Poppies: An Oscillating Symbol

The opium poppy is one of many species in the poppy family (Papaveraceae), including Papaver somniferum (opium poppy), Papaver rhoeas (common or corn poppy), and Papaver orientale (oriental poppy). The opium poppy has a long history of human cultivation and coevolution. Writers, artists and artisans, horticulturalists, pharmacists, scientists, chefs, and narcotics dealers have engaged with the plant since antiquity. Originally used and revered by humans medicinally and religiously in the Middle East, the opium poppy became an object of aesthetic beauty in Europe and was later racialized through the Opium Wars in the 19th century. While opium poppies have had a historic relationship with people as a drug, they have also been a subject of visual culture from the Neolithic period to the present day. As a recreational drug, opium has been a tool for artistic inspiration but also an addictive substance that has warranted attempts at wholesale eradication of poppy cultivation. Today, opium poppies are still grown for their flowers but are firmly associated with corruption due to their role in the illegal drug industry in South America and Afghanistan, where the poppies are mass produced for the seed capsules that hold the drug opium. The condemnation of the opium poppy occurred after centuries of shifting attitudes towards the plant, oscillating between a symbol of beauty and a blight on civilizations in different spaces, time periods, and cultural contexts.

Prehistory of the Opium Poppy

Poppies, like most plants we know today, were domesticated and have coevolved to meet the needs of humans. It is not known where poppies are native, as the first mention of poppies was as cultivated plants. Opium poppies were able to live and thrive across many environments. Like many plants used for hallucinogenic effects, opium poppies were first used for ritual and sacrifice purposes. Salavert et al. (2020) confirm that poppy seed remains and deposits were first found in Neolithic sites in “the central and Western Mediterranean, northwestern temperate Europe, and the Western Alps.”¹ Representations of the opium poppy seed pods were found in artifacts like stelaes, sculpture, and other decorative objects from the Mediterranean and parts of what is now the Middle East, as well as Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Their seed capsules were considered precious, magical, and even divine.²

Divine Remedies

During the early Neolithic, the opium poppy was the only oily plant cultivated in the western Mediterranean. The poppy’s flower had yet to make much of an entrance into popular culture until the spread of the Roman empire (6 B.C.E. - 473 C.E), when barley and poppy were both associated with “Persephone and the promise of perpetual rebirth,” the Minoan goddess of poppies, and Demeter/Isis, goddess of agriculture.³

Another notable example of the plant’s valorization comes from Anatolia during the Mycenaean period (1600–1100 B.C.E.): two gold pins resembling dried poppy capsules (from the Robert Schimmel collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). While scholars disagree about whether these bulbous single-stemmed plants are poppy seed capsules or pomegranates, there is some consensus that both were depicted in ancient reliefs on stelae, vases, and other monuments.⁴

Greek culture heavily influenced Roman life, especially during the classical antiquity period (8 B.C.E-5 A.D). Both Greek and Roman culture followed the same worship of deities and used poppies in daily and religious life. Ceres, the Roman equivalent to Demeter, is often depicted with poppies, conveying poppies as symbols of agricultural fertility just like the Greeks. ⁵ Philosophers like Cato the Elder and Pliny the Elder preserved Roman traditions like the ritual use of poppies and included poppies as an ingredient in recipes.⁶ In and around the Mediterranean sea, statuettes of maidens were found holding poppy capsules as symbolic of fertility. ⁷ The area that is now modern-day Italy was central to the popularization and cultivation of poppies.

The spread of the poppy itself needed careful monitoring via human intervention in order to naturalize and exist in differing environments, specifically outside of the Mediterranean temperate zones.⁸ It would only be in the 16th century that opium poppies could be found in books about “hardy flowers” or existing in “wild gardens.” In The Wild Garden; Or, Our Groves & Shrubberies Made Beautiful by the Naturalization of Hardy Exotic Plants (1870), author and practicing gardener William Robinson described Papaver somniferum as able to “grow[ing] in any soil.”⁹

