Opium's Orphans

The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs

P. E. Caquet

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789145595
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Upending all we know about the war on drugs, a history of the anti-narcotics movement's origins, evolution, and questionable effectiveness. Opium's Orphans is the first full history of drug prohibition and the "war on drugs." A no-holds-barred but balanced account, it shows that drug suppression was born of historical accident, not rational design. The war on drugs did not originate in Europe or the United States, and even less with President Nixon, but in China. Two Opium Wars followed by Western attempts to atone for them gave birth to an anti-narcotics order that has come to span the globe. But has the war on drugs succeeded? As opioid deaths and cartel violence run rampant, contestation becomes more vocal, and marijuana is slated for legalization, Opium's Orphans proposes that it is time to go back to the drawing board.

PART I

THE RISE OF
CONTROL

1

FORBIDDEN CITIES

Why did the Qing dynasty Chinese take to smoking opium? The question is fundamental, yet likely to remain forever shrouded in mystery. Humans have consumed opium since the dawn of historical time, and the use of the poppy’s sap is thought to have been pioneered in Asia Minor or Mesopotamia. The name originates in the Greek word opion, the root of both the Persian word afyun and the Chinese yapian, hinting at the route the drug took eastward through conquest or trade.¹ Opium had been used in China since the Tang dynasty (seventh to ninth centuries AD), but, as in the Indian subcontinent or Europe, it served as an ingredient in medicinal preparations. In China, opium was long used for combating diarrhoea, dysentery, sunstroke, coughing, asthma, and other pains and ailments.² A major change took place when tobacco arrived via the Philippines or the Indonesian archipelago.³ In Indonesia and the Malay peninsula, it had become local practice to blend opium with tobacco, forming a product known as madat and designed to be smoked. The custom spread to Taiwan, where local plants were thrown in to make a boiled concoction now named madak. After the Qing conquered Taiwan in 1683, Chinese seafarers – sailors, labourers, merchants – began to carry madak back home.⁴

Thus adulterated, opium entered the user’s body only in small quantities. From the mid-eighteenth century, though, it began to be smoked pure. Madak smoking had begun as a simple affair: on Taiwan, the blend was placed in a hollow clay pot and smoked through a bamboo tube and a filter made of coir fibres produced from coconut trees. Pure opium smoking, by contrast, was the object of sophisticated rituals and even connoisseurship. Opium was typically smoked reclining. Its preparation required dexterity and training, and it was difficult to perform for a beginner. The smoker, or a servant or waitress in a den, would first roll and knead a small ball of opium, with the help of two needles, over the flame of a lamp. This brought it to the right temperature and to a texture much like that of caramelized sugar. Still using one of the needles, the operator would cut a conical pellet from the ball and flatten this again to fit it on top of the smoking bowl. The bowl itself, an often ornate china or metal globe affixed to the pipe, contained a smaller aperture through which the smoke flowed. The pellet was pierced into a doughnut shape to leave this aperture free. The fumes were now ready to seep through. The smoker leaned the pipe towards the lamp’s flame, pressed his or her lips around the mouthpiece and sucked.⁵ A contemporary describes the experience:

On a miserable rainy day, or when you feel down, light up an opium lamp on a low table, recline face to face, pass the pipe around and inhale. At first there is a sudden feeling of refreshment, one’s head and eyes becoming very clear. Soon afterwards, there is quietude and profound well-being. After a while, one’s bones and joints become extremely relaxed and the eyes heavy. This is followed by a gradual descent into slumber, and detached from all worries, one enters a world of dreams and fantasies, completely free like a spirit: what a paradise!⁶

The ostensible explanation for the spread of recreational opium, especially pure, is that it emerged as a social marker. High Qing China was exceptionally prosperous; it saw the flowering of lively consumer and leisure cultures. Among the moneyed classes, the fashion was for exotic goods: carpets, glasses, pens, pictures, musical boxes, watches . . . Opium became another article of pleasure: urban and civilized, like its consumers.⁷ In an era when music halls, tea houses and other places of entertainment flourished, it joined the list of items of conspicuous and hedonistic consumption. Urban China was endowed with quarters of river boats filled with tea or smoking shops, many of them hosting prostitutes, and their prices favoured a clientele of rich merchants, literati and mandarins. These establishments began purveying madak and, later, pure opium. From there, opium spread into the better-appointed home or the dedicated public house or ‘den’.⁸ Soon, rich families employed opium butlers. They collected prize versions of the utensils: items encrusted with silver mimicking flowers and leaves, ornate lamps or pipes made of precious wood, jade or tortoiseshell, or carved out of ivory in the shape of elephants’ tusks. Opium even earned its own vocabulary, like oenology, with ‘yellow’, ‘long’ or ‘loose’ used to describe its various states, and the expression ‘to light the lamp’ became a euphemism for sharing the comfort of one’s smoking chamber.⁹

