Opium
Opium History, 1858 To 1940
By Alfred W. McCoy
High Imperial Opium Trade (1858-1907)
During the latter half of the 19th century, opium became a major global commodity. Across the Asian opium zone, from the Balkans to Manchuria, there was a steady increase of local opium cultivation and consumption. Moreover, in the latter half of the 19th century, the modern pharmaceutical industry made opiates a drug of mass abuse in the cities of the West--Europe, the Americas, and Australia.
By the early 20th century, opium and its derivatives, morphine and heroin, had become a major global commodity equivalent in scale to other drugs such as coffee and tea.
In retrospect, the growth of mass narcotics abuse in the West seems part of the transformation of diet and health care in the late 19th century. In an era when Western medicine had still not developed genuine therapeutic remedies, self-medication with opium and the profession's reliance on morphine injection encouraged drug abuse.
Indeed, opium was a genuinely effective against the gastrointestinal diseases that were epidemic in the cities of 19th Century England and America. Introduced to skeptical American doctors in 1856, the hypodermic syringe proved an effective means of relieving pain with morphine injection, and by 1881 many physicians used the drug as a panacea for wide range of illness.
With the approval of the medical profession, Western pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Bayer and Parke-Davis began selling substantial quantities of opiates and coca in the form of popular remedies. Such successful marketing made mass addiction to cocaine and heroin a significant feature of late 19th century life in the West.
Soon after the Bayer Company introduced heroin as a non-addictive substitute for morphine in 1898, the American Medical Association (AMA), continuing the profession's long reliance on opiate medications, initially endorsed the new drug as safe for respiratory ailments.
The spread of mass addiction was part of a new diet in the industrial nations based on a global trade in proteins and stimulants. After a century of constant dietary habits, the average Englishman's consumption of sugar, jumped four-fold from 1850 to 1900. During the same period, England's per capita consumption of tea increased three-fold.
Similarly, in the United States between 1865 and 1902 coffee consumption increased nearly three-fold, while sugar jumped four-fold. The simple 18th century diet of milled grains had given way to one spiced with large quantities of protein (eggs and beef), glucose (sugar), and stimulants (coffee and tea).
If an energized diet of proteins, glucose and caffeine could be used to stimulate the body through a long working day, then narcotic-based medicines could be used to relax it in the short hours of rest.
Paralleling the growth of sugar and coffee use, American consumption of opium rose over four-fold from the 1840s to the 1890s, and the number of addicts peaked at 313,000 in 1896. In the United Kingdom, sales of patent medicines, most of them opium-based, increased almost seven-fold between 1850 and 1905. Significantly, the average consumption of opium per 1,000 population increased from 1.3 pounds in 1827 to over 10 pounds 50 years later.
Reflecting and reinforcing these global changes, the legalization of opium in China quickly transformed the country into the world's leading producer. After the Second Opium War ended in 1858, Chinese officials encouraged local production, and poppy cultivation spread beyond the southwest to nearly every province. As addiction rose throughout China, imports of Indian opium increased from 4,800 tons in 1859 to an historic high of 6,700 tons in 1879. Despite the growth of Indian imports after 1858, most of the higher demand was supplied by Chinese domestic production.
By the 1880s, China was in the midst of a major opium boom, particularly in the rugged southwestern provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan. Observers claimed that China's leading opium producing province, Szechwan, was harvesting 10,000 tons of raw opium annually. In 1881, the British consul at Yichang estimated the total opium production in the southwest at 13,525 tons, a figure that at first seemed exaggerated. Twenty-five years later, however, the first official statistics showed that Szechwan and Yunnan were in fact producing 19,100 tons, equivalent to 54 percent of China's total harvest.
Although estimates varied widely, by 1885 China was probably growing twice as much opium as it was importing. By 1906, China had 13.5 million addicts consuming some 39,000 tons of opium. With bountiful supplies and legal retail sales, China had 27 percent of its adult males addicted to opium--a level of mass addiction never equaled by any nation before or since.
