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The plant doesn’t look or smell pretty anymore—it is a sticky, dark mess, with a toxic stench.
    When this mush is eaten or smoked, it unleashes its miraculous effect: pain abruptly disappears. The consumer may have a gaping hole in the side of his head, but suddenly all he can feel is numbness. The incredible speed with which it works has epic consequences. Opium is one of the most effective anesthetics known to man. It was even once sold in the United States under the label GOD’S OWN MEDICINE. But while curing agony, the mush also releases its infamous side effect: the consumer feels a sleepy euphoria.
    I ask Matilde to describe the effect of these flowers. What is the magical property they have? What is it that makes them so valuable? She looks at me blankly for a moment, then answers in a slow, thoughtful tone.
    “It is a medicine. And it cures pain. All pain. It cures the pain you have in your body and the pain in your heart. You feel like your body is mud. All mud. You feel like you could melt away and disappear. And it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You are happy. But you are not laughing. This is a medicine, you understand?”
    Such effects have inspired writers for three thousand years, from Homer to Edgar Allan Poe. They describe the opium buzz as feeling as if you were covered in cotton wool; being the happiest in your life; or feeling as if your head were a feather cushion that could burst open. Musicians croon about this blissful low in a hundred songs, looking for melancholy chords that conjure up glazed smiles in smoke-filled opium dens.
    The scientific secrets of opium were uncovered by two physicists in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1973. 5 When opium is eaten or smoked, the scientists found, it stimulates groups of molecules called receptors in the central nervous system—the brain and the spinal cord. The whole drug war mess starts with chemical reactions.
    Opium has an especially potent effect when it hits the brain’s thalamus—an inch-long, ovoid mass that registers pain. To put it simply, when we have a toothache, messages rush to the thalamus and we feel discomfort. Opium’s ingredients bond with receptors in the thalamus and make the pain messages it is receiving slow down to a crawl. Our tooth may still have a cavernous hole, but we only feel a dull twinge rather than seething agony. This same chemical bonding makes people feel euphoria. Their brains are slowed down, but this makes them overcome with bliss, in turn making them feel creative, philosophical, romantic.
    The other opiates, such as morphine, codeine, and the queen of them all, heroin, work the same way. In the Sinaloan mountains, gummers now turn almost all their opium into heroin, including Mexican mud, which is light brown in color, and black tar, which is … well, black and looks like tar.
    The chemistry that creates such “godly” effects also leads to the dreaded downside: addiction. The brain sends its own natural opiate-type signals to slow down pain. When people blast themselves with opium or heroin too regularly, these natural mechanisms stop functioning. Without their fix, people feel the notorious “cold turkey” withdrawal effects, such as diarrhea, depression, and paranoia. As a heroin addict I knew back in Britain said, “Imagine the worst flu and multiply it by ten. Then, know you can make it go away with one more hit.”
    Thousands of years before Sinaloan gummers made heroin, primitive humans had discovered opium’s power. Poppy-seed capsules show that hunter-gatherers in Europe scraped gum four millennia before the birth of Jesus Christ. Around 3,400 B.C. in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), the world’s first farmers drew images of opium poppies on clay tablets under the name Hul Gil or the “joy plant.” Two millennia later, ancient Egyptians wrote about our poppy in the Ebers Papyrus, one of humanity’s oldest medical documents, as a remedy to prevent the excessive crying of children. As European