Opium

Opium, or Papaver somniferum, has been cultivated and consumed by human beings since at least the third millennium b.c.e., when inhabitants of Mesopotamia began growing and ingesting it. From its likely origins in ancient Mesopotamia, opium use spread westward to Egypt and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean by the first millennium b.c.e., and eastward into Persia, India, and China by the first millennium c.e.

The European explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encountered a preexisting opium trade in Mughal India, centered principally in areas surrounding Calcutta and Bombay (Mumbai). The Portuguese gradually entered the trade, progressively displacing Indians and Arabs from the increasingly lucrative China market. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch, English, and French had joined the opium commerce, which came to involve all of Asia and parts of Europe and its colonies around the globe as the nineteenth century unfolded.

At that point, opium had become a crucial commodity that had a major impact on the economic, social, and political circumstances in India, China, and Great Britain. The twentieth century witnessed the spread of opium cultivation to the Golden Triangle (Burma [Myanmar], Thailand, and Laos), to the Golden Crescent (Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan), and even to Columbia. At the same time, consumption of opium and its most popular derivatives, morphine and heroin, extended to every corner of the globe.

Medically, opium serves as an analgesic, relieving pain, especially for those who did not or do not have access to modern therapeutic procedures. People with respiratory disorders, particularly tuberculosis, self-medicated with opiates to control coughing. Opium produces constipation and was thus taken to treat diarrhea and dysentery, common symptoms of numerous maladies that were otherwise untreatable in premodern times. In addition, people believed that opium helped to mitigate the symptoms of malaria and to energize exhausted laborers.

In addition to medical usage, people consumed opiates to demonstrate social status. When the price of opium soared, only the well-to-do could afford such a luxury. In the nineteenth century particularly and later as well, many intellectuals, from China to England, viewed opium as an agent of enlightenment that could expand the powers of the mind and bring tranquility to the soul. As English author Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) put it, "Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium introduced amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation and harmony." French writer Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) claimed that opium smoking generated "the ultimate siesta." The drug also served as a sort of social lubricant, bringing together friends and neighbors at community opium establishments or "dens," much as people in the early twenty-first century meet at coffee houses, tea houses, or local taverns.

Most recreational users claim that opium alters one's mood, produces a feeling of euphoria, reduces the stress of everyday life, and acts as an aphrodisiac (though some consumers admit to reduced sexual performance). For both medical and recreational users, the perceptions of opium's powers may well outstrip the actual performance of the drug or even produce a result opposite to the one desired.

GLOBAL OPIUM PATTERNS, 1800–1950

The vast majority of opium production and consumption during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century occurred in Asia. Britain, India, and China accounted for most drug activity there. National governments, local drug lords and officials, opium growers and merchants, colonial opium monopolies, and drug prohibitionists clashed over the suitable role opium should play on a continent whose inhabitants had increasingly become attracted to the drug.

By early twentieth century, pharmaceutical companies in the Europe, North America, and Japan began producing morphine and the precursor chemicals needed for the manufacture of opium derivatives for sale in the nonindustrial world, chiefly in China. Decades of global prohibitionist activism, World War II (1939–1945), postwar decolonization, and the 1949 Communist revolution in China destroyed traditional opium trafficking and consumption patterns. These circumstances, plus an emerging tolerance for drug use in most of the industrial world by the 1960s, set the stage for new centers of opium production and consumption.

Nineteenth-century opium trafficking was chiefly an Asian phenomenon. Nearly all opium growing was done in Turkey, Persia, India, and China, while most consumption took place in China, though people in other parts of Asia, Europe, and North America also became regular opiate users. Opium probably had the largest impact on China, where the Qing/Manchu government (1644–1911) had historically prohibited the drug, a ban that brought China into conflict with Britain, which supplied more than 90 percent of the foreign-produced drug.

