Opium Quotes
Although this is one of Marx’s more famous quotations, he had Napoleon Bonaparte {39959} to thank for the concept of the use of religion as a political tool. A Napoleon contemporary Chartist, Charles Kingsley, {441604} in 1848 also made the analogy between religion and opium for political control.
He was the first Chinese official to make opium illegal. However, British many merchants were involved in a complicated trade scheme whereby they brought opium to Canton. They paid not attention to the new laws against opium the same as their Chinese customers. Lin Zexu, perceiving Queen Victoria to have powers equivalent to the Chinese Emperor who could do anything in China, He assumed that the Queen could and would control the merchant’s behavior, and before punishing the British merchants, he was putting the Queen on notice. There is no record of what Victoria did, if anything. When Lin Zexu tried to enforce his ban on opium, the British Merchants resisted and the First Opium War broke out between China and Britainin which the Chinese were humiliated and resent to this day. A bronze statue of Lin Zexu was erected in his honor in Chatham Square (Kimlau Square) of New York City's Chinatown.
3rd Viscount Palmerston. This historical quotations illustrates the worst of the British Empire. British merchants were making large profits shipping opium to China and selling it there. Drug addiction became a major problem and some local Chinese Authorities passed laws banning the importing and selling of opium. However, the English merchant ship captains paid no attention to these laws claiming their rights as Englishmen to free trade. The Chinese finally seized a number of shipments of opium and burned them. The British then appointed Captain Elliot to lead a squadron of ships to China, arrange for payment in compensation for the value of the seized opium and to open up the opium trade, by force if necessary. The Chinese position was not unreasonable and Captain Elliot was not able to secure the concessions the English government wanted without starting a small war with the loss of many lives. Temple, who was the Foreign Minister at this time, fired Elliot and replaced him with someone who was less concerned about problems of drug addiction and the Chinese. Thus began the First Opium War. Note that the then British view of equity was that if they had to send an expedition of ships and soldiers to force the Chinese to allow the English to sell opium, then part of the terms must be that the Chinese pay the costs for the British ships and soldiers who invaded their country and forced them to keep poisoning their own people. See {621319} for Captain Elliot’s view.
The main feature of this law was to establish a very small tax on opiates. The tax was not significant as a revenue source, but was meant to make public that which had been a clandestine activity and also reduce the promotion of sales. Users had to fill out special Treasury Department forms to order their drugs, and none could be delivered to anyone who did not order on the special forms.
The Chinese authorities wanted to stop the distribution and use of opium, but the British merchants, in one of the more disgraceful episodes of British history, would not stop the trade and actually went to war when the Chinese tried to stop the opium trade. See {625957} for more on this incident and the First Opium War that followed.
British merchants and the East India Company made huge profits from the drug trade buying opium in India and selling it to China where it had become immensely popular. But when the Chinese (led by Lin Zexu) tried to ban the import of opium, the British fought two wars with China to force the reopening of the opium trade. At the end of the 20th century, some referred to England and the English Crown as the largest Drug Cartel in history.
“Tomans” were a quantity of money.
This is a particular fascinating quotation. First because the American liquor trade and Prohibition are paralleled to the opium trade in China. Second, is illustrates that the opium growing problem of the 21st century was virtually the same as that which existed at the beginning of the 20th century. The only difference is that the location moved from China to Afghanistan.
