This article traces the twentieth-century ‘afterlife’ of Indian opium, following the global trajectories of the commodity beyond the decades of prohibition, when its international trade was broadly viewed as being in terminal decline. The article demonstrates how opium from Malwa, Bengal and Bihar was brought into the ambit of Western pharmaceuticals during the two World Wars. In spite of the scepticism of temperance-minded nationalists, it foregrounds the crop’s regular integration into these commodity chains in the early decades of Indian independence and its ascent as the key raw material in the USA’s expanding painkiller market. Yet this putative success, this article suggests, was temporary, and Indian opium would fuel a burgeoning domestic narcotics crisis, before being felled, again, by pharmacological, botanical and geopolitical transformations at the century’s end. In offering a history of Indian opium which stretches beyond the traditional ending point offered by prohibition, this article locates opium within a broader connective history of Indian commodities, demonstrating how one particularly electric commodity was integrated within a widening purview of Western economic power, and American pharmaceutical hegemony in particular.

本文追溯了二十世纪印度鸦片的“来世”，跟随了数十年来禁令之后该商品的全球发展轨迹，当时该国的国际贸易被普遍视为处于绝境。这篇文章展示了两次世界大战期间如何将来自Malwa，Bengal和Bihar的鸦片带入西方制药的领域。尽管对节制思想的民族主义者持怀疑态度，但它展望了该作物在印度独立初期的几十年中已定期融入这些商品链中，并逐渐成为美国不断壮大的止痛药市场的关键原料。不过，本文认为，这种推定的成功只是暂时的，印度的鸦片将助长国内麻醉品危机的迅速发展，然后再被药理学，在本世纪末发生了植物和地缘政治变革。在介绍印度鸦片的历史并超越禁令所提供的传统终点时，本文将鸦片置于印度商品更广泛的联系历史中，论证了如何将一种特别的电商品纳入西方经济强国和美国的广泛视域中特别是医药霸权。