More than £348 million worth of illegal drugs went up in thick smoke in major cities across Myanmar as part of a day of ...

Officials in Myanmar’s major cities destroyed about USD 300 million worth of confiscated illegal drugs on Thursday.The ...

Massive mountains of illegal drugs have been set alight in Myanmar as the country celebrates burning nearly $300million worth ...

Smoking opium wasn’t technically illegal at the time, so Curran and Neilson were charged with attempting to defraud the government out of tax revenue, according to the Bottineau Courant.

There were others, of course, notably Peng Yangou, whose Souls from the Land of Darkness (1909) exposed the generational legacy and trauma of addiction. Smoke and Ashes emerged from the research Ghosh ...

Japan, however, differed and thought that the elimination of opium smoking could be effected only by registration and rationing of all smokers. Then the question of opium import certificates was ...

And the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909 banned the importation, possession, and smoking of opium all together. This brief history shows some of the challenges to naming things. These instruments might be ...

In the final pages of Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, Amitav Ghosh volunteers a startling confession.

At Haw Par Villa, she went up to a sculpture sitting on a rock with a pipe and said: "I wanna know what this guy is smoking." "I think this guy is smoking opium," her cameraman said, laughing.

John Murray, $34.99 Amitav Ghosh (or perhaps his publishers) has given Smoke and Ashes two subtitles. In India, it came out in 2023 as “A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories”.

Nonetheless, Smoke and Ashes does present an astringent indictment of the “drug-pushing racket” and the “colonial narco-state” associated with that trade. Along the way, Ghosh finds room to advise the ...