The war on drugs from the past 100 years is a farce. It's always been about controlling people and making money from criminalizing an activity. A black market grows, and money is to be made there. The U.S. government has been and still is a major player in the drug trade, as I recently posted about.

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The current drug was is a war on people who use drugs. They don't harm others, only themselves, but apparently you don't own yourself according tot he governmental authoritarians. So they have to control you and lock you into cages for using drugs they don't authorize you to use.

The prison population has grown faster than the population growth of the USA. The U.S. has about 5% of the world's population but about 22% of the world's prisoners. Nearly 1% of Americans are in jail.

The war on drugs is really a war for drugs and has a longer history that our past 100 years.

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War for Drugs in the 19th Century

Great Britain has a history of being a power-hungry beast trying to dominate the rest of the world, along with other conquering nations of the time. Money always plays a central part in expanding empires, and getting into the drug trade was a key source of money for Britain.

Britain exported opium from India and sold it to China to buy luxuries that westerners wanted, such as silk, porcelain, teas, spices, etc. They needed the cash inflow from drugs for the cash outflow of buying luxuries, otherwise they would have gone bankrupt to sustain their appetites.

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Opium in China

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That's a lot of opium use, but as the graph shows, it wasn't always used heavily at all.

Opium wasn't always desired, even when it was first introduced in the 7th century as a relief for pain or tension. Later, in the 17th century, opium became used in larger quantities when tobacco use spread from North America to China, and smoking opium was adopted into the normalized smoking practice. Opium addiction increased, and imports increased as a result.

After nearly a century of use, the problem grew to such an extent that the Yongzheng emperor prohibited the sale and smoking of Opium in 1729. The trade still continued. In 1796, the Jiaqing emperor outlawed opium import and cultivation. But still the opium trade grew.

The Portuguese first found out about the middle-man profitability of selling Indian opium to China. Britain soon followed in 1773 and become the top supplier of opium to the Chinese market.

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The Opium Wars

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All the buying up of luxurious goods from China required silver to be paid as the only accepted payment. Britain was running out of sterling, and this was inflating trading costs all around. Getting in on the highly profitable cheap drug trade ensured the British would have a steady inflow of money to poor back into China for buying luxury items. The Chinese were hooked on opium, and the British loved it. It was their cash cow. Without it, they would have no cash flow coming in to pay for all the things they were buying up.

The British East India Company became a very rich enterprise, dealing the drug trades out to country traders that would not implicate the company directly in selling opium to China. This corporation was Britain's largest and was under the protection of the Crown. It could almost do anything it wanted.

China kept trying to get the West to stop selling opium, it knew who was behind all of this. The country was falling apart, with drug use running into government and military operations. The Qing dynasty tried to enforce more opium restrictions, and this led to two conflicts with the West known as the Opium Wars. All this exploitation, control, and war, just for money, luxury and wealth. At the end of the second war, losing again, the Chinese rulers were forced to legalize opium.

Not only did Britain want to dictate that another country allow them to flood their country with addictive drugs that destroy lives, but they had the added hypocrisy of having outlawed opium in in Britain. The only reason they were forcing China to allow opium, while they banned it themselves, was for money.

A Chinese court official Lin Zexu even wrote to Queen Victoria and told her:

"By what principle of reason should foreigners send a poisonous drug, which involves in destruction those very natives of China? We have heard that in your own country opium is prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity – this is a strong proof that you know full well how hurtful it is to mankind.

Turning people into junkies wasn't a reality the queen wanted other people to know about. And being called out on it made an enemy out of Lin Zexu.

Receiving no response, Lin Zexu burned up 20,000 chests equaling 1,400 tons of opium. Queen Victoria responded by sending 16 battleships to sink China's old fleet, and sparked the beginning of the infamous Opium Wars. The dominating controller just wanted things her way, and when things didn't go her way she waved her hand and ordered people to go murder others. A war for drugs, not a war on drugs.

After the battle, and the trade legalized, Hong Kong was in the hands of the Brits. This is how Hong Kong remained as a British commonwealth into the 1990s. It all traces back to the Opium Wars and the biggest drug dealer of them all: Queen Victoria. Taking the population size of China and the drug use at the time, makes the Queen the largest drug dealer in history.

Conquering and dominating other people is nasty behavior in human history that we apparently haven't gotten over yet. We're still stuck in this mindset and have some growing to do. When are we going to grow up?

I think it's when we seek truth and moral comprehension more. We need to realize and accept the importance of moral truth in life to determine the quality and condition of our lives. This will help us engage in more self-control and cast of the chains of external control from centralized authority. Otherwise, we will continue to be led as pawns in a game, ready to be sacrificed in conflict after conflict.

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References:

• Opium trade
• History of opium in China
• Opium Wars

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Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.

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