Why Is Smoking Toxic? (The Migrating Opium Poppies)
Performance-lecture at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy
In Cantonese slang, consuming opium or heroin is described as "chasing the dragon." The smoke rising from the pipe becomes a dragon-like being, slowly wafting into the air. The vaporized residue from plant latex animates after the exhalation of humans, ensuring its own survival.
The drug, opium, shares the same name as the opium poppy, a plant native to the Mediterranean. All parts of the plant contain alkaloids, including morphine and codeine, with the highest concentration found in the capsules. Collected and dried from unripe capsules, the milky latex, opium, was first used as a hypnotic and pain-relieving agent because of its narcotic properties.
Among opium's uses in folk medicine in the ancient Mediterranean, it was the crucial ingredient of a widely circulated remedy: Theriac. According to legend, the remedy originated with Mithridates, ruler of ancient Pontus—a kingdom on the shores of the Black Sea (now part of Turkey)—who, fearing being killed by poison, invented antidotes he could take daily. Through multiple improved formulations over centuries, Theriac began as a reputed antidote for poison and later evolved into a treatment and preventive for hundreds of diseases. Its most effective ingredients of all were viper’s flesh and opium.
The term Theriac comes from the ancient Greek for a wild or venomous animal. The second-century BC Greek poet Nicander wrote two works, Theriaca and Alexipharmaca, catalogues of poisons and their antidotes, describing the nature of venomous creatures and ways of detoxification. Through the Silk Road, the trade routes connecting Asia and Southern Europe, Theriac became a famed medicine across empires, spread globally by missionaries and merchants. During its circulation, the Chinese name 底野伽—a transliteration of Theriac first found in Chinese medical books in the seventh century, recorded as a gift to the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty from the Byzantine Empire.
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Yet the same soothing effect would later be reinterpreted through its material history: venomous images, manipulated by those who produced, distributed, and profited from the substance, reframing opium as a moral threat and racial allegation. The medical and magical qualities of opium were gradually disenchanted.
The Indonesian writer Soetan Machoedoem wrote in his anti-opium book: "Initially we ate opium, later opium ate us." Does opium claim its own agency by eating, or is there a false animacy attached to opium—the sinister man-eating creature perceived by those who were once its consumers?
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Images of opium dens—dark, filthy, marked with degeneracy—were sometimes perceived as miniatures of Chinatowns: the racialized enclaves and sites of moral contagion.
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The drug's allure, steeped in with a century-long exotic image of the semi-colonies, had been circulating around the globe. The first Asian Hollywood film star, Anna May Wong, was made to inhabit the typecast roles assigned to Asian women at that time: the mysterious, wicked seductress, entangled with opium smugglers or swallowing opium to commit suicide, in scenes often set in a delusion of Eastern colonies or Chinatowns.
"Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a villain—murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass!" Anna May Wong's remark on early Hollywood cinema returns to the detrimental images of venomous creatures. Snakes and opium poppies become toxic incarnations, the poison that migrated across centuries, shapeshifting into certain human bodies.
The plant and its residues, permeate the threshold from toxicity to intoxication, narrating a history of intimacies that has been lost in the fantasization and stigmatization of their unstable materiality. There is no dependable center that can be held. If we swallow, digest, and breathe, can we share the particles that imbue histories within them, and see through the senses of the smoke?
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