The English physician Thomas Sydenham once made the statement that;

“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.”

 Sydenham lived during the mid 1600s, as we can see from his quote that the pain that was alleviated by the medicinal use of Opium was also recognized by physicians at the time of the enslavement as well.

 
The opium progression throughout Europe in essence took thousands of years to enslave entire generations of various societies either by the manufacture of the opium or its enslavement to the drug or a derivative of it. All the while, the powerful classes of the various societies grew to unknown wealth by that enslavement process. Please keep these couple of thoughts in your mind as I continue civilwarblogger.com’s look at the Opium Road.

The use of opium is still a major source of control in the world yet today. Individuals die everyday from the use of heroin, morphine, and opiate use.

“One might say, whomever controls opium, controls.”
Unknown Quote from an article by RA Kris Millegan©2000, The Boodle Boys;

That statement not cited as to the author, was so right on target I had to include it in this commentary.

As in the days of the East India Company, the Silk Road brought many fine oddities and curiosities to various ports of call throughout the world.

During the days of the Revolutionary War many of the concoctions that average folk and the hierarchy used as remedies for everything from a boil on your butt to baby’s teething had at least an opium base along with a variety of herbs for whatever may ail ya. Folk medicine was very many times all the doctoring available on the frontier. So whatever could have been brought from civilization was used until it was all used and then make do as one may make do was the next step.