Movement Across Eurasia

The use of opium in Europe halted during the Holy Inquisition. Despite that, the opium poppy was transported across Eurasia by traders, merchants, physicians, and travelers. India, the Middle East, and China participated its naturalization; the Silk Road was especially conducive to the poppy’s naturalization, as people held onto poppies for medicine and trade. In 1061, the Chinese scholar Su Song writes that, “[Poppies] are hard to cultivate. They must be planted during the ninth month, in a piece of land which was manured the year before. If not cultivated in this way, it will never germinate.”¹⁰ Arab traders traveled through the Silk Road, speading opium poppies across Asia. Opium poppies were integrated into diet and medicine in Southern China and its countryside, where Buddhist monasteries concocted recipes for remedies for ailments related to the throat and stomach.¹¹ During Tang Dynasty China (618–907), the Silk Road reached its zenith and because of its easy-entry and the development of other trading routes, recreational opium smoking rapidly spread.

Century after century, social perceptions of the opium poppy have changed drastically, despite being useful as a medicinal drug throughout history. Meanwhile, both Asia and the Middle East took part in opium trading when Europe banned the use of Eastern products during the Holy Inquisition. In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus, a physician and scholar, repopularized the opium poppy as the drug “laudanum”, a tincture of opium with wine or water. It was then that European societies returned to using the opium poppy for medicine. In China, opium use became popular across classes, beginning in royal courts and rural regions and spreading to the working class. In the late eighteenth century, opium became a major part of China’s sex industry. European nations considered Dutch sailors who smoked opium at the time, “primitive people” for partaking.¹² By the nineteenth century, certain types of opium were prized commodities once again. Author and naturalist George Birdwood writes of Indian opium as “the luxury of the rich in China, as champagne is in Europe and America.”¹³ Asian and Middle Eastern use of the morphine content in opium via smoking distinguished opium use from western use of opium through pills and tinctures.

Rebranding: From Value in Aesthetics to a Household Drug

While prehistoric and ancient depictions of opium poppies mostly referred to seed capsules and the dried seed heads of poppies, the poppy flower gained notoriety in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in aesthetics, including in botanical illustrations, floral arrangements, still lifes, and textiles. Illustrations of wild poppies, double red poppies, common poppies, feathery poppies, and annual poppies were common. During the Early Modern period (1500–1800), poppies were considered beautiful objects rather than functional tools for human use.¹⁴ Yet, they were still used as medicine, including for their sleep-inducing effects.

Angelo Sala, Italian doctor, chemist, and promoter of chemical remedies, discusses the medicinal properties of opium and evaluates existing knowledge about its effects in his 1618 Opiologia; or a Treatise concerning … Opium, primarily its ability to “wonderfully and speedily release the body from intolerable pains”. The first chapter is preceded by an image entitled ‘the method of extracting the juice of the poppy’, shown here, depicting a Turkish opium picker using his knife to scratch the poppy seed capsule in order to collect the sap. A similar image, shown behind Sala’s image here, appears on the title page of Georg Wolfgang Wedel’s Opiologia (1682).

Moving into the eighteenth century, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus named the opium poppy Papaver somniferum in his Species Plantarum (1753), the genus coming from the noun for poppy in Greek and the species name acknowledging its sleep and dream-inducing properties in the etymological link to the latin somnium, meaning “dream” or “vision.” This name differentiates the opium poppy from other varieties of annual flowering plants in the family Papaveraceae.

The nineteenth century saw a conflict between these concepts of the opium poppy: as a plant of beauty that provided relief and inspiration, and increasingly negative attitudes towards the morality of the trade and use of the drug, with the western and eastern perceptions increasingly overlapping. Herbals, such as the physician Hermann Adolph Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen (1890), continued to categorize the opium poppy as a medicinal plant. The relieving effects of opium led to its use in commonplace medicines, even for children; it was referred to as “the poor child’s nurse” due to its ability to stop babies crying, as seen in this 1849 edition of Punch magazine.