As opium spread inland from the southern coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, the volumes smoked rose slowly but surely. If one trusts the records of opium’s principal carrier at the time, the Dutch East India Company, Chinese imports in the first half of the eighteenth century were in the order of two hundred chests annually.¹⁰ (The chest, which would become a standard packaging and weight unit under the British East India Company, weighed around 60 kilograms (130 lb).) At this level, it is likely that most opium was still taken as medicine rather than mixed into madak. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, and after the emergence of pure opium smoking, imports had reached 4,000 chests.¹¹

They were destined to expand by a still greater multiple in the decades to come. If demand was stimulated by opium’s foreign mystique, its suppliers were eager to oblige. By the time of the Jiaqing Emperor’s 1813 prohibition decree, opium had come to be cultivated commercially in China, but this was confined to remote regions such as the far western Xinjiang or southwestern Yunnan. Domestic production remained negligible.¹² The overwhelming share of China’s opium came from India. Under the Mughals, opium had been traded freely and sold for export to local, Dutch, Portuguese or British traders.¹³ After the conquest of Bengal, this had increasingly fallen under British control, though it was not until 1773 that Governor General Warren Hastings had placed the opium supply under the monopoly of the East India Company. The idea was simply to milk the revenues from it for the Presidency of Bengal. A contractor bought the opium from the cultivators, then sold it to the government, who auctioned it on to private traders. After 1797 the contractor was eliminated and replaced by a government agency.¹⁴

The scale and complexity of the operations involved should remove any doubt that the trade run by the East India Company was anything but a consciously elaborated, profit-oriented enterprise. Bengal opium was cultivated in two geographical areas. (The poppy was also grown elsewhere in India, where the product was designated as ‘Malwa’, but for a while the lion’s share went to ‘Bengal’.) The first area was centred around Patna and the second around Ghazipur, both upriver on the Ganges from Calcutta. Two Bengal agencies, one for each region, sat atop a multi-level hierarchy involving British administrators, local agents, the landed aristocracy, village leaders and poppy farmers. The farmer was legally bound to sell to the company and forbidden to sell elsewhere. Sowing was completed by November, and by late January the poppy was in bloom. Harvesting required skill: the farmer incised the plant’s pod at exactly the right depth to let out its white juice while ensuring it neither hardened nor got lost. He or she then sun-dried that juice for several days, letting it coagulate and turn brown. In April or May, after the harvest, farmers and agents took the opium to rural collection centres.¹⁵

The Bengal agencies sold opium for distribution in India itself in the shape of rough bricks. The Chinese consumer, however, was reckoned to have finer tastes. Transportation by sea required that the product be kept in a moist state to maintain quality. It also needed to be free from adulteration and to carry proof of origin. It was accordingly processed for export in what became two vast factories in Patna and Ghazipur. After the opium had arrived and been weighed and checked for impurities, craftsmen began turning out ‘cakes’ or balls of opium approximately the size of a cannonball. Each ball was rolled into dried stems and poppy leaves and placed in a round, earthenware cup of the right size. This was a delicate task: each ‘caker’ was able to turn out no more than six cakes a day. Next, during August and September, the cakes were placed on high racks to dry out. This too was labour-intensive: to ensure that drying took place evenly, each cake was given a one-quarter turn once every six days. After that, the workers began to prepare the mango-wood chests in which the opium balls would be packed: fitted with compartments for forty balls, sealed with gum and covered in burlap, these were stamped with the East India Company’s mark. At last, after another three months, the chests were ready to be shipped downriver to Calcutta for auction. At their peak, the ‘Sudder’ factories, as they were called, of Patna and Ghazipur would each employ more than a thousand workers. During drying season, the racks, designed to hold tens of thousands of balls, were stacked from floor to ceiling, their upper shelves reachable only with a tall ladder.¹⁶

Save for one ill-fated attempt in 1781, the East India Company never handled the opium trade into China directly. Rather, the chests were sold to private merchants locally licensed as ‘country’ traders, who shipped it out in their own name or on behalf of co-investors. The company was well aware that opium was a forbidden article at destination, and this system provided it with plausible deniability.

