The power of the poppy

America has for years been struggling with a shortage of the drugs it uses to execute people, yet it was only in August, in Nebraska, that the first judicial killing using opioids was performed. Aside from moral questions about the death penalty itself, the resistance for so long to this obvious solution denotes a particularly sadistic puritanism, as though it’s an unacceptable risk that even the last moments of a condemned man should be at all pleasant.

Opium and its derivatives and synthetic imitators constitute a miracle class of drug: nothing else is as good for pain relief, as Lucy Inglis’s bright and anecdote-packed history shows. Modern British and American soldiers, wounded on the battlefield, are given fentanyl lollipops, so that if they lose consciousness the lollipops drop out of their mouths and they avoid overdose. And the use of opium to treat the wounded in war goes back as long as human cultivation of the opium poppy, which dates from Neolithic times.