From the article: the first deliberate cultivation of the poppy, as opposed to its casual collection, seems to have happened in Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago

From the article: the first deliberate cultivation of the poppy, as opposed to its casual collection, seems to have happened in Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago, organized by the local Sumerians, who called their crop hul gil, which translates as “the joy plant”. At the risk of being pedantic, I wrote an entire post about how this is completely wrong, tracing the origins of the error back to a confused Victorian writer: https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2018/08/opium-or-cucumber-debunking-myth-about.html https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2018/08/opium-or-cucumber-de...