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Benjamin Robert Siegel, "Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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Network
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hello and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I'm Tom Zoica and today I have the pleasure of being joined by Benjamin Siegel to discuss his new book, Markets of Pain, Opium, Capitalism and the Global History of Painkillers, published just last month with Oxford University Press. Ben is a writer and historian, currently an associate professor of history at Boston University, and is broadly interested in the commodity chains that have shaped modern life. His first book, Hungry Food, Famine and the Making of Modern India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, traces how food lay at the heart of India's postcolonial nation building project. His writing has appeared in such illustrious publications as Vice and Public Books, and he has presented his impressive research across the us, Canada, uk, Pakistan, China, Germany, Switzerland, and India. Quite the globetrotter. So Ben, how are you today?
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B
Doing well, thanks Tom. Thanks for having me.
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C
Of course. It's a pleasure to have you to discuss this marvelous addition to a growing field of books about drugs and lovely to see it out at last. I think we've known each other for about as long as you've been working on this project.
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B
I think that timeline is about right.
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C
Perhaps we could get started with you discussing how you came to this project and maybe situating it within this broader scholarship. There's certainly been no shortage of books dealing with opium and opioids. I'm thinking of something like Ben Breen's fantastic Age of intoxication from 2019, and more recently something like Patrick Raden Keefe's Empire of Pain.
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B
Yeah, thanks for that. Those are both great books. And I hope that this book is going to be in conversation with some of those because those are two things that I've enjoyed in really different ways. So, as you know, this has been about 10 years in the making, during which I did a lot of work here in the uk, in India and in Turkey, a few other places. And I started writing this book, or really thinking about this book in call it, around 2015 or 2016. And I think that's the moment when the United States opioid crisis was not new, but coming into public consciousness in new ways. People, people were coalescing around a number of narratives around the opioid crisis, about American deindustrialization, about rurality, about the state of cities and rural places. And to me, reading this as a historian rooted in India, but thinking about global commodities, thinking about agriculture, so much of this felt parochial to me. There were places, there were Connecticut boardrooms, there were Appalachian towns, there were American cities. And I had in the back my head the notion that India had of course, been the world's largest producer of opium gum, largely sent to China. And I wondered to what degree that had continued, how those industries connected with the present moment. Even knowing at that point in time a little bit about the complexity of opioids as a category of drugs. I would learn a lot more over the next 10 years. So I started this project thinking about how can I tell a story of opioids that didn't start from a prescription package or from the story of the Sackler family, but instead from a producer's field where I knew so much of the 19th century histories had started and the story started to sprawl. I really thought this was gonna be, and this is a bit of warning to anyone who attempts to write a history like this. It will take longer than you think. I started out thinking this would be a book about India and the United States. And pretty soon it became apparent to me that this was a book that would connect India, Turkey, the kind of old trails that led opium from places like Patna or Smyrna and stretch into Europe and the United States following the birth of modern pharmaceuticals, and link us to places like Tasmania, where most non synthetic opioids are now grown today. That starts around 1996. I wanted to put the crisis that we're seeing in perspective and to frame it as the tale of a older infrastructure and to ask how that infrastructure still operates in the world. And I think we'll talk about this later. But opium is just irresistible as a historian, and I think that's why you get so many different generations of people taking stabs at it. It's a substance that can cure, that can kill. It sits between agriculture and medicine, and it links empire and statecraft and science together in a way that many commodities do. But I think it does really profoundly. There are so many excellent approaches to thinking about drugs or intoxicating substances. You named Benjamin Breen's great work on the origins of some of these substances in an earlier period. I think immediately of people, of course, David Courtright, who's written on the earlier waves of the opioid crisis. People like Paul Gutenberg, who, working on cocaine, has traced networks of science and consumption and production globally. My colleague Stefan Rimner and Diana Kim, who've offered really revisionist accounts of the opium and opioid trade. People like David Hertzberg and Caroline Acker, who think about consumption and marketing, particularly in the American context. And this is kind of just the tip of the iceberg here. The field is really too large, as you know, to summarize. But my sense was that so much of this work, with a couple of exceptions, and I think David Herzberg, who I just mentioned, is one of them, so much of that work focused on illicit markets, on prohibition, it kind of follows the diplomats and the lawmakers, the statecraft that led to prohibition. And this book really does something, I think, new in that or newish in that it brings the licit trade, which has been in the shadow of the black market for so long, and it puts it in the center of the story. That division is really hard. And this is like making the trail while you walk it. But I try to differentiate that as much as possible and to kind of pull on those threads coherently in the story. And I don't need to make a case to you for why intoxicants are really revealing to a historian. They tie the body to the state. They tie the field to the laboratory, the household, to the world of diplomacy. They kind of bring. They reorder bodies and landscapes and political authority just completely. And you can take. Every substance has its own thread. Of course, alcohol is a main one that we could think about along historiography. But cannabis, ketamine, Ozempic is something that I've been thinking about a lot as kind of how we're viewing the substance. All of this gives us an opportunity to look at how every era arbitrates between vice and medicine and commerce. I think methodologically doing drug history on a global scale, as some of those other historians have mentioned, or I think their work implies, it really makes you do multi archival and multilingual work if you want to follow a substance through its many kind of avatars or disguises in different contexts here. I also think it's a way of doing global history that feels intimate. You can move from a peasant scoring an opium poppy, this very physical act, to a State Department cable in just a couple of lines. And I think that's really fun and generative as a historian to write.
