“The Plant Of Joy: Nature's Anti Depressant: Opium Poppies:"God's Own Medicine"
https://www.facebook.com/
The Plant Of Joy "God's Own Medicine" Sir William Osler
1. Who can say ‘*Dr. Dharamvira Gandhi, MP’ is wrong. incorrect or guilty about “The Plant Of Joy: Nature's anti depressant: opium poppies:"God's Own Medicine" Sir William Osler”?
2. Opium is an extract of the exudate derived from seedpods of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. The poppy plant was cultivated in the ancient civilisations of Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence and fossilised poppy seeds suggest that Neanderthals may have used the opium poppy over thirty thousand years ago. Less controversially, the first known written reference to the poppy appears in a Sumerian text dated around 4,000 BC. The flower was known as hul gil, plant of joy.
3. Later authorities were scarcely less enthusiastic. Physicians commonly believed that the poppy plant was of divine origin; opium was variously called the Sacred Anchor Of Life, Milk Of Paradise, the Hand Of God, and Destroyer Of Grief. Medical pioneer Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), sometimes known as 'the English Hippocrates' and 'the Shakespeare of medicine', writes....
4. Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium."
5. This may be overstating God's benevolence; but by relieving emotional as well as physical pain, opiates have been understandably popular. Robert Burton (1577-1640), scholar, priest and author of Anatomy of Melancholy, commended laudanum - essentially opium dissolved in wine - for those who were insomniacs...
6. "...by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains [which] is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men..."
7. Indeed opium was probably the world's first authentic antidepressant. Unlike other pain-relieving agents such as ethyl alcohol, ether or the barbiturates, opium doesn't impair sensory perception, the intellect or motor co-ordination. Pain ceases to be threatening, intrusive and distressing; but it can still be sensed and avoided.
8. In low doses, opium may sometimes be pleasantly stimulating rather than soporific. In the East, opium was typically treated as a social drug; and opium-smoking was a tool for conviviality. Nowadays a life of habitual opioid use evokes images of stupor and mindless oblivion, yet ironically Coleridge coined the word intensify to describe opium's effects on consciousness.
9. Opium was viewed as a medicine, not a drug of abuse. Contemporary medical theory didn't allow that one could become addicted to a cure. However, the chemists and physicians most actively investigating the properties of opium were also its dedicated consumers; and this may conceivably have coloured their judgement.
10. Writers of distinction certainly consumed opium in copious quantities. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote Kubla Khan in a dream-like trance while under its spell; opium promotes vivid dreams and rich visual imagery as well as gentle euphoria...
11. Opium was already heavily used in China as a recreational drug…
12. Classical Greek physicians either ground the whole plant or used opium extract. Galen lists its medical indications, noting how opium...
13. "...resists poison and venomous bites, cures chronic headache, vertigo, deafness, epilepsy, apoplexy, dimness of sight, loss of voice, asthma, coughs of all kinds, spitting of blood, tightness of breath, colic, the lilac poison, jaundice, hardness of the spleen stone, urinary complaints, fever, dropsies, leprosies, the trouble to which women are subject, melancholy and all pestilences."
14.Fellow English author Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) writes of "the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain". De Quincey seems to have treated opium as a mood-brightening smart-drug. The author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) draws invidious comparisons with alcohol. He attributes a heightening of his mental powers to opium use...
15. "Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation and harmony. Wine robs a man of self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it....Wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilize and disperse the intellectual energies; whereas opium seems to compose what has been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. ...A man who is inebriated...is often...brutal; but the opium eater...feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of majestic intellect...."
16. De Quincey states that not he himself, but opium, should be regarded as the true hero of his essay. Opium was his "Divine Poppy-juice, as indispensable as breathing". By reputation, opium users have dull wits, idle lives and diminished sensibility. This was not de Quincey's verdict. He made a habit of going to the opera under its influence - and found his experience of music delightfully enhanced...