War and Colonialism

As the opium poppy developed into a household drug, its role within the political conflicts of empire, trade, and regulation in the nineteenth century was epitomized in The Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860). The opium poppy was connected to another primary economic plant of the period, tea, and the trade imbalance between Britain and China, with China accepting only silver in exchange for tea. The British response was to illegally smuggle Indian opium into China for payment in silver. ¹⁵ Fraught discussions of the ‘Opium Question’ centered on the morality of the trade, considering the addictive properties of the drug, as well as Britain’s financial dependence on opium. An 1882 edition of the Journal of the Society of Arts records a discussion of this among members of the society including former Home Secretary Henry Bruce and doctor Sir John Rutherford Alcock, who lived in China for twenty years: “[T]here was a very painful impression on the minds of some persons as to the morality of this trade […] many believed that this country [Britain] was not only importing on a large scale a pernicious drug into the most populous country of the world, but also compelling its introduction and use by force of arms.”

This question of morality was heightened by the drug trade being fueled in British India. The East India Company sought to monopolize opium production in India from the 1770s onwards and by the nineteenth century managed opium poppy plantations across the country.¹⁶ However, they sold off the product to private merchants to transport to China, increasingly disconnecting the opium poppy plant from the drug product it provided.¹⁷

Archival records and objects held at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew display the role of the institution in this colonial network of trade, describing “Experimental Poppy Gardens” in India that sought to examine methods of poppy cultivation, including disease and soil conditions impacting the plants and the yield of opium they produced.¹⁸ The opium poppy was considered a “useful plant”, and a volume entitled “India: Economic Products: Opium” is dedicated to it in Kew’s Miscellaneous Reports, an archival collection which records activities in the network of botanical gardens across the British Empire. As an economic product of financial value whose cultivation was regulated by the East India Company, it is clear that the opium poppy was of interest in the context of nineteenth century colonial economic botany.

Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens between 1865 and 1885, visited the opium manufactory in Patna in India in 1848. In his Himalayan Journals Hooker gives an account of the process of cultivation and labor-intensive methods of extraction, from the granting of licenses from the East India Company, the flowering of the poppies in late January and early February, and the extraction of latex from the seed pods in February and March, to the transportation of the opium jars to stores and the creation of “balls” of opium by men working “ten hours a day” to be sent to market.¹⁹

Literary Inspiration, Dreams, and Addiction

While Britain waged war with China over the trade of the opium poppy’s valuable drug product, within Britain itself, opium’s reputation as a source of artistic inspiration and creative dreams grew to influence the work of many poets of the Romantic period. Samuel Taylor Coleridge described his poem Kubla Khan as “a fragment […] composed in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of opium”. Recording similar experiences of the inspirational effect of opium, Thomas De Quincey writes in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) that “[i]f opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, […] I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man”.

Opium continued to play a role both in the inspiration and content of literary works into the late nineteenth century. One such example is Wilkie Collins’s bestselling sensationalist novel The Moonstone (1868). “A novel written about an experiment with opium written under the influence of opium”, it centers on a mysterious theft unknowingly performed while a sleepwalker is under the influence of opium.²⁰

Opium is alluded to, mentioned, and used in the works of many other prominent Victorian novelists, including Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist), Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days), Bram Stoker (Dracula), and Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes). The poppy is also explicitly associated with femininity in J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs Animées (1847), which includes an image of a poppy humanized in the form of a woman sprinkling poppy seeds from the seedpods onto insects, with the petals appearing like an upturned dress.

Marianne North (1830-1890), a botanical artist whose extensive paintings are displayed in the gallery she built in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, painted the opium poppy with emphasis on a seedpod in the foreground, unscarred and untouched. Artistic representations of opium poppies continually accentuate the vibrant colors of the petals which form large yet delicate flowers, but also the distinctive shape of the seedpod, all contributing to the association of opium poppies with floral beauty.

The plant’s influence continued into the twentieth century with Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), in which the scent of opium poppies puts Dorothy to sleep in the chapter entitled “The Deadly Poppy Field,” and the covers of some editions of the text portray vivid red poppies. Thomas De Quincey’s nineteenth century autobiographical account inspired the 1962 American crime film, Confessions of an Opium Eater. The long-lasting mystique of opium in both literature and cinema has continued into the twenty-first century with novels such as Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) as well as his more recent history of opium, Smoke and Ashes (2024).