During the 19th century, Southeast Asia experienced a confluence of socio-economic forces--demand, supply, and state policy--that expanded its total opium trade and the degree of European dominance. First, Chinese migration to Southeast Asia accelerated the demand for drugs throughout the 19th century, creating a substantial market of wage laborers with the means and motivation for opium smoking. Pressed for revenues to finance public works, European colonial governments established opium farms and leased these revenue contracts to overseas Chinese merchants.
No mere vice, opium became a major factor in Southeast Asia's economic growth in both public and private sectors, reflecting and reinforcing the region's ongoing modernization. In many parts of 19th century Southeast Asia, the opium franchises were integral to the rise of overseas Chinese capital.
In the late 19th century, these franchises gave way to state-licensed opium dens that became a unique Southeast Asian institution, spreading and sustaining addiction throughout the region. At first, the region's colonial governments had restricted their role to importing the opium from India and auctioned opium farms, or franchises, to the highest bidder, usually a consortium of Chinese.
In 1881, however, the French administration in Saigon established the Opium Regie, a direct state marketing monopoly that showed greater profitability. By century's turn, every Southeast Asian state, from Burma to the Philippines, had either an opium monopoly or an officially licensed franchise.
In 1930, for example, Southeast Asia had 6,441 government opium dens that served 272 tons of opium to 542,100 registered smokers. In no other region of the world did so many governments promote mass drug abuse.
Dutch opium commerce on Java fostered both a vast state enterprise and a large illicit traffic. From 1640 to 1799, the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.) imported an average of 56 tons of opium annually, large quantities for their day that rose steadily throughout the 19th century to 208 tons by 1904.
By starting their retail monopoly two centuries before the other European powers, the Dutch developed a large clientele of native Javanese opium smokers. Despite efforts to reduce sales, the Dutch monopoly was still operating 1,065 opium dens in 1929 that retailed 59 tons of opium to 101,000 registered smokers.
While opium addiction weakened the local populations, it strengthened the finances of colonial governments. In 1905-1906, for example, opium sales provided 16 percent of taxes for French Indochina, 16 percent for the Netherlands Indies, 20 percent for Siam, and 53 percent for British Malaya. Despite heavy opium consumption, Southeast Asia did not become a significant opium producer until the 1950s, a full century after China.
Afraid that smuggling from their remote tribal highlands would undercut high official prices, the state monopolies did everything possible to discourage local opium production. Although poppy cultivation did spread somewhat in the highlands during the decades before World War II, the region still remained a minor producer.
Finding even this level of cultivation troublesome, Burma, Thailand and Indochina mounted suppression operations that reduced region's production to only 15.5 tons in 1940--far from the Golden Triangle's 3,050 ton harvest a half century later.
Increase/decrease in World Opium Production:
--In 1907, the first systematic survey of opium indicated that world production stood at 41,624 tons--over ten times the 1994 world illicit opium supply.
Changes in Opium Cultivation by Region:
--Rising from low levels in the 1840s, China produced 35,000 tons of raw opium in 1906-07--equivalent to 85 percent of world opium supply.
--Reflecting changes in production levels, Indian opium exports to China rose from 4,810 tons in 1858 to peak at 6,700 tons in 1879. Thereafter, Indian exports dropped by half to 3,368 tons by 1905, and then dwindled to insignificant amounts after 1913.
--Of the 41,624 tons produced worldwide, Southeast Asia produced 2 tons; Southwest Asia (Turkey, Iran, India, Afghanistan) 6,258 tons; and China 35,364 tons.
Changes in Quantity of Opium Consumption by Region:
--The number of opium smokers in China increased from 3 million in the 1830s to 13.5 in 1906.
--US opiate addicts increased from low levels in the 1840s to a historic high of 313,000 by 1896.
--US imports of all opium increased dramatically from 32.8 tons in 1859 to 298.1 tons in 1907.
