If one opposes the War on Drugs - what should perhaps more properly be called Narcotics Prohibition - what to make of the infamous Opium War of 19th-century China?
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Narcotics had been marketed in the United States for a least a couple of hundred years before the Harrison act of 1914 began the government's busy-body dog-legging of the consumer drug traffic. Cigarettes were banned in some states because they encouraged debauchery and made men effeminate. Then alcohol was proscribed from 1920 to 1933 with the result that public drunkeness increased, not decreased. This was because drug dealers of the day - i.e. alcohol pushers - correctly reckoned that it was not in their best economic interest to risk prison time for the low profit margins incurred when selling low alcohol content beverages. Thus hard liquor quickly became the only form of hooch on tap. One simply couldn't buy beer or wine coolers. With only rotgut available, drunkeness quickly became almost de rigeur with drinkers. In fact, the two-fisted hard drinking culture (ex: the double martini lunch) which only began to die out in the late 1970s was sandbagged onto us by Prohibition. The present enlightened preference for drinking beer and wine coolers is actually a reversion to alcohol consumption in urban America prior to alcohol prohibition. As with so many alleged modernizations (women's lib, gay rights, etc), it's not that contemporary drinkers have heroically overcome the past to emerge more progressive and civilized, but that we've reverted to the earlier era of our great-grandfathers, to revive a more traditional and more civilized culture of drinking. To stride progressively into the future, we've taken a pleasant header into the past.
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Opium has been available in China since at least the fourth century A.D. There had been no moral collapse as result of opium's availability for 15 centuries. But then, in the late 18th century opium prohibition began to appear care of busy-body academics and emperors. This produced the corruption that appears whenever government gets into the monopoly business and bans everyone else but itself from selling something. Furthermore, paleface missionaries got into the bidness of peddling the opium scare as a way of prompting donations back in the home countries. When saving heathens from themselves was an insufficient motivator for looting wallets of spare change (this was an era when self-reliance was still popular), the invention of an allegedly real-life demonology came in very handy vis-à-vis the narcotics peddler. If Demon Rum couldn't be hawked, then Demon Opium would more than suffice.
Opium has been available in China since at least the fourth century A.D. There had been no moral collapse as result of opium's availability for 15 centuries. But then, in the late 18th century opium prohibition began to appear care of busy-body academics and emperors. This produced the corruption that appears whenever government gets into the monopoly business and bans everyone else but itself from selling something. Furthermore, paleface missionaries got into the bidness of peddling the opium scare as a way of prompting donations back in the home countries. When saving heathens from themselves was an insufficient motivator for looting wallets of spare change (this was an era when self-reliance was still popular), the invention of an allegedly real-life demonology came in very handy vis-à-vis the narcotics peddler. If Demon Rum couldn't be hawked, then Demon Opium would more than suffice.
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Here's a quote from an 1841 account of the opium business in China: Among the thousands who have suffered in person and property for being either really or constructively concerned in selling or using opium, three or four only of the government officers are said to have been called to account for their conduct; though the manner in which they have acted in the matter is summed up in the following story, which was often cited to me by an inhabitant of more than 40 years in China. The magistrates in a town upon the coast beheaded 13 opium smugglers one morning; and before three o'clock the same day they sent to the foreigners, saying, we are ready to admit opium again upon the terms heretofore observed between us. - they had washed their hands in blood, and were now prepared to incur a new debt of guilt, to be liquidated in due time after the same manner.
Here's a quote from an 1841 account of the opium business in China: Among the thousands who have suffered in person and property for being either really or constructively concerned in selling or using opium, three or four only of the government officers are said to have been called to account for their conduct; though the manner in which they have acted in the matter is summed up in the following story, which was often cited to me by an inhabitant of more than 40 years in China. The magistrates in a town upon the coast beheaded 13 opium smugglers one morning; and before three o'clock the same day they sent to the foreigners, saying, we are ready to admit opium again upon the terms heretofore observed between us. - they had washed their hands in blood, and were now prepared to incur a new debt of guilt, to be liquidated in due time after the same manner.
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The more things change, the more they remain the same, yes? And here's a quote I'm particularly fond of: In China, the spendthrift, the man of lewd habits, the drunkard, and a large assortment of bad characters, slide into the opium smoker; hence the drug seems to be chargeable with all the vices of the country. Opium, doubtless, has her victims in persons who, but for her fascinating lures, might have escaped their ruin; but in the great majority of instances she only adds one stain more to a character already polluted.
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The more things change, the more they remain the same, yes? And here's a quote I'm particularly fond of: In China, the spendthrift, the man of lewd habits, the drunkard, and a large assortment of bad characters, slide into the opium smoker; hence the drug seems to be chargeable with all the vices of the country. Opium, doubtless, has her victims in persons who, but for her fascinating lures, might have escaped their ruin; but in the great majority of instances she only adds one stain more to a character already polluted.
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If interested in this book, go here for more at Googlebooks: http://tinyurl.com/rc363
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There's an interesting youtube vid here as well: Cops Against the Drug War