Chinese demand for opium resulted in an outflow of silver to pay for it. That in turn increased the price of silver, which peasants had to purchase with copper in order to pay their taxes. Just as important, the Chinese tribute system of international relations, which regulated foreign access to China, began to break down. The British East India Company—the only British organization permitted by the Chinese to conduct trade in their country, and then only in Canton (Guangzhou)—lost its London monopoly on the China trade in 1834, thus permitting (under British law) any British company to enter the China market. But even as mercantilism gave way to free trade in Britain, China continued to insist on conducting foreign trade through the tribute system. These points of disagreement—the impact of drugs and the system of international relations—produced the First Opium or Anglo-Chinese War (1839–1842).

China's defeat and the ensuing Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing, 1842), which made no reference to the opium trade, opened China to the outside world and the European system of international relations. China resisted opening its doors while the drug trade continued, generating the Second Opium War (1856–1860), another defeat for China, and yet another set of treaties, one of which—the Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin, 1858)—allowed the import of opium upon the paying of a tariff. By this time, China was well on the way to becoming the world's largest opium producer. By the end of the century, probably more than ten million Chinese were addicted to the drug and millions more were periodic users. Millions of farmers had become producers of the drug, and tens of thousands of transporters and retailers emerged to get the product to users, while government officials at all levels reaped the taxation (some legal, some illegal) rewards.

Beyond China, the British government used opium profits to cover the expenses of governing India, while millions of Indian farmers produced opium for the burgeoning global market, which included all the colonies in Southeast Asia, particularly those locations where large concentrations of ethnic Chinese lived. But the drug had also caught on in England and the United States, where Americans became enthusiastic consumers of patent medicines, most of which contained some form of opium. In addition, colonial regimes in Southeast Asia came to depend on opium taxation to finance their administrative costs.

But even while global opium production and consumption soared, an international opium prohibition movement emerged to check nonmedical use of opiates and other drugs. In 1905 the British government informed China that it would consider ending its exports of opium to China if Beijing would undertake a serious anti-opium campaign. This offer by London represented the culmination of a decades-long prohibitionist crusade in England and America, led by missionaries and assorted other reformers, much in the spirit of the progressive movement then in full swing in the United States. Should Britain be convinced of a serious Chinese effort, then London would end its export of opium to China by 1917.

Although Beijing launched an anti-opium movement in 1906 that initially succeeded beyond almost everyone's expectations, and though the British promised and did in fact bring an end to opium exports as prearranged, Chinese politics ultimately doomed the effort. First, the Manchu Qing government feared mobilizing the common people in the antidrug campaign for fear it could easily become a nationalist anti-Manchu movement. Next, the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), the nation's principal leader, died in 1908, and three years later China's dynastic government collapsed forever. Successor regimes had little interest in the campaign, and by 1916 the country had fallen into the hands of warlords, almost all of whom used opium to finance their organizational operations. Moreover, those political movements dedicated to crushing warlordism, ending foreign privileges in China, and modernizing the country—the Nationalists (Guomindang) and the Communists—both relied on opium revenue to some extent from the 1920s to the 1940s, even as they attacked the practice officially.

Meanwhile, several international anti-opium conferences held before and after World War I (1914–1918) to bring about an end to illicit drug trafficking began alerting the wider world to the perils of drug use. In the United States, the Harrison Act of 1914 began a prohibitionist drug campaign in a country that had liberally and legally consumed opiates. Great Britain agreed to end its export of opium to colonies in Southeast Asia by 1936, a pledge it honored. The League of Nations, created in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles to deal with thorny international issues, sponsored numerous anti-opium conferences, which generated anti-opium treaties.