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C
Thank you for that. And I want to get back to that thread on the utility of studying intoxicating substances in a moment. But first I just want to say what I really enjoyed about your book, which is ostensibly, I think, a history of industry and capitalism, is that we really never lose the human element among all these sort of state or imperial level actors. I think you're really able to successfully make what, in the hands of a less deft scholar, could be a run of the mill, dry kind of economic history into a lucid, interesting and engaging story. And you really hooked me at the start with your little bait and switch moment about the Indian politician deploying what very much could have been an appeal from the 1880s, only to reveal that these conversations are happening a century later in 1981. And I'm curious, thinking about that human element, if there's a particular anecdote or actor you feel is representative of the story you're trying to tell, or if you're particularly perhaps enamored is the wrong word, but have lingering intrigue with any of these figures.
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B
Oh, well, first of all, I'm sorry for the bait and switch, but I am glad that it worked to bring you in. And that politician in the 1980s is a really interesting one, making politics out of a substance that really belongs in the 19th century, but has a very, very long t tale or half life or hangover, depending on how you want to think about it. People are central to this story, and I'm glad that it came through. I wanted to tell this in a way that was not about shipments and kind of the bloodless world of law or diplomacy, but to put many of the people who touched opium, who found that opium touched them, or opioids touched them in the center. For me, the most important and generative in those stories tend to be farmers and politicians in part because they have so much invest sorry farmers, politicians and scientists who are all kind of working with this substance in different ways in part because they have so much invested in the life worlds of this crop. I think a lot shortly after the politician opens the book, I think a lot about the peasant cultivators who are mentioned shortly thereafter. Puneet Singh, Imre Singh and Telangi, who only has a single name. These are folks who are asked to kind of describe to the Royal Commission on Opium which is held by the British in 1892, 3 and 94 to decide what the future of the industry looks like. It's self serving. Many most British actors want to continue it. Global sentiment is turning and they call forth these three witnesses and ask them what opium cultivation means to them. And they describe just this complex social and cultural world of opium production. It's the medicine that soothes everything from the aches of bodily labor to pregnancy. They give it to children, they give it to the elderly. Use it in ways that I think we would find, or I certainly found kind of, kind of off kilter for my understanding of him now. But they describe making choices, but choices that are constrained. And I think there's so much of that kind of agricultural history questions of choice around a substance that's really potent. I thought a lot about Commissioner Nagarwala who is the Indian bureaucrat who really travels the world. He's often in the United States, but he goes to Europe frequently. He's in the Soviet Union, he's in Japan, he travels the world kind of pitching. He's doing basically a slide deck to global pharmaceutical production to figure out what this new state can offer the world for the foreign currency it needs. I think a lot about the Anatolian women who were conscripted into producing chicory dusted opium cakes. I think about the palliative care doctor, Mr. Rajgopal, who in South India really lamented the lack of painkillers in India. All of these people I want to put front and center in part because so much of the popular literature that we read on the opioid crisis has I think appropriately focused on the American users and their kind of tragic outcomes that we're more familiar with. But I wanted to convey both how that translates on a global scale, but the very different kind of polyvalent approaches that these actors had to a complicated substance and what it meant to them. Great.
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C
Well, I mean something I also think about this book doing well is bringing these kind of underexplored elements in broader histories of consumer culture. Right. Really complicating some of those narratives. I'm thinking a lot of something like Jennifer Regan Lefebvre's Imperial Wine, which argues that the global wine industry today is very much the product of settler colonialism. And so what I think you're doing in this book is playing with scale in a really fun way. We can't untangle the global from the local, and you make that case very clearly.