The Qing authorities channelled all their European trade through Canton, where it came under the supervision of the provincial and city governors and the inspector of customs or Hoppo. All authorized trade was performed through a select group of Chinese merchants named the Hong. The East India Company carried out a significant amount of business in Canton, involving both the sale of articles other than opium, such as raw cotton, and the purchase of Chinese goods, especially tea. Indeed, until 1834 it held a monopoly on the British trade with China – the India ‘country’ traders forming an exemption. Until that date, the company also retained control over the Canton residences, known as ‘factories’, where the foreigners stayed. This enabled it to discipline, if needed, the private traders on whom it relied to sell opium. In turn, the ‘country’ traders sought to escape that supervision, the more freely to engage in the illicit trade. They discovered, for example, the trick of registering as consuls for third-party countries in nearby Macao (then a Portuguese colony). James Matheson, for example, at one point represented Denmark and Thomas Dent Sardinia, while others allegedly stood for Prussia, Hamburg or Poland.¹⁷

The charade continued at payment time. Beyond Canton runs an expanding delta filled with islands of differing sizes, and it was off these islands that the opium was unloaded, not in the city itself, where it would have been too dangerous to do so. Business dealings, however, took place at the factories or in nearby streets. There, the merchants contracted opium sales with Chinese brokers. The broker paid upfront, in silver, and received a delivery order exchangeable for opium down-river. The merchant in turn took the silver to the British factory and obtained a company bill for it. The bill could be exchanged for coin or goods back in India. The company used the silver to buy tea and other articles from the Hong.¹⁸

The Jiaqing Emperor’s anti-drug offensive began to make itself felt, in the south, from 1815. It first struck at Macao. The authorities took sixteen Chinese dealers into custody, and Portuguese ships were henceforth ordered to submit to cargo searches by local officers.¹⁹ As to Canton, at some point the opium merchants had become so bold as to move their unloading all the way up to Whampoa, a village on a flat island close to shore a mere 20 kilometres (12 mi.) from the city. The Canton governor and the Hoppo warned the Hong about such practices, who passed the message on to the East India Company. The company’s board of representatives on the ground, the ‘Supercargoes Committee’, seconded the warning. The merchants ignored it, declaring it a blatant attempt to extract ‘squeeze’ or corruption money from them. In 1821 the exasperated authorities laid charges of smuggling against the owners of four ships at Whampoa, impounded these, and told the men they could have their ships back when they moved out and pledged never to return. The smuggling trade moved further down the delta, to a more remote island named Lintin.²⁰

The foreign merchants may have thought they led dangerous lives – Charles Magniac called the campaign to move them from Whampoa ‘the hottest persecution we remember’ – but it was their Chinese buyers who took all the risk.²¹ It was they who took the opium to shore, refined it and distributed it inland. From the foreign clippers, they transferred the drug onto boats nicknamed ‘fast crabs’ and ‘scrambling dragons’: sleek craft built of bright, unpainted wood and designed for speed, combining sails and rows of oars and manned by up to sixty or seventy sailors. While evading the Chinese navy’s junks was their primary purpose, these boats were equipped for combat. Scrambling dragons and fast crabs were known to fire their guns at both patrolling authorities and rivals. When cornered, their sailors were ready for hand-to-hand fighting.²²

These buyers boiled down the opium to turn it into a more concentrated, smokeable product locally termed chandu.²³ Sometimes they sold the raw paste on. History does not record who the opium kingpins were on the Chinese side, but they must have existed. Some of the Hong probably participated in opium dealing, though the richest of them, a man of reputedly fabulous wealth named Howqua, is believed not to have engaged in it.²⁴ The evidence nevertheless attests to the role of wealthy single buyers or buyer syndicates. On its own, operating such equipment as the fast crabs and dragons required significant capital. Just one chest of opium was an expensive item, equivalent to $10,000 or more in today’s money, and Jardine Matheson’s accounts show individual buyers paying for hundreds of chests over short periods.²⁵

Gangs, possibly involved in other forms of crime, took the drug further inland. There, as do modern drug dealers, their members and underlings faced the risk of getting caught – and the penalty of transportation or death – and of assault from rivals or extortionists. According to a local administrator, hundreds of ‘brigands’ belonging to secret societies banded together to pursue the trade in the regions of Hunan, Hubei a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on Weights and Currencies
• Prologue
• Part I: The Rise of Control
• Part II: Prohibition Triumphant
• Part III: The System Challenged
• Closing Observations
• Appendix I: Opium Smoker Numbers in Nineteenth-Century China
• Appendix II: League-Era Opium Regime Statistics
• Appendix III: Post-War Drug Seizures
• References
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index