The Opium Question

In the relations between East and West, opium possesses more than an academic importance, far surpassing the literary value it represents in works like Cottle's Reminiscences of Coleridge or De Quincey's Confessions and Suspirica de Profundis. Slavery in those relations was not productive of worse misery and death, says Dr. Medhurst, an English physician, than the opium traffic which has paralyzed the noblest efforts to elevate primitive races to a higher standard of life. Alcohol and cholera are scourges not to be compared to opium, says a Dutch missionary.1 Such statements might be multiplied ad infinitum, their common purport that opium is an unmitigated curse, corroborated on high medical authority. The moderate and even the minimum opium-eater is a slave to his stimulant as the moderate alcoholdrinker is not.2 Civilization, no unmixed blessing when impelled by that powerful spring of western action, cupidity, has brought down many evils upon the East: the spread of opium among them. The export of opium from British India alone, during the fifty years I855-I904, amounted to 5,220 million rupees, or, on an average, more than ioo million rupees yearly. The total gain from Indian opium, i.e., the amount paid by China and Eastern Asia for that commodity, above its cost price, during the period I773-I906, has been estimated at ?436,000,000.3

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• Harms caused by China's 1906–17 opium suppression intervention

  Open Access•James Windle•International Journal of Drug…•2013

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