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B
That's a book I think, that you recommended to me, Imperial Wine. So I'm really glad that you're making connections. I think there's so much that we can do as writers and his historians thinking about consumption, the productive elements of production that structure our consumption. And we can take those in many different directions. There's a lot that has been done on opium, opioids and heroin from consumer culture in the United States. So I think about a lot of the work that Americanists have done on laudanum, Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup, all the patent medicines that made use of. Of these substances, and the different ways that's inscripted into projects of race and class and gender in the States, or the very attractive kind of elements of visual culture that companies like New York Quinine produce for a 19th century audience. But I love it. And the kind of imprecations of grapes are really important here. I was thinking a little bit when you said that about Heidi Tinsman. Heidi Tinsman's really fantastic work buying into the regime on the American demand for grapes that were boycott safe in California in the 1970s and 1980s. I think mostly 1980s, and how that reorganized gendered labor in Chile in the same period. There are so many of these threads that we can pull on. I think Latin America has been really generative in thinking about consumption and production as a push and pull. John Sallouri's work on bananas is another one that comes to mind. There's great work on silver. So much of our histories of capitalism are kind of written in the shadow of work on call It Cotton and its fellow travelers. And that's great. And we've really benefited from that work. And there are so many products, particularly agricultural products, that we can, we can, we can pull on and we can follow that I think are productive for us to think about in tandem.
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C
Now, one thing you've, you've begun to touch on and one thing that I've been grappling with, particularly as I'm redeveloping an undergraduate history course on the history of intoxication, is the utility of studying intoxicating. Substances. I think what I tell people I'm teaching this class or that I studied social life, you know, there's this kind of bemused reaction perhaps from some administrators or members of the general public. But I think what your book really shows is that these intoxicating substances are in fact so important to our understanding of networks of imperial influence, the development of capitalism and consumer culture, diplomacy, medicine, what have you. And can you speak to this a little bit more? Can you offer us an apology for why we should be thinking more about intoxicating substances historically?
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B
Well, I think the, you know, the classic, I mean the classic moment when an undergraduate student encounters intoxicating substances for the first time is usually when they think about the rise of the French coffee house and the transition away from low alcohol beer and other downers to uppers represented in the form of coffee and caffeine. And when I teach that, I presume when you teach that too, you take a student who's studying the Enlightenment, the flourishing of. The kind of flourishing of thought in a new way, the kind of great revolutionary moment, the stimulants, that power, that transformation as everyone goes from being a little bit slosh to a little bit buzzed or quite a bit buzzed, depending on whether their modes of pract preparation. It takes them back very quickly to Yemen, to the Indian Ocean world that brought a bush eaten by a goat from Ethiopia and the Ottoman worlds that Europeans then encountered. It just really refracts those networks inherently. Even before you get to the question of how do people experience history, the world they are in, the politics that they are in, through these kind of mediated or altered lenses. And you have so many different doors that you can knock on when you start putting that question out there, whether that takes you in the direction of thinking about the various psychedelic revolutions of the 20th century or the kind of birth of pharmaceuticals and the remaking of the body and subject to it through Rhineland capitalism. So it's a really nice through line. And what I found in working on this project is that nearly everyone wants to talk about it. It's like food and drugs seem to be the two subjects that really light people up. And whether they feel great, whatever their kind of emotional or affect is, they tend to be quite excited about it. So I suspect your students like mine, will help you overcome any administrative skepticism.
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C
I get a lot of. I didn't realize history could be this, which is always so hard. Yep. Now, at the heart of this book really are these two divergent roads for what happens with licit opium in two places. In India and in Turkey. And can you perhaps briefly speak to why those roads diverge and how that variance has impacted both India and Turkey and perhaps the broader kind of global landscape of opium consumption?