However, as opium became entwined with the indulgence and decadence of the fin de siècle, the drug was also increasingly being associated with racist concepts of degeneration. In his book Degeneration (1895), Max Nordau writes of the impact of addiction to such substances as opium on the development of societies, suggesting that “[a] race which is regularly addicted, even without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form (such as […] opium) […] begets degenerate descendants”. Following The Opium Wars and increased consumption of opium in the West, these racialized stereotypes about harmful addiction in China became widespread, forewarning of the sharp downturn of the opium poppy’s reputation in the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century opened and closed with significant developments in the production of medicinal and recreational substances from the opium poppy. Morphine, the first drug isolated from the plant, was first produced in 1804. In 1895, German pharmaceutical company Bayer was responsible for the first commercial production of heroin from chemically processed morphine, and named it thus because it was seen to have “heroic effects” on users.²¹ With the peak in opium production occurring around the early twentieth century, the trade came under greater global scrutiny. The International Opium Convention in 1912 led to a worldwide ban on trading opium, morphine, and cocaine. Since then, morphine and some other opiates have remained in use as pain relievers, but continue to be illegal for recreational use.

The Cursed Flower in Colombia

Throughout the twentieth century, the poppy trade and trafficking and smuggling routes became a global business with producers in Asia and Latin America: The Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan), The Golden Triangle (Burma, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam) and in the Americas, Colombia and Mexico. These regions of the world where most of the world’s poppies are produced are also places which, despite their differences, share certain political, social, economic and environmental particularities: good climate and perfect land for production, constant war, political instability, paramilitary personnel, inequality, among other reasons. To illustrate in more depth what the presence of opium poppy has meant in a specific case, we chose to talk about Colombia, and the way in which this plant has generated a clear political, social, economic, and environmental effects for human and non-humans communities.

At the end of the twentieth century, the opium poppy went from being an unknown plant in Colombia to a metaphor for beauty—the hidden and the forbidden, to one of consumption, excess, and precariousness. Once it flourished in Colombia’s mountain ranges, the seeds spread swiftly in humid and tropical forests, and became an object of desire for its precious “honey,” as the peasants call the latex that oozes from its fruit. Once admired for its beauty, it has transformed into the “the cursed flower” (“la flor maldita” in Spanish).

The artwork of the contemporary Colombian artist Juan Fernando Herrán (Bogotá, Colombia, 1963) is an expression of this process of shifting between a romantic botanical conception of the poppy to a more social, political, and ecological matter. In a photograph from 2000, we see the moment when the head of the poppy has been delicately cut off and liquid surges from it. The plant transforms into a powerful image that distances itself from previous representations depicting it as an exotic; here, the photograph shows the opium poppy capsule as a visual element that connects a relationship of the plant with the human and the animal life. The capsule evokes its relevance as a raw material and also displays that both material and spiritual human and non-human forces coexist in poppy plant.²²

Policing, Farmers, Eradication

The spread of poppy crops in Colombia was a social and economic phenomenon, especially for small farmers who saw it as a unique opportunity to cultivate and trade a plant that had been recently introduced into the country. The rapid acceleration of trafficking and consumption of heroin also resulted in the emergence in the 1990s of policies to prosecute growers and exterminate the plant. This resulted in a constant fear spread throughout the homes of peasants and Indigenous peoples who did most of the opium planting in remote places and on small farms.²³ In 2000, the Colombian government signed “Plan Colombia,” a political and economic initiative with the United States whose mission was to eradicate from the country illicit crops such as cocaine, marijuana, and opium poppy. The exponential increase in poppy cultivation put the country at the top of the world’s poppy producers, and Colombian heroin became sought after in foreign markets due to its high purity level. With Plan Colombia, the government began a campaign of strong police persecution of both the plant and the people who cultivated it. The eradication occurred manually, with many people digging it up and an intense and ineffective aerial application of glyphosate, a potent herbicide. Uncertainty and paranoia seemed to be in the air all the time. The government created a battleground that translated into a metaphor for a vigilante state.

