How to Make a Hero

et’s start with opium. That venerable poppy grew wild and natural after the retreat of the last Ice Age, across a broad band of territory stretching from Asia Minor to the Mediterranean to North Africa. We know from the archaeological record that New Stone Age farmers were interested in it. A carefully curated stash of seeds, about 7,000 years old, was discovered near the Mediterranean Sea; seventeen other New Stone Age sites throughout what we now call Europe show evidence of opium use 5 or 6,000 years ago; and the first deliberate cultivation of the poppy, as opposed to its casual collection, seems to have happened in Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago, organized by the local Sumerians, who called their crop hul gil, which translates as “the joy plant”.