Bitter, brownish and sticky, opium - the sap of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum - has been cultivated from the earliest of times.

Oscillations in opium poppy production in Afghanistan have long been associated with how the state was perceived, such as after the Taliban imposed a cultivatio

Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford reba