Between the world wars, heroin was quickly replacing opium as the drug of choice in much of China, and although all the industrial nations provided the necessary chemicals to produce heroin in China, by the mid-1930s Japan came to dominate the traffic in heroin and its precursor drugs there. A growing split surfaced between Tokyo on the one side and London, Washington, D.C., and Nanjing (China's capital from 1928 to 1949) on the other, which resulted in Japanese trafficking becoming a prominent rationale with which to brand Japan an outlaw nation. World War II and various independence movements destroyed traditional drug marketing patterns in Asia, and the Chinese Communist victory in 1949 and its subsequent genuine antidrug campaign obliterated nearly overnight the largest consumer market for opium (at least until the 1980s). By the mid-twentieth century, the vast majority of the world's opium was used to produce legitimate medicines.

OPIUM ACTIVITIES SINCE 1950

Nonetheless, there remained a demand for opiates, particularly in the industrial world. With India and China no longer producing the drug, other centers of cultivation and new patterns of trafficking emerged to fill the vacuum. Drug users proliferated in the 1960s as counter-cultural movements across the globe extolled the benefits of getting high, often with opiates. Two principal production sites surfaced to meet the growing demand for opium, the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent. The countries of these regions were relatively poor, possessed vast remote and mountainous regions difficult for a government to access or control, and had all experienced considerable political instability. By the 1990s, Columbia entered the opium growing business.

After World War II, the United Nations and member governments supported drug prohibition movements, at least verbally. Like the League of Nations, the United Nations sponsored antidrug conferences, promoted antidrug treaties, and disseminated antidrug measures. In practice, however, the United Nations merely served as a launching platform for its members' antidrug public relations campaigns.

By the 1970s, the United States had commenced its "war on drugs," a reaction to the growing popular notion that drug use had somehow become an acceptable part of one's lifestyle. Popular culture began addressing drug issues, one example being the motion picture The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin, 1971), which chronicled the movement of illicit heroin from Marseilles, France, to the New York consumer market and the marginally successful police effort to thwart such trafficking. "Just Say No" campaigns in the United States and elsewhere aimed to reduce drug use, and did realize some success in the 1980s and 1990s. By the late twentieth century, though opiates still attracted addicts and recreational users, other illicit hard drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamines, began to capture a larger share of the illegal drug market.

International affairs have continued to have an impact on the drug trade. The Cold War (1945–1991) between the United States and the Soviet Union tended to undermine global antidrug operations because Washington often found itself allied with drug traffickers. Thus the U.S. government turned a blind eye to the drug activities of Chinese nationalist remnants in Burma, where they plied their trade into the 1970s, and worked closely with the Hmong of Laos (also in the opium business) during the Vietnam War (1957–1975). In addition, the United States supported the mujahideen (Islamic guerilla fighters) in Afghanistan, who cultivated and marketed opium to help finance their war against the Soviet Union, which had invaded and occupied their country in the late 1970s and 1980s. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the 1980s and the American defeat of the militant Islamic Taliban government in 2001, opium cultivation once again became a significant source of income for Afghan tribes. This policy of overlooking the drug-related activities of America's conditional allies extended to Latin America, where Washington was predisposed to support governments that opposed Soviet or Cuban activities in the region.

These political marriages of convenience date back to World War II, when the United States worked with drug traffickers in Burma in an effort to defeat the Japanese, and extend into the early twenty-first century, when the U.S. government worked with drug traffickers in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban and capture the Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden (b. 1957). As long as consumers demand illegal opiates for recreational purposes, poverty will drive producers to meet those demands. And as long as governments advance agendas deemed more critical than illicit drug eradication, and prohibitionists continue to dominate drug policy in governments around the world, producers and consumers of opium will continue to achieve their agendas.

see also China, First Opium War to 1945; China, to the First Opium War; Opium Wars.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bello, David Anthony. Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Booth, Martin. Opium: A History. London: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Brook, Timothy, and Bob Takashi Wakabayashi, eds. Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Courtwright, David. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Madancy, Joyce A. The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

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Trocki, Carl A. Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Walker, William O. Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912–1954. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Walker, William O., ed. Drugs in the Western Hemisphere: An Odyssey of Cultures in Conflict. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996.