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B
Sure. So I'll just lead off by saying that I had a title. So this project was called Markets of Pain for a long time. And towards the end of this project, I decided that this book was going to be called the Ghost Ship. And my editor, Susan Ferber, decided that that wasn't a great title, and we stuck with Markets of Pain in the end. By the way, this is an aside, but I would love to do. I don't know if it's not a podcast, it's something else, but I'd love to have a project and all the great books that we know and the names that they could have had up until the very last minute. So the book I was thinking of as the Ghost Ship, and in my mind it sometimes still is, because these are commodities that in both places, India and Turkey are still produced, but for markets that are artificial, contorted, really have no kind of end product. They remind me a little bit, and this is closer to home for you, of the tobacco that's grown in Connecticut. These are. These are vestigial industries that have some use, but they are fractions of what they used to be. So throughout the middle of the 20th century, both Turkey and the United States were selling their opium and opium alkaloids, sometimes as gum and then later on as straw. You can use both. Straw is a slightly more sophisticated way of doing it. They were both selling to the United States and to many global buyers. Turkey really failed in many ways to convince global purchasers, particularly in the United States, but also European buyers, that they were a reliable source of licit opium that would not leak to the black market. In part, that was because there were significant and important global black market networks that started in Anatolia, so much so that the movie the French Connection was made from that. And there was the real French Connection, which linked Anatolian opium to New York City via the port of Marseilles. So Turkey failed in many ways, and it became really the object of American ear in a way that no other country was. It was Afghanistan, Avant Lelettre, a kind of country that was seen as suspect. So in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon, as really the first salvo in his global war on drugs, brought Turkish opium or poppy cultivation to heel by using diplomatic carrots and sticks to end production there. Didn't last long. It was kind of the productive site of a lot of Turkish politics. So the ban really only lasted two years. But Turkish opium never quite recovered in the same way. And it really became a kind of vestigial industry in part. Turkey's economic prospects, though kind of, they came in staccato ways, grew in ways that made opium production less interesting, less valuable. But opium production is really kind of limited in the Turkish context. India managed for quite a bit longer, even while formerly being quite a bit more distant from the United States under its policy of non alignment. It was not a Cold War ally. It was able to use opium and its statements that it had a well managed leak proof opium production system to buy quite a bit of goodwill from Americans, from American politicians, American diplomats. As a result, India was able to produce opium for quite a bit longer and it had a captive market. So much so that in the 1980s when the United States passed its 8020 rule, which said that 80% of the opium that it purchased had to come from either India or Turkey, they really were talking mostly about India. It was a bit of a gift to India. So as a result, there was a really large domestic constituency in India for growing opm, both for the licit market, but also I think, and I say this somewhat hesitantly because it was very easy to allow a certain amount of black market sales which really greased political wheels in India. That same dynamic exists today. It exists when I was in India, kind of seeing the easy temptations of the black market, though everyone that I spent time with assured me, and I believe them, that they were not selling to that market. But it meant that in India it had a much longer half life. Again, in both contexts, these are agricultural commodities that I think are really kind of behind the times. There is really almost no reason that these commodities should be grown or these crops should be grown in these places, other than either as a political gift or in a world where every country was committed to a little bit of strategic onshoring, where each country would produce painkilling medicines for its own consumption. That is a different model that exists and still could happen and might in a moment of closing borders.
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C
Well, you mentioned the United States and this is kind of a nice segue, but one fascinating element that you talk about is the United States attempts, even in its very early days to more recently as, as attempting at growing its own opium poppies. And can you talk a little bit about why this doesn't take off and is there still a potential future?
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B
Right.
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C
I think you mentioned that new Mexican company, Bright Green in the conclusion, which is doing some of that work. Do you see this taking off or have synthetic opioids kind of disrupted the need or the utility for something like this.
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B
This is such an interesting question. So to answer the first part first, the early American physicians, chemists grew opium all the time. The 18th century model was that you can grow poppy anywhere. You can grow an opium poppy in your backyard. In my backyard, most, except for the most extreme climates in the United States, you could grow it basically anywhere, productively. It's a resilient plant, and there are different varieties. It doesn't need to be papavera somniferum. It can be a number of cousins that also produce alkaloids in different proportions. So you can grow it anywhere. Americans did in Boston, they did it in New Haven, they did it in New York, they did it in Philadelphia. You'd have physicians growing in their backyards or chemists growing in their backyards. This faded out with the regular. With the rise of what was called the Smyrna trade. So American clippers brought opium from the port of Smyrna, today's Izmir, and in Turkey, and they would bring it to the rising early pharmaceutical, not even industry, but pharmaceutical markets in the United States. And that was the font of most American painkilling medicine, which is to say most of American medicine, because it was really one of the few effective substances. They had the biggest proposal, and there are many that you read in the book, but the biggest proposal came in the 1860s with kind of enterprising Swiss emigres proposal to grow essentially put together an opium plantation. He fronted this idea in Arizona. He said it could also be essentially near Palm Springs. He had an idea that we'd be growing opium at home. This wasn't really a great. This wasn't really an idea about medicine. This was all about the balance of trade with China. He was trying to solve an economic problem. And already there you see the kind of complex projects that opium has been drawn into. But this was the idea. You could produce your own medicine at home. The United States kept on trying this. They tried this during the Second World War. In the 1970s, there was a massive project to grow a cousin called practitum of our regular opium poppy in the United States. And each time it's just been seen as at odds with the geopolitics of opium, even though in almost all cases I really think it would have been the easier solution. There has always been a fantasy that we will the poppy. And in a moment of bioengineering and kind of new, New. New breeding capacities, or rather New synthesizing capacities. Maybe that will be true, but what chemists and pharmacologists have found since the 1930s is that new fully synthetic opioids, so things like fentanyl or carfentanil and there are many others, have their uses in hospital settings, but are often too potent to use in the way that we use things like morphine or codeine. So I suspect we are still quite a way off from the moment when we will no longer need a poppy. You mentioned the one New Mexico company that is trying to do this, and they may well succeed. The amount of poppies needed to produce our annual painkilling needs is not that high. It seems plausible that a number of companies could do this. It's a tricky political project, and I am not 100% sure that it will take off, but it's certainly within our technological or agricultural capacity to do.
