We walked a long, darkened hall with just a hint of red and purple hues in the air. The light reflected the bumpy, rock-like walls that had embedded within fossil-like skeletons and skulls with expression of scream and terror.
This museum started off like a haunted house, and that’s evidently the first impression they want visitors to have.
Well, not quite the first.
From the outside, the Hall of Opium looks like a friendly, modern structure welcoming you to enter and learn about the regional culture.
But once you entered to that first freaky hallway, it was clear that the culture shaped by a plant has ultimately been a dark and deadly one.
***
Opium is indeed a flower, a flower with a pronounced bulb resting at its top within which is the sap used to derive heroin, morphine, and other opiates.
I thought it strange when it was announced we’d go to a museum devoted to a drug, but this opium has done a lot more than just get people high.
It became the basis of an economy:
The impetus for war:
The basis of an entire culture:
And a thread through the history of East/West relations:
After the hellish opening corridor, we got to the museum you might expect, including the items pictured above.
There was also a botany room devoted to the plant itself, which included a fake, concrete opium flower bed in the corner with fake, plastic opium plants growing forth.
Out in fields not too far from where the museum stood–mainly in Burma–workers still harvest this crop. In Thailand (and Burma), cultivation of opium is illegal in the eyes of the international community–and probably the local governments, too. But things slide. There’s a lot of money from street drugs greasing the wheels.
150 years ago, opium was sliding freely all over Asia and beyond. Its effects of getting people relaxed–very relaxed and euphoric–became especially popular in China. Use of the drug formed its own culture, which shaped Chinese culture. Designer pipes and pillow industries rose to appeal to the serious user. Candy shops set up near the dens, because after getting high, the user craved sweets. It was ritual to go to an opium den after a day’s work. A quarter of the male Chinese population were opium users.
China had had enough and made the drug illegal.
England resisted the prohibition, though, because opium was then being imported from Britain-controlled India–thus the Opium Wars, both of which England won.
But eventually things hit home for the West when opium dens popped up in America and other nations. And in 1909, several nations gathered for an opium conference, and soon after, the drug was outlawed in many countries.
I walked away from the museum with two key points in mind:
- The human susceptibility to addiction: This is an odd activity for an organism to undertake–for one’s mind to permit and justify this slow suicide. It’s even stranger when you see how normal this self destruction can become when socially accepted.
- Despite all the problems caused by the War on Drugs, I better appreciated why it was waged, particularly when putting myself in place of Chinese leaders in the 1800s. If left with the choice to watch your people endure this ruin or prevent it with force, the choice seems obvious.
To the museum’s credit, it wasn’t just a palace of doom and gloom to try and scare people away from the horrors of drugs. There was much information simply laid out for people to decide for themselves the impact of policy. And in fact, they even had a generously-sized set of wall panels devoted to the War on Drugs debate, including proponents for ending drug prohibition entirely.
But the main message of the museum was the harm caused, and to show the universal toll opium has doled out, one of the final displays was a panel of global celebrities taken in by the lure of heroin, morphine, or other opium-derived drugs.
***
I was in Thailand documenting the trip of 37 eighth grade students from St. Paul, Minnesota. Throughout the museum, the students dutifully took notes of the history and reading the captions along the exhibits.
Some left with question–basic ones. On our drive back to our motel, one of the boys in my van asked me, “Brandon, why is opium bad?”
It was Kevin, 14, a curious young man in thick-frame glasses. I turned around and exhaled with the acknowledgement that this wasn’t going to be a short answer. But I was also eager to share with the six young men sitting behind me. I know that most of the talk they hear about drugs is likely to try to scare them away from it. I wanted to offer them a more honest view.
“Guys, opium isn’t necessarily bad,” I said. “It’s a substance that affects your body by slowing it down. And you feel relaxed and feel good. This is useful when someone is in pain. But some people use it just to get high.”
I paused and asked, “Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” said two or three of them.
“The problem is that it takes more and more of the drug to feel good. Like someone who needs to drink fours beers to get drunk instead of the two they used to need. Plus, like a hangover from alcohol, you start to feel sick after the opium wears off.
“So, you see there are two factors: you need more and more to feel high–tolerance. And when you don’t have it, you feel sick–dependence. Both cause you to want more, and people start taking too much. Opium slows you down. Sometimes people take enough to slow their heart to a stop and they die.
“Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” said the same two or three.
They didn’t offer any follow up questions. I hope the knowledge can be useful to them. I hope the Hall of Opium can serve to lessen opium abuse in the region and beyond.