--Average American consumption of opium increased four-fold from 12 grains per person in the 1840s to 52 grains in the 1890s.
Summary and Analysis of Trends within Epoch:
During this period of high imperialism (1858-1907), Britain loses the near monopoly over the Asian opium trade that it enjoyed under mercantilism and the drug becomes, for the first time in its history, a free-market commodity. Traded in mass volume through unrestricted trade, opium gains new markets in the West and expands its trade in Asia.
To maintain profits and tax revenues, European colonial regimes in establish state opium monopolies throughout Southeast Asia in the 1880s and 1890s, continuing an element of the restrictive mercantilism prevalent in an earlier epoch.
While controls remain over opium sales within the colonies, its international trade is now unrestricted. In Asia, China removes its ban on opium cultivation and thereby undercuts the hyper-profitability of British exports. Now fully commoditized, opium spreads beyond its Asian trade axis to become, through the modern pharmaceutical industry, a major item of mass consumption in the West. Driven by this global commerce, world opium production reaches an historic peak of 41,000 tons in 1907--10 times its level in 1993.
Multilateral Control & Syndicate Crime (1907-1940).
In the late 19th century, a Christian crusade, through skillful propaganda and lobbying, transformed itself from a populist movement into a novel form of drug diplomacy that continues today under the United Nations.
Led by Protestant clergy and laity, a global anti-opium movement created mass support for the imposition of legal controls over individual drug abuse, culminating in a series of treaties that restricted the global narcotics trade.
Starting with the Shanghai Opium Commission of 1909 and the International Opium Conference at The Hague in 1911-1912, these early meetings led to a succession of opium control treaties under the League of Nations in 1925 and the United Nations after 1945.
On balance, the most profound and lasting legacy of this movement remains the underlying concept of applying the force of law and police to regulate what individuals do to and with their own bodies. The intrusion of the state into a realm previously thought personal and private marks a small but still significant watershed in modern political history.
As the anti-opium movement grew at century's turn, narcotics were already a global commodity that sustained heavy opiates abuse in China, Europe, and America. With an addict population representing over a quarter of the country's adult males, opium had become a staple of the China's consumer economy.
Moreover, during the late 19th century the steady rise of mass opiates addiction in England and America added a new dimension to the global drug trade, forming a resilient commercial connection between Asian opium growers and Western consumers.
Launched when the drug was already a major commodity, the anti-opium movement's goal of a total prohibition produced a contradictory legacy. The movement did force governments to cease active promotion of drug use through licensed dens or patent medicine sales. Paralleling these prohibition efforts, however, new criminal syndicates quickly emerged in the major cities of Asia and the West to organize a global traffic in illicit drugs.
Between 1895 and 1910, moreover, medical opinion within the U.S. turned against the mass prescription of opiates. From the 1870s onward, a growing number of doctors in both the United Kingdom and the United States documented the dangers of addiction from repeated opiate use.
Moreover, research into bacteriology discovered the causes of previously incurable diseases, thereby discouraging the use of broad-spectrum palliatives. In a sharp reversal of past practice, in 1920 the AMA passed a resolution recommending the prohibition of heroin.
The early anti-opium movement began as a loose alliance between British Protestants, China missionaries, and Chinese imperial officials. Formed in 1874, the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade soon attracted the patronage of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
For 30 years Britain's missionaries and moralists fought a relentless campaign that culminated in 1906 when Parliament passed a motion to end India's opium exports. With strong mandates for suppression, a year later British and Chinese diplomats agreed on a ten-year, step-by-step reduction in both Indian imports and Chinese cultivation.
When Britain finally abandoned its advocacy of the Asian drug trade in 1907, opium had become a global commodity comparable in scale to the commerce in stimulants such as coffee and tea. Representing about 85 percent of world production, China's opium harvest of 35,000 tons sustained 13.5 million addicts, or a quarter of its adult male population.