This phenomenon of eradication and the intervention of other governments did not only occur in Colombia, for instance, Afghanistan. Over 80 percent of global opium production occurs in Afghanistan,²⁴ where illicit poppy production has benefited from both the Taliban’s and U.S. government’s war on drugs.²⁵ As in Colombia, persecution and eradication became government policy, leading to April 2022, when the Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada decreed that poppy cultivation be prohibited; this led to increased insecurity, displacement, and uncertainties for farmers. At the same time, it appears that opium production has increased under Taliban rule.²⁶

In his Papaver somniferum series, artist Juan Fernando Herrán presents a Tríptico judicial, for which he appropriated a photograph from one of the most important newspapers in Bogota. The image in the center shows two peasants who have been caught by the police and are shown with what they have been arrested for. A table with a delicate tablecloth displays, stretching from side to side, a large bouquet of opium poppies. On one side of the table, almost imperceptibly, we can see two blades and two containers, “proof” that the two men are guilty even before their trial. On either side of the image, Herrán has added two “natural” capsules, composing a scene where the two capsules are two portraits in dialogue with the photograph. The artist conceives the scratching action on each of the capsules as the inscription of an “invitation”: a promise that is to come while at the same time is being cut off. The plant represents the place where certain impoverished communities can dream of a better future, but the dream is disrupted, and the invitation becomes a sign of deception, injustice, and displacement for those communities.

Displacement and Environmental Terror

The displacement of peasants and Indigenous people was accentuated in the 2000s during the war against the “cursed flower.” Entire populations had to flee due to police persecution and the structures of the drug industry. According to the UN Refugee Agency, Colombia is a country with more internal displacement at a global level that disproportionately affects ethnic minorities. For some scholars, displacement should be understood as a weapon of war, not an effect of war, a capitalist strategy of accumulation in which both the state and the insurgent groups empty land as a reason to expropriate, to appropriate both the territories and their resources. The reality is that in these politics of domination, the whole landscape was being transformed. Not only was violence being wrought on the human, but also on the plant and the other organisms that coexisted with the opium poppy. The aerial spraying reached every corner of the surface. Colombia’s Edenic scenes of an almost virginal landscape of the mountains began to change into a codified space where the machine with its noise and poison became an integral part of that new colonizing gaze.²⁷

Carlos Uribe’s (Medellín, Colombia, 1964) painting, Horizonte con glifosato (1999), makes direct reference to these political and environmental issues that informed a broad public and private debate about the increasingly notorious presence of drug money in Colombian society. The work is a purposeful appropriation of the 1913 painting by Antonio Cano (1865-1935), considered emblematic for regional visuality in Colombia. Cano’s painting shows a peasant family extending their hands in an act of promise in front of the immensity of a territory that shows historical references to a long tradition of occupation in a history of colonization in the Antioquian region. Cano’s work contains allusion to religion, patriarchy, and colonization of the territory. The painting has been described by scholars as the best example of a regional identity in Colombia because it shows elements of a region that has become one of the richest and more prosperous in the history of modern Colombia whose values are rooted in a particular conception of family, religion and industry. On the other hand, in Uribe’s work, in addition to making an artistic appropriation, he also makes a historical reference to a political and environmental situation that was happening once the airplanes spilled glyphosate not only on poppy plantations but also in rural communities.

Curiously, the pilots had to direct their gazes to the beauty of the opium poppy flower. Wherever they saw red, they had to spray. The plant becomes a sign of its own precariousness and a threat to the vegetation that covers or hides it. Different reports from both the state and environmental organizations warned of the consequences of aerial spraying for both humans and the environment. Artist Maria Elvira Escallon (1954) displays the encounter between landscape and herbicide. For twenty-six days she took pictures to show the slow and damaging effect of the glyphosate. Her artwork reveals how the opium poppy is entwined with the small and the large. Uribe’s and Escallón’s artwork question the poppy relationship to an idea of life and of death, with the intimate, the public, and the private. The opium poppy becomes an allegory and accumulation of that which is criminal and immoral. Even today we cannot consider the history of Colombia without understanding the agency of the opium poppy, and its relationship with the environment, the animals, and the human.

References