospora infestens to the potato. The less succulent structure of the poppy is evidently unfavourable to any rapid or general extension of the mycelium. The disease is commonly known as Chirrah or Agiya. The pale rose coloured patches of this thread mould are very common on the poppy during moist, warm weather. In the opium godowns and, in fact, on opium everywhere, it finds a favourite media covering the surface with its rosy web of mycelia when left for any time undisturbed plate IV, fig.

Other species of fungi reported on the poppy plants are Trichoderma viride, Sporotrichum Sp. None of these, however, cause any serious damage to the crop. Poppy plants suffering from leaf curl disease are very frequently found in the fields. Sometimes it is devastating. The symptoms are identical to the potato and tobacco mosaic and it is surmised that this may also be a virus disease plate II, fig.

The only method of eradication is to pluck the diseased plants as they appear and burn them. Plants with gangrene and root canker are also occasionally met with. The poppy crop, as grown by cultivators, consists of a wonderful assemblage of types intermingled with each other and intercrossed and the work of sorting these out and testing the relative value of each appears to be necessary.

The cultivator's field involves too large a scope for the personal element and is not a suitable basis for comparative experiments. It is already possible to say that there is a very wide divergence between different races with regard to the morphine content of their opium.

The highest figure of morphine obtained from a pure race is over 14 per cent. With diminishing consumption of opium every year by 10 per cent with a view to completely prohibit its use for quasi-medical purposes by the year , the excise opium in India will go out of market. Our main effort at the present moment is, therefore, to find out those varieties which will give opium of high morphine percentage for medicinal purposes. At the same time we are not to lose sight of the cultivator and his profit.

It is, therefore, equally essential to isolate a race which, with a high morphine content, will also give a high average yield.

This will not only be beneficial to the cultivator but also to the Government because the land thus saved will be utilized for growing other crops like wheat, gram, etc. Experiments on large scale are, therefore, being conducted to achieve this object. Attempts will also be made to discover a variety which, with all the above advantages, may also be disease resistant.

United Nations. Office on Drugs and Crime. Site Search. Alkaloid contents of Indian opium and its chief characteristics in comparison with opium of other countries. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.