After the revolution of 1911, China's new Republican government proved corrupt and its opium suppression campaign faltered. China's poppy cultivation revived, morphine and heroin pills appeared as substitutes for smoking opium, and the new Republic's cabinet was found taking a bribe from an opium syndicate. Nonetheless, in January 1919, the Republic burned the last chest of Indian opium at a public ritual before invited guests at Shanghai. After more than 300 years, the India-China opium trade had ended.
While Britain engaged in bilateral negotiations with China, the United States sought a solution through multilateral drug diplomacy. After occupying the Philippine Islands in 1898, the United States discovered Manila had 190 dens retailing a total of 130 tons of opium. Responding to pressures from the anti-opium movement in the US, in 1903 the colonial regime appointed the Episcopal missionary Bishop Charles Brent and two medical doctors to an investigative opium committee that recommended total prohibition.
Between 1906 and 1908, the U.S. regime banned opium smoking in the Philippines, becoming the first American government to outlaw narcotic drugs.
The Philippine ban launched America's attempts at domestic suppression and drug diplomacy. Aware that opium smuggling from China was sabotaging the Philippine prohibition, Bishop Brent convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to organize the first international opium commission.
With Brent in the chair, delegations from thirteen countries met at Shanghai for a month in 1909, passing unanimous, non-binding resolutions that urged the gradual suppression...of opium. Two years later, the United States used its influence to draft The Hague Opium Convention which required each signatory nation to pass its own domestic drug legislation.
As a party to the Convention, the United States fulfilled its diplomatic commitments in 1914 when Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, the country's first federal law restricting drug use.
In 1925, the League of Nations convened the Geneva Conference, launching a new round of drug diplomacy, moving away from voluntary national laws to mandatory international controls over drugs.
Restrained by the colonial lobby, this cautious diplomacy produced international treaties that gradually restricted the right of governments to traffic in narcotics, producing an 82 percent decline in world opium supply--from 42,000 tons in 1906 to 16,000 tons in 1934.
Although none of Southeast Asia's states actually abolished their opium monopolies, all made gestures that reduced the region's opium sales by 65 percent in the fifteen years after World War I. The Netherlands Indies, for example, cut the colony's consumption by 88 percent, from 127 to 15 tons.
Although these reforms reduced Southeast Asia's legal opium sales, they could not eradicate a mass demand for the drug cultivated by three centuries of colonial rule. As soon as governments slashed imports or closed opium dens, smugglers and dealers emerged to service the unmet demand. On the mainland, Thailand and Indochina found it impossible to close their mountain borders to the overland caravan trade from Yunnan and Burma. With 50 percent of the region's smokers and 70 percent of its dens, Bangkok and Saigon were Southeast Asia's premier opium markets, offering high profits which drew the caravans southward from the opium hills.
Republican China's attempts at opium prohibition expanded both production and consumption. After 1906, the reduction in British imports and Chinese suppression led gradually to several negative developments: an increase in China's opium cultivation; a shift in consumption from domestic opium to imported heroin; and a centralization of criminal controls over the illicit opiates trade.
Significantly, China's experience in the decades before World War II demonstrated that the international opium trade had already developed a resilience that would allow it to survive almost any attempt at suppression.
After 1909, China's early attempts at eradication created a demand for illicit morphine and opium. As Szechwan's opium production declined, Shanghai's licensed syndicates, notably the Green Gang, began importing morphine and heroin from Europe. Moreover, this localized suppression in Szechwan stimulated both the spread of cultivation to other provinces and smuggling of illicit opiates into China.
Between 1911 and 1915, Japanese traders smuggled major supplies of morphine and heroin into China. By 1923, Shanghai syndicates were importing 10.25 tons of heroin from Japan and Europe annually to meet consumer demand.
Starting in the late 1920s, the country's rising criminal syndicates shifted from the import of heroin to its manufacture and distribution. On balance, the growth of the heroin trade in northeast China was a market response to both global and local attempts at suppression.
