Introduction:

The Southeast Asia Opium Survey 2023 was made available today by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

According to the data, Myanmar is the country that produces the most number of opium in the world.

opium

In addition, between the years 2022 and 2023, Myanmar had a sixteen percent increase in output as well as an eighteen percent increase in the amount of land that was utilized to cultivate the illegal crop, which amounted to one lakh sixteen thousand acres.

The expansion can be ascribed to a number of different variables, including the utilization of irrigation and fertilisers, as well as the improvement in plot density.

In the past, Afghanistan was the country that held the infamous label; however, ever since the Taliban came to power in 2021, the cultivation of opium poppies has decreased by five hundred and fifty percent.

A number of factors, including poverty, a dearth of government services, hard macroeconomic situations, instability, and insecurity, are all mentioned in the research as being intimately connected to opium production in Southeast Asia.

So what is opium?

• Opium is a depressant, which means it makes it take longer for information to get from your brain to your body. It comes from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) and was one of the first plants known to be used for medicine.
• Sumerians were known to have grown opium as early as 3400 BCE, but some researchers think that people used opium before the Sumerians did.
• The opium poppy pods contain a milky substance called latex that has many drugs in it, such as morphine and codeine. Poppy is made by taking latex from poppy pods and drying it. Most of the time, it is improved by cooking and drying it again.