Opium use in Turkmenistan: a historical perspective.

This paper presents a picture of how the patterns of opium use have changed in Turkmenistan over more than 100 years and the relationship between these transformations and formal and informal social controls of drug use. From the late 18th century, when opium use began to become a social problem, informal control weakened. Eventually, in the late 19th century, formal control was introduced, aimed at the prohibition of drug trade and use. From that time, the intended and unintended outcomes of implemented policies led to changes in the demographic patterns of users and the social-medical consequences of opiate use. The anti-drug policies, where criminal prohibition coexisted with strategies aimed at raising the population's general living standards and at providing free access to health care, were effective up to the early 1980s. New political and social-economic realities in the 1980-90s have radically changed the drug scene in the country, with heroin trade and use as the main concerns. The government's reaction, while following the old paths, has included new elements, based mainly on ideas of national consolidation.

The rules of drug taking: wine and poppy derivatives in the Ancient World. IX. Conclusions.

Evidence of a ritual use of poppies becomes more and more rare during the late Roman age, until only the medical usage of poppies seems to survive. In the meantime, a complete lack of evidence of a hedonic use of opium persists. As a whole, this study shows a remarkable continuity in the modalities of wine and poppy derivative use from the Ancient World to the present, particularly in that the hedonic use of psychoactive drugs remained restricted to alcoholic beverages. This observation challenges the opinion that drug-taking behavior is under the control of transient cultural contingencies. In addition, it imputes that the attribution of any documented prehistoric or historical nonmedical use of psychotropic drugs for the aim of experimenting with their pleasant effects is a stereotype.