In the decade following the League's first attempt at opiates control in 1925, Shanghai emerged as a major center for illicit heroin. During the 1930s, China began to supply a substantial, but unquantifiable, share of the U.S. domestic drug market. In 1931, the League of Nations imposed restrictions on the manufacture of heroin in Europe, and just three years later the U.S. Treasury attache in Shanghai noted a sudden shift of the traffic in narcotics from Europe to the Orient.
When the Geneva convention banning European heroin exports took effect in 1928, Europe's criminal entrepreneurs moved first to Istanbul, the center of a Turkish drug trade which harvested 845 tons of opium in 1928 and manufactured 13.2 tons of heroin and morphine in 1932.
Pushed by that city's violent criminal milieu and pulled by the scale of the Asian drug trade, leading European drug dealers such as the Eliopolos brothers moved to Shanghai and Tientsin in the early 1930s. In his 1934 report to Washington, the U.S. Treasury attache in Shanghai reported that there had been an influx into China of individuals formerly identified with the traffic in Europe.
In particular, the Jewish syndicates that dominated New York's drug trade under the leadership of Yasha Katzenberg and Louis Lepke Buchalter sent agents to purchase heroin through European dealers based in Shanghai.
Simultaneously, Shanghai's Green Gang leader Tu Yueh-sheng emerged as the city's leading drug dealer and a key intelligence operative for the Nationalist Government--an alliance that protected the narcotics network from the regime's anti-opium campaign of the 1930s.
By 1934, the U.S. Treasury attache in Shanghai reported that the Green Gang leader was the opium King of the nation. Through his close relations with the Nationalist regime, Tu's cartel was a major force in the Yangtze River opium trade that dominated China's drug traffic.
After the annual harvest in the southwestern highlands, according to the US Treasury agent in Shanghai at least 18,000 tons of Szechwan and 10,000 tons of Yunnan opium passed through the major river ports downriver to Shanghai. At the city of Hankow, half way down Yangtze, the government's Special Tax Bureau collected $20 million in annual opium transit fees.
Indicative of Tu's control, the head of the government's Opium Suppression Bureau, was an active member of the Green Gang who still remains loyal to his benefactor, Tu Yueh-sheng. In effect, the League's attempt at global regulation and the Nationalist regime's local suppression combined to expand China's illicit narcotics traffic.
Moving beyond simple opium growing, China had emerged as the world's main heroin manufacturer. As League regulations barred diversion of heroin from legal laboratories to criminals, Shanghai's Green Gang emerged as Asia's first major heroin producing syndicate in the 1930s.
Causality underlying above changes:
Over the space of two centuries, China had thus progressed from opium importer to heroin exporter through the intersection of three key factors--a global commodity trade in opiates, the failure of successive interdiction campaigns, and an alliance between drug syndicates and military intelligence services.
Increase/decrease in World Opium Production:
--World opium production declined from 41,624 tons in 1907 to an estimated 16,653 tons in 1934.
--Licit world heroin production declined from an estimated 20,000 lbs. in 1926 to only 2,200 lbs. in 1931.
Changes in Opium Cultivation by Region:
--Although world total declines markedly during this period, the percentage of world production in each region within the Asian opium zone remains relatively constant.
Changes in Quantity of Opium Consumption by Region:
--Between 1896 and 1924, the number of opiate addicts in the United States declines from 313,000 to an estimated 200,000. --Although there is no indication of any decline in overall level of addiction in China, opium smoking declines and heroin use increases rapidly.
Summary and Analysis of Trends within Epoch:
Anti-Opium Movement:
Within the Protestant churches of England and America, a moral reaction to the excesses of a market-driven expansion of drug abuse inspired a global anti-opium movement in the late 19th Century. Inspired by the larger temperance movement, the anti-opium crusade gained its force from the institutional strength of the Churches and its urgency from
(1.) the influence of their China missions which felt stigmatized by the European opium trade; and,
(2.) a moral revulsion against the excesses of alcohol and narcotics. Through the religious origins of the anti-opium movement, the Western, particularly American, debate over drugs becomes bound up in the metaphor of Christian warfare against evil with the parallel political goal of total extirpation.