17. "Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind, generally increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure...It is sufficient to say, that a chorus, etc of elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life - not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents removed...and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed..."
18. Opium induces gentle, subtle, dream-like hallucinations very different from the fierce and unpredictable weirdness of LSD. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) likens opium to a woman friend, "...an old and terrible friend, and, alas! like them all, full of caresses and deceptions." Across the Atlantic, in 1842, William Blair describes his experiences with opium in a New York magazine...
19. "While I was sitting at tea, I felt a strange sensation, totally unlike any thing I had ever felt before; a gradual creeping thrill, which in a few minutes occupied every part of my body, lulling to sleep the before-mentioned racking pain, producing a pleasing glow from head to foot, and inducing a sensation of dreamy exhilaration (if the phrase be intelligible to others as it is to me) similar in nature but not in degree to the drowsiness caused by wine, though not inclining me to sleep; in fact far from it, that I longed to engage in some active exercise; to sing, dance, or leap...so vividly did I feel my vitality - for in this state of delicious exhilaration even mere excitement seemed absolute elysium - that I could not resist the tendency to break out in the strangest vagaries, until my companions thought me deranged...After I had been seated [at the play I was attending] a few minutes, the nature of the excitement changed, and a 'waking sleep' succeeded. The actors on the stage vanished; the stage itself lost its reality; and before my entranced sight magnificent halls stretched out in endless succession with galley above gallery, while the roof was blazing with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was tinged with strange, gigantic figures, like the wild possessors of lost globe...I will not attempt farther to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of 'brown gum' had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words that I can command would do justice to its Titanian splendour and immensity..."
20. Opium was also well known in Chinese antiquity. One 10th century poem celebrates how the opium poppy can be made into a drink "fit for Buddha". Ancient peoples either ate parts of the flower or converted them into liquids to drink. But by the 7th century, the Turkish and Islamic cultures of western Asia had discovered that the most powerful medicinal effects could be obtained by igniting and smoking the poppy's congealed juices; and the habit spread. The widespread use of opium in China dates to tobacco-smoking in pipes introduced by the Dutch from Java via the island of Formosa in the 17th century. Whereas Indians ordinarily ate opium, the Chinese smoked it. The Chinese mixed Indian opium with tobacco, two products traded by the Dutch. Pipe-smoking was adopted throughout the region. Predictably enough, this resulted in increased opium-smoking, both with and without tobacco. Old encrusted opium-pipes were still valuable because they contained a residue of charcoal and raw opium known as "dross". Dross could be recycled with tobacco plus various adulterants and sold to the poor. Styles of opium pipe reflected the relative wealth or poverty of their owners. Pipes ranged from bejewelled, elaborately ornamented works of art to simple constructions of clay or bamboo.
21. By the late-1700s, the British East India Company controlled the prime Indian poppy-growing areas on the Ganges plain between Patna and Benares. The company dominated the Asian opium trade; but they did not create it. "Take your opium" was a standard greeting in some Indian cities even before the Europeans arrived. By 1800, however, the British East India Company had a virtual monopoly, controlling supply and setting prices. Dealers, merchants and users alike lovingly assessed the quality and potency of their merchandise with the ardour of a wine connoisseur. According to The Chinese Repository, discerning purchasers of the raw product looked for opium of...
22. "...moderately firm texture, capable of receiving an impression from the finger; of a dark yellow color when held in the light, but nearly black in the mass, with a strong smell, and free from grittiness..."
23. “The Plant Of Joy: Nature's anti depressant : opium poppies:"God's Own Medicine" Sir William Osler”: opioids . com
24. “Are the Opioids-Naturally occurring opium-containing substance ‘any opium-containing substance that is produced naturally in the brain’???
25. What might it look like if someone had an imbalance between these two opioid systems — if perhaps they had too much of one or a paucity of the other or a defective receptor? This could theoretically occur as a result of environment — trauma, for example, or chronic stress — or from a genetic problem or some combination.
