Nothing has worked against incredibly powerful agent opium: Amitav Ghosh

“Opium is an incredibly powerful agent in history. There are other botanical entities that played a very important role in history… like sugarcane and cotton because they created these plantation models. But, if you look, over time sugarcane and cotton have sort of faded in importance economically around the world, whereas opium has grown stronger and stronger,” said Ghosh.

The 67-year-old US-based writer gave the example of northern Mexico, which he said has “virtually evaporated” as a state because this one small plant has “eluded every attempt by every government to establish control of it”.

“In northern Mexico the state has virtually evaporated. Apparently, a very large part of the arms that the West is sending to Ukraine is ending up in northern Mexico and also amongst the underworld in America,” said Ghosh.

He researched extensively on the topic for his highly successful Ibis trilogy – “Sea of Poppies”, “River of Smoke” and “Flood of Fire” — where he delved into the lives of 19th-century sailors and soldiers vastly impacted by the global opium trade.

‘Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories’ by Amitav Ghosh (Source: Amazon)

Unlike the three books, which are fiction wrapped in history, his new work is a mixture of travelogue, memoir and an excursion into the economic and cultural history of the infamous opium trade. It is essentially a result of his research for the Ibis Trilogy.

According to Ghosh, the logic of supply and demand of the market, given as a “major justification” for the opium trade since the East India Company began trading the addictive substance, doesn’t follow here.

“It is a substance that creates its own market… When you invent this theory of balance of supply and demand, what you are doing is removing all ethical constraints that have traditionally been in place to limit the profit motive,” Ghosh, who grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, said.

“The same thing is what the East India Company did when they made this drug easily available and the demand grew by itself,” the Kolkata-born author added.

The prevalent “opioid crisis”, according to the Jnanpith awardee, has already resulted in over 400,000 deaths worldwide — more than the Second World War.

The opioid crisis refers to the serious public health issue stemming from the rapid increase in the use of prescription and non-prescription opioid drugs.

He spoke at length about the “love affair” between humans and opioids and the recreational use of the addictive substance, which didn’t begin until the 15th century. Before that, it was only used for medicinal purposes.

Ghosh, who said he was no “no policy expert”, argued that the only thing he can tell is that so far nothing has worked against opium — suppression or legalisation.

“Holland is the most liberal of all states in relation to drugs. But I think it was two-three years ago that a group of police chiefs in Holland essentially said that ‘Holland is a Narco state’. It is a very dark and grim scenario, because you can see that the criminal networks around the world have become so powerful and they are incredibly empowered by the internet,” he added.

Ghosh is also the author of “The Shadow Lines”, “The Glass Palace”, “The Hungry Tide”, “Gun Island”, “The Great Derangement”, “The Nutmeg’s Curse”, “Jungle Nama” and “The Living Mountain”.

“Smoke and Ashes”, priced at Rs 699 and published by HarperCollins, reveals the pivotal role one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know it – a world that is now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

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