Opium Trade Quotes

We made a mistake. We paid the farmers not to grow poppies. So all the other farmers started planting poppies. If we didn’t pay them, they had the poppies [to sell.]

I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it.

Many Chinese saw opium as a poison introduced by foreign enemies.

The British illicit trading of opium in China was rapidly staining the British character with deep disgrace

If you make a treaty first with the United States and settle the matter of the opium trade, England cannot change this, though she should desire to do so.

The President wishes the Japanese to be very prudent about the introduction of opium, and if a treaty is made, he wishes that opium may be strictly prohibited.

The problem, therefore, reduced itself to [opium] production in Persia, Turkey, and Jugoslavia. The first of these countries declared that it could not restrict production without a loan of ten million tomans, customs autonomy, and a financial moratorium. The other two said that until other means of livelihood had been found for their peasant populations, production could not be limited.

John Jacob Astor, the first American multimillionaire and the richest man in the country at the time of his death in 1848, was an accomplished smuggler. Astor engaged in a variety of illicit trading ventures, smuggling opium …, trading with the enemy during the war of 1812, and clandestinely exchanging banned alcohol with Native Americans for furs.

The East India Company established a monopoly over the production of opium, shortly after taking over Bengal.

The great increase of the contraband opium trade was the cause of frequent comment on the Upper Yangtsze. It seems to parallel what one hears of the liquor-smuggling in America, for I was told that large numbers were being attracted by the great profits, and people of hitherto unimpeachable reputation were engaged in the trade; so that in this way, as well as by the use of the drug, numerous people were being debauched.... Caravans of the drug have been brought over by the soldiers from Yunnan and Kueichow, where the planting has been encouraged and even insisted upon by the officials, who in some cases have taxed it when planted, when in blossom, and when the drug is gathered.

There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

The effect of the [opium prohibition] edict was electrical. Farmers stopped cultivation with little resistance. Smokers abandoned the habit by millions; it became unfashionable to smoke in public; and the young were constrained not to acquire the habit…

It appears that the English think the Japanese... are fond of opium, and they want to bring it here also.

In the United States, at least one druggist out of every ten exists by means of profits from the sale of habit-forming drugs, of which, of course, opium and its derivatives are most important.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Any foreigner or foreigners bringing opium to the Central land, with design to sell the same, the principals shall most assuredly be decapitated, and the accessories strangled.

Although the Chinese had used opium as a medicine, there was no widespread addiction before the British arrived.

No nation alone, however great its vigilance, can erect a barrier high enough to keep out narcotics when opium is grown or drugs are manufactured without limitation or restriction. The nations of the world must be aroused to cooperate.

No opium is exposed for sale in the shops, probably because it is a contraband article, but it is used with tobacco in all parts of the Empire. The Chinese indeed consider the smoking of opium as one of the greatest luxuries, and if they are temperate in drinking, they are often excessive in the use of this drug.

In 1776 one-fifth of America’s trade ran through the Middle East and that trade involved, in essence, large barrels of rum from Boston in particular, which were sent out of New England to the Ottoman Empire. There it was dumped and the barrels were filled up with opium. From there, the ships went to China and they dumped the opium in China and filled it up with tea and came back to New England.

All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.

Too often, stories about Afghanistan center around the various wars, the opium trade, the war on terrorism. Precious little is said about the Afghan people themselves - their culture, their traditions, how they lived in their country and how they manage abroad as exiles.

The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use of India to flood China with opium.

The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [...] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War.

We found that we had captured, with the Philippines, an opium problem