Law and Body:
For the first time in the modern era, the anti-opium movement, in alliance with the larger temperance crusade, succeeded with new laws from the state restricting the individual's control over the body.
Under the laissez-faire principles of 19th Century social practice, the state did nothing to restrict the individual's right to indulgence. With the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, the American state, for the first time, imposed the force of law over the right to use or abuse the body as the individual saw fit. This change in law constitutes a significant turning point in American social practice.
Failure of Prohibition:
The prewar attempt at multilateral controls over narcotics had a mixed result. In the West, the stronger state apparatus could actively influence social behavior and reduce drug consumption through a ban on legal sales. In the colonies with strong, authoritarian states, such as British India, opium restrictions were even more effective than in the West. But in Third World areas with weak states, such as China, the attempt at prohibition produced a florescence of organized criminality.
Thus, in the 1920s, the legal opium trade, whether by states or corporations, yields to a transnational criminal trade with powerful Chinese syndicates in Shanghai supplying organized crime groups in the United State. With the end of alcohol prohibition in 1932, American syndicates became even more dependent upon drug trafficking, elaborating their transnational contacts and expanding the illicit trade.
One of the main consequences of multilateral controls was the rise of organized crime that blunts the effectiveness of drug prohibition, forcing consumption to the social margins in the First World and production to the spatial margins in the Third. Although repression does reduce both production and consumption, the high profits inherent in the opiates traffic remain to sustain criminal syndicates which now act as an unintended market response to limit state control over the drug trade.
Despite all these considerable drawbacks, multilateral controls do have their successes. By limiting the power of states and corporation to traffic in drugs without restriction, the League of Nations did effect significant reductions in the gross consumption and production of narcotics.
Through these efforts, the constant, century-long upward trajectory in drug abuse was finally broken, and, for the first time since the 18th century, both use and production began to decline. Through these efforts, world opium production declined from 41,600 tons in 1907 to 16,600 tons in 1934, while licit world heroin production, much of it for recreational use, dropped sharply from an 20,000 lbs. in 1926 to only 2,200 lbs. in 1931.
Although the political parameters of the world drug trade in the prewar era were distinct, the legacy of multilateral controls, today found in the UN Commission on Drug Abuse Control, might well prove a viable alternative to our recent attempts at bilateral eradication.
Books
Opium: A History
Traces opium's history from the first evidence of poppy cultivation (possibly as early as 4,000 B.C.) to the drug wars of today. Explores its uses in different cultures, its roles in British and Chinese political affairs, its use by artists and musicians, and its horrifying ramifications for addicts. Written with admirable attention to detail.
Informative book details opium and its derivatives such as morphine and heroin. It is fascinating to learn about the effect this drug has had on various cultures such as China and India. Anyone wanting to obtain information for academic purposes or just to learn more about this drug will enjoy this book.
Opium: A History
Opium:
A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon
A picture history of opium. Photos, drawings, book covers, sketches, paintings, engravings, and other artwork featuring opium related scenes and paraphernalia are found on almost every page of this beautiful book. Includes a comprehensive overview of written works throughout history which feature opium as their theme.
The focus is on the wealth of images and literature celebrating or condemning this fabled drug, and on the writers, artists and photographers who have tried to capture the essence of opium's allure. All the works mentioned are in the bibliography as a resource for further reading.
Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon
The Politics of Heroin:
CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
A greatly revised and expanded edition of Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Tells a fascinating story, that opium was often the only viable form of currency. The author produces considerable disturbing evidence that US authorities are guilty at least of complicity in the global drug trade.
Exposes basic hypocrisy in American policy making, and demonstrates that, as long as powerful government bureaucracies work at cross-purposes, America's drug problem will not be easily solved.
The Politics of Heroin
Opium Related Books About Opium And Related Drugs More Opium And Related Drug Articles Various Opium And Related Drug Links
