The legal opiate of the masses

I’m posting this because there’s moves here in Hong Kong to topple statues of people with any connection with the Opium wars with China. That all the opium trade was selling poison in return for Chinese tea and porcelain. The reality at the time was that opium was legal in England. And was considered rather a wonder drug. Which it is to this day: morphine a powerful pain killer. I’ve had opium, in 1974 in Herat, Afghanistan. I had amoebic dysentery thanks to some meat at an outdoor market, hanging in a fly-blown shop. And someone said that opium would help. Which it did. And rest. And boiled eggs. And lying in the courtyard, dreaming opium day dreams. 

So. Anyway. Opium. The wars. With China. All horrible. And all because Queen Victoria was uncaring about the deaths of far away Chinamen. Or... maybe, this is opium, the wonder drug. 

Reading the revised edition of this acclaimed work is like renewing an acquaintance with an old friend. The 1981 book, though mainly written by Virginia Berridge, also included a section by Griffith Edwards. The new edition is solely the work of Virginia Berridge, a distinguished historian, who has produced a truly wonderful text. This provides the definitive overview of the widespread use of opium in Britain during the 19th and early 20th centuries. My only criticism of this tour de force is its subtitle: this suggests that the book is confined to the use of opium in England, whereas Scotland also looms large in the text in relation to topics such as opium growing, clinical practice, and research.
At the start of the 19th century, opium was extensively used in Britain for reasons ranging from recreational use and the doping of babies to a host of medicinal purposes. These included analgesia and treating conditions such as the malarial “ague,” rheumatism, neuralgia, diarrhoea, dysentery, delirium tremens, “excessive drinking,” and the trials of childbirth. Opium was so widely used, especially in areas such as the then undrained and malarial Fens, that it was taken for granted for self medication and as a means of inducing euphoria or oblivion. Acceptance of opium was so general that horticultural societies gave awards for growing the poppy and medical practitioners were among the prize-winners. Neither the medical nor the pharmaceutical professions were sufficiently well organised or influential to administer or control opium use. Berridge outlines how, as these professions gained in power, they redefined opium use as a cause for concern and regular opium use as “a disease.” This concern was accompanied by the growth of research into the ill effects associated with opium and the introduction of controls on its production and distribution.
The changed representation of opium in Britain provides the context for the evolution of current UK drug control policy. The contemporary “war on drugs” may be viewed as an extension of the debate on the status of opium in society. Drug policy reflects evidence on patterns of use and levels of harm. Even so, it is, above all else, a forum for opposing ideologies and the flexing of muscles by influential professions and interest groups.
This is a thoughtful, scholarly, and perceptive book. It should be essential reading not only for those with a historical interest in opium but for anyone interested in the ambivalent relation between humanity and psychoactive drugs.

In Afghanistan, I thought that the US troops there after 2003, should not have destroyed the crops. That was a boneheaded policy. Instead they should have set up morphine manufacturing families, let the locals run them, train them to do so, and then sell the morphine to the United Nations that could give it away as an analgesic in Africa, where it’s in short supply. Win-win-win. Drugs are here to stay. We can work with them, or try to ban them and end up worse off. The lesson, amongst others, from the Britain-China opium wars. 

Which, By the way, was it better or worse that Hong Kong is Hong Kong? That it existed? Because it only exists as a result of the Opium Wars. If not for them, it would either have continued as a small fishing village on a rocky island; or, at most, as another Chinese city. Meaning nowhere for the millions of refugees from the Communists in the 1940s to flee to. Think on ‘it.