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6 The Opioid Crisis Opium is also produced for legal purposes, primarily in the medical fi eld. Th is opium is produced under tightly controlled licenses issued by the United States and other governmental agencies. Currently, most legal opium is produced in Turkey, India, Tasmania, France, Japan, and Great Britain. Th e illegal opium economy is a much diff erent story, with Afghanistan the world’s leading producer of the substance. An estimated 3,300 tons of oven-dry opium was produced in that country in 2015 (the most recent year for which data are available), about 70 percent of all illegal opium produced worldwide in that year. Other major producers were Myanmar (647 tons), Mexico (475 tons), and Laos (92 tons in 2014) (“World Drug Report 2016” 2016, Annex, ix–x). By comparison, the total amount of legal opium produced in 2015 was about 661 tons, of which the largest quantities came from France (204 tons), Turkey (113 tons), and Australia (112 tons) (“Supply of Opi- ate Raw Materials and Demand for Opiates for Medical and Scientifi c Purposes” 2015, Table 2, 103). The History of Opium to 1800 Th e origins of opium use in human civilizations have been the subject of extensive research by archaeologists, ethnobota- nists, historians of drug use, and other academics interested in the topic. One of the earliest dates mentioned by some authorities is about 30,000 years ago, based on the discovery of fossilized poppy seeds in Neanderthal settlements (see, e.g., “Origins and History of Opium” 1994). Even if this date is correct, there is no way of determining if these were accidental remains of a wild plant or whether they came from cultivated plants used for reasons that can probably never be determined by researchers. A more common attribution gives sometime in the sixth millennium for the period in which human societies were defi - nitely using opium plants. Th is claim is based on the discovery of fossilized opium seeds, made in the early 1990s by a team