What is the Opium Trade?
From China, the Company bought tea, silk and porcelain. The Chinese wanted silver in return. Over the next years tea became a very popular drink in England, and there was a fear that too much silver was leaving the country to pay for it. To stop this happening, the Company became involved in a triangular trade by smuggling opium a highly addictive and illegal drug from India into China.
History of opium in China - Wikipedia
The Company grew opium in India. They were looking for something that the Chinese would accept instead of silver, to pay for the goods they bought at Canton. Opium was a valued medicine which could deaden pain, assist sleep and reduce stress. But it was also seriously addictive and millions Chinese became dependent on the drug. Although opium smoking was a subject of fascinated horror for Europeans, the Company actually encouraged people to use the drug in China - sales of opium were extremely lucrative. As a result, millions of Chinese would die from opium addiction, and the very fabric of Chinese society was threatened.
Opium trade
After the Company's trade monopoly was abolished in , smuggling of opium into China by European private traders intensified. The Chinese state was deeply disturbed at this and threatened force. Britain was prepared to defend 'free trade' and, in , they went to war. These 'Opium wars' led to a humiliating defeat of the Chinese and a trade treaty which ceded Hong Kong to the British.
The Company Story
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. Historians do not have records that connect patients who were becoming addicted directly to opium unloaded on Boston wharves. But the traders returning from China are a likely source of the drug. It's not clear how much opium was coming into Boston in the early s, when doctors sound the alarm.
David Courtwright, author of "Dark Paradise: Boston merchants were the dominant American opium traders. The conversation about opium addiction continues in the BMSJ through the s and into the next decade. Many writers warn about accidental overdoses.
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Opium addiction does not reach epidemic proportions in the U. It was a legacy of the Civil War, when the opium derivative morphine was widely distributed to both Confederate and Union soldiers. But Courtwright says the real driver was the introduction of hypodermic needles, which delivered strong doses of morphine that produced immediate relief and were overused. Massachusetts would not be particularly hard hit during this opium epidemic, but as it builds, state public health officials worry.
Fitch Edward Oliver, a physician at what was then Boston City Hospital, distributes a questionnaire to physicians and druggists across Massachusetts.
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He compiles the results in an essay called " The Use and Abuse of Opium ," which is included in the state's third annual health report , published in Some communities say they do not have anyone addicted to opium, but Oliver concludes that "the opium habit is more or less prevalent in many parts of the state. In Boston, he says "two prominent druggists each have six habitual users" and "in parts of the city where those addicted to the habit mostly reside, the sales are much larger.
Oliver says women, particularly those in rural areas, appear to be at greatest risk, which he blames more on moral than physical causes. It was a change in prescribing behavior that brought the post-Civil War opium epidemic to an end. A temperance movement that lead to a ban on the sale and manufacturing of alcohol in Maine in was spreading across the country. Again, as in , doctors responding to questions about addiction in say, according to Oliver, it is "caused by the injudicious and often unnecessary prescription of opium.
Historians say it was a change in prescribing behavior that brought the post-Civil War epidemic to an end. Most of that fentanyl or the ingredients used to make it are produced in China and shipped to the U.
Now, in the early 21st century, it is a producer nation, especially when it comes to drugs like fentanyl," Courtwright says.