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C
You talked about this a little bit earlier, but your book really focuses mostly on the growing sale and legislation of this list in opioid trade. But one area that felt a little bit underexplored, rather, was consumption. And it sounds like that was a very deliberate choice on your part.
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B
Yeah, I mean, consumption again, part of that is because there is so much good and interesting work on consumption. Consumption that's looked at opioids through race. That's something that's been central since Americans really first encountered injectable opioids in the wake of the Civil War. That's our first opioid crisis. There's a lot of great work on consumption in cities from really the 1930s to the 1950s. These are really interesting stories to tell, and they connect more directly with some of our policy questions, which this book is decidedly not a contribution to. But I would hope it would be helpful to someone working in public health to kind of understand our context here. But the consumption story is pretty well trodden terrain, and I think there are many. I can think of several Americanists who are working on projects like that right now who I encountered over the last 10 years. And I think we're about to see a lot of great work on consumption coming out next.
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C
For opioids.
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B
For opioids. I think we're in a really complex moment. So one of the through lines, and I think this would be true in many of our histories of intoxicating substances as they connect with our histories of capitalism. One through line in this book, which really connects the late 19th century century to the third decade of the 21st, is the kind of intractable, large and sprawling nature of Opioids. And I think that we've been very close in our popular accounts of opioids to kind of almost writing an end to the opioid crisis. Just we're recording this on the first week of May, and just last week, week was broken up. That's been a long time coming. It's been turned into a public benefits corporation. It's had its assets diverted to treatment, to naloxone, to basically staunching the crisis that it helped created. And I think we're at a moment where we're almost ready. We're kind of sick of it. It feels very distant. After Covid, we've seen overdose deaths in the United States coming down, which is a great development. Although some of that has to do with a kind of wave of fatality and kind of what we're seeing afterwards. I think we're at a really complicated moment. Opioids. There is very little heroin made from poppies left in the United States. I don't think anyone laments the loss of heroin, but it was in some ways a less lethal substance than the fentanyl that we see. The now or car fence. And all opioids, synthetic opioids, can be produced. They are produced in Mexico from Chinese precursors. They can and probably are being produced here. There's a global landscape of opioids. There's no longer the kind of easy kind of large figures like the 19th century opium magnates who built all these great buildings in Boston or the Sackler families of the world. This is going to be a much harder moment. And I don't have great confidence that anyone is in a good position to think about what's coming next. If I had any kind of prescription for this moment, it would be that so many of the people who are working, as always on treatment get the resources they need to think about that. Because I think we're going to have something coming down the pike, and we already are in that moment that is just much more complex than any of the moments that this book has chronicled in. And as you know, they are plenty complicated.
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C
Well, Ben, I want to thank you again for joining me to discuss this dazzling new book, Markets of Pain, Opium, Capitalism and the Global History of Painkillers, published by Oxford University Press, available now. We're fine and less fine, presumably, books are sold. But before we end, I just want to end by asking what's next as a teaser of what you're working on now.
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B
Sure. I am writing a book that is a. It's a mix of history and reporting on our protein craze, which sounds like it's not connected. But what I'm actually doing, as I do in all my work, is I follow the kind of agricultural systems that are brought into our politics and our economic life. And opium, of course, maybe is the big one. But I'm looking at our moment where we are eating so much protein and we are finding protein in different places. And I'm looking at the plants and animals that are conjured up and are brought together from around the world to give us a protein abundance that 50 or 60 years ago, most planners, most nutritionists, most ecologists thought would be impossible. That book is called the Price of Protein and you should be able to read it if I get all this global reporting and writing done sometime in early 2028.
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C
And I can corroborate. I was recently out with someone who expressed that he had given up eating fruits and vegetables in favor of his solely protein diet. But we can talk about that another time. Ben, thank you, as always, a pleasure. And please read this book. It's wonderful.
- [35:31]
B
Thanks Tom. Great being here. Sam.