To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization
defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity,
opium--a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the
iron grip of dependence. Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage
caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the war on drugs,
which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the
beginning of Chinese communism. But, as Narcotic Culture brilliantly
shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the
drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the
failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition.
In a stunning historical reversal, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and
Zhou Xun tell this different story of the relationship between opium and
the Chinese. They reveal that opium actually had few harmful effects on
either health or longevity; in fact, it was prepared and appreciated in
highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints preventing excessive
use. Opium was even used as a medicinal panacea in China before the
availability of aspirin and penicillin. But as a result of the British
effort to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign
use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other
psychoactive substances. Narcotic Culture provides abundant evidence
that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of
prohibition produced a cure that was far worse than the disease.
Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is
part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and
part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition.
