The story of today’s prescription opioid overdose crisis didn’t start this year, or 10 years ago, or even 100 years ago. It starts with a plant-the opium poppy-that has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years.
Papaver somniforum-literally, ‘sleep-bringing poppy’-is the scientific name for the type of poppy that produces opium, which humanity has relied on since before history was even a concept. Along with wheat, the opium poppy is one of the world’s oldest cultivated plants, with some estimates suggesting that humans have been growing it for 10,000 years or more. It’s been cultivated so widely we don’t even know where it originates. Some think it’s indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean or the Swiss Alps, but frankly nobody really knows. What’s clear, though, is that the relationship between humans and this strange and hardy plant (it can grow basically anywhere) goes beyond curiosity and into the realm of symbiosis.
There’s a line from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: “Nature is Satan’s church,” and perhaps there’s no better example of the curious and uncanny relationships that form across species and time than the one between humans and the poppy. Opioids, the chemicals produced by papaver somniforum, somehow fit perfectly into the human body’s opioid receptors, which are scattered throughout the brain, spinal cord, and digestive system, and this precise fit makes them exceptionally effective at suppressing pain. The geometry is so exact that some experts theorize that the opium plant and our neural architecture is the result of symbiotic co-evolution (some even think opium poppies shaped the development of human consciousness). The mystical pain-dampening plant on the one hand, the upright ape on the other.