Word: opium
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...white opium poppies burst into bloom last week in the barren mountains of Northwest Mexico, setting the stage for melodrama. Troops rode through the hidden valleys, determined to stop the opium harvest. But the contraband harvesters, brown farmers and shepherds, bent on sharing the highest dope prices in history from over the border, eluded the soldiers...
Silently the opium gatherers moved among the flowers, sometimes hidden from sight among the rows of corn. With knives and razors they slashed a "V" in the egg-shaped fruit over the big poppy petals, tapped out drops of white slime into tin cans and paper sacks. If they could slip past the soldiers, they could sell the stiffened slime, crude opium gum, to gun-toting dealers. The rewards were great; and it was certainly easier than raising tomatoes, which spoiled on the burros' backs on the long trails to market...
...pound of pure opium ("hop"), which used to cost $75 in the U.S. underworld, now brings as much as $700. The price of pure heroin ("aitch") has gone up from $60 an ounce...
Favorite drugs were "mercurials, calomel, opium, niter, Glauber's salts, Dover's powders, jalap, Peruvian bark-and by the 1840s, quinine" in heroic doses. One doctor reported a patient who took so much calomel that his teeth fell out, then the upper and lower jawbones came out "in the form of horse shoes." One treatment for the ague involved putting the patient in a draft between two cabins, stripping off his clothes, pouring cold water over him until he had a "pretty powerful smart chance of a shake...
...sources, Pegler proceeded to detail and document his charge. Warren Delano, partner in the American firm of Russell & Co., "was one among American merchants who, with British merchants, were imprisoned by the Chinese in the walled-in area of Canton, the event which led to the so-called Opium War." The "vessels owned by ... Russell & Co. soon controlled the opium trade and became known as opium clippers." "Russell & Co.," was apparently "the only American . . . firm engaged in the traffic." Concluded Pegler: "Delano died in 1898, leaving a personal estate of $1,338,000. . . . When the President's mother died...