Opium References in Popular Culture, the 2023 List

Posted: December 31st, 2023 | No Comments »

I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for quite a few years now (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 & 2012) about just how opium keeps on fascinating us.

So first off, some novels. Tom Bradby’s Yesterday’s Spy finds a link to opium smuggling in contemporary Tehran. There’s a lot of morphine and opium floating around 1930s Birmingham in Natalie Marlow’s great read, Needless Alley.

And some non-fiction…Gabrielle Paluch’s The Opium Queen, the true story of the widely mythologized genderqueer Burmese opium-pioneer of noble Chinese descent, Olive Yang, who secretly ran an anti-communist rebel army supported by the CIA in the 1950s heyday of the Golden Triangle. Following his Ibis trilogy on the Canton opium trade Amitav Ghosh published Smoke and Ashes (out in February 2024 in the UK) subtitled A Writers Jounrey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories.

On the bg screen Florence Pugh was on the laundanum to ease the pain of child loss, husband loss and nursing in the Crimean War in The Wonder, based on Emma Donahughe’s book. And, on the small screen, I’ve been catching up with the period crime series Miss Scarlet and the Duke where (in series 2, episode 2) young copper Oliver Fitzroy is dragged out of an East End opium den in Victorian London by his boss.

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