26. We are in the midst of a devastating and often lethal opioid epidemic, one of whose victims, we learned last week, was the pop star Prince. At such a time, it is hard to remember that there are multiple opioids naturally produced in our brains and required for our well-being. The neural circuitry utilizing these substances controls some of our most fundamental feelings of pain, stress and hopelessness, as well as pleasure and even euphoria.
27. There is obviously a need for extreme caution, but research suggests that certain opioids may actually be useful in treating psychiatric diseases that have proved frustratingly unresponsive to current medications.
28. Poppy seeds have been found at archaeological sites of Neolithic man. The Sumerians wrote about “the joy plant”; an Egyptian papyrus from the second millennium B.C. described the use of a product of poppies to stop the crying of children. Hippocrates suggested its use for female ailments, and a ninth-century Persian physician advocated the use of opium for melancholia.
29. Millenniums later, during the American Civil War, the Union Army used 10 million opium pills to treat wounded soldiers. And then there were the two Opium Wars fought between China and Britain. Unquestionably, no other psychoactive substance has played such a central role in human affairs.
30. The drugs like Morphine, oxycodone, heroin and codeine etc, to name just a few. ….., but their addictive potential was enhanced as well”. nytimes. Com; June 4, 2016: By Anna Fels
31. “Why bill to legalise marijuana and opium getting cleared for Parliament is a game changer: Sourav Roy posted on 16th November 2017 The proposed changes in the Act seek to enable medically supervised and state- regulated supply of traditionally used natural drugs for a common user.
32. "Thirty years down the line, where do we stand? The fact of the matter is that the NDPS Act has not only failed in achieving its professed goals, but this ‘War on Drugs’ has delivered results directly opposite to what it aimed to achieve," Dr Gandhi said in a statement.
33. "Heroin replaced opium, cocaine replaced cannabis, and so on. As the drug business involves huge super profits; on one hand, it creates rivalries spilling into gang wars and, on the other hand, it promotes ruthless and aggressive marketing, thus pushing more and more people into the drug world. Consequently, the petty traditional drug users are turning to the easily available and aggressively marketed more addictive and dangerous street drugs."
34. "In some of the developed countries like the US, marijuana has been legalised, which ultimately results in less drug abuse. The possibility of the same maybe explored in India... Marijuana should be legalised for medical purposes, especially as it serves a purpose in cancer.”
35. "In the villages of my constituency, old people, venerable people used to smoke natural marijuana. Today, by imposing ban on natural substances, which people have been using for ages, from the time of Lord Shiva, we have actually forced a lot of these people to move on to alcohol."
36.“While most cannabis use is occasional, moderate and not associated with significant problems, it is nonetheless precisely because of its potential risks that it needs to be regulated.” yourstory. Com: “Why bill to legalise marijuana and opium getting cleared for Parliament is a game changer: Sourav Roy posted on 16th November 2017”.
37.*“Dr. Dharamvira Gandhi, MP: Dharamvir Gandhi (born 1 June 1951) He is a Member of Parliament from Patiala.
(i) During his college days, Gandhi was detained for a month in Amritsar, for protesting against the 1977 Emergency. He went on to become a reputed cardiologist of Patiala. He also worked as a Senior Lecturer at the Government Medical College, Patiala's Department of Cardiology.
(ii) Gandhi joined politics inspired by the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement, and campaigned for the AAP during the Delhi Legislative Assembly election, 2013. He contested the Indian general election, 2014 from Patiala on an AAP ticket. During the campaign, he was assaulted in the Rasulpur Saidan area, allegedly by the Shiromani Akali Dal Municipal Councillor Rajinder Singh Virk”. An extract From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Highlights forwarded By: Balbir Singh Sooch-Sikh Vichar MancH
First Posted On: October 2, 2018, 10:37 AM (IST)
http://sikhvicharmanch.com/