For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.
I have just started reading Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), by Amitav Ghosh. Having read his Ibis trilogy, ordering every new book as soon as it became available, I was familiar with the story through Ghosh’s riveting fiction, but it was still shocking to read his historical account of the opium trade in the British colonial era. The rapaciousness, the aggression, the cynical disregard for human life is almost beyond belief; but we see in it the features of the opiate and opioid crisis of today, as a succession of wars on drugs have only served to exacerbate the problem. Ghosh reminds us that the poppy has been used for millennia, but it was under British colonialism that the scale of its exploitation was first ramped up to “narco-state” proportions. He further proposes throughout Smoke and Ashes that we shift our human-centered focus and consider the poppy as itself a powerful actor in this story.
Poppies are widely associated with sleep, war, and death. Here’s an article on the history of the poppy, which was first used for medicinal purposes by the Sumerians back in 3,400 B.C.E. And here, just for fun, is the scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and the Lion are overcome in a field of poppies.
Ghosh gives a brief introduction to his new book below:
Smoke and Ashes is the story of how, under the aegis of the British Empire, India became the world’s largest producer of opium between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the different conditions under which opium was produced in various regions, with lasting effects for those areas. It also traces the transformative impact that the opium trade had on India, China, Britain and the United States, with profound long-term consequences for the birth of the modern world, and of contemporary globalism. Many of the world’s biggest corporations got their start in the colonial opium trade. But the opium economy also had significant effects at the microlevel, influencing migration and settlement patterns, and touching upon millions of lives. . .
This story is remarkable, and revelatory, because at the heart of it lies a plant—the opium poppy. While many other plants, like sugarcane, tobacco and cotton, have played major roles in history, their importance has faded over time. The opium poppy, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength; it is now more powerful than ever, manifesting itself in the devastating opioid crises that currently grip the globe.
Harper Collins India, 2023
The Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860)
The British first created a captive market (and a famine) by forcing Indian farmers to grow opium poppies instead of food crops, then illegally smuggling the opium into China, giving rise to a massive addiction problem, and then going to war with China—not once, but twice—to force it to allow the opium into the country in the name of free trade. (See this useful learning module on the opium wars from the Asia Pacific curriculum in California.) We see comparable strategies being played out in the opioid crisis of the past three decades, in the highly lucrative trafficking of illicit and prescription opioid drugs, the creation of a nation of addicts, and soaring numbers of opioid overdose deaths (OODs).
“Opiates” vs. “opioids”
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Although these terms are often used interchangeably they are different: Opiates refer to natural opioids such as heroin, morphine and codeine. Opioids refer to all natural, semisynthetic, and synthetic opioids—fentanyl, for example.
Starting in the mid-1990s Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, deliberately created a demand—and millions of addictions—by flooding the market with a prescription opioid drug Oxycontin, dispensed to unsuspecting patients by their doctors. In 2017 alone, as a direct result of these practices, there were more than 17, 000 deaths in the United States from prescription opioids. See Pain Pill Pushers, by fellow A-to-Z Challenge participant, English Explorer, for an account of Purdue Pharma’s criminally deceptive and wildly profitable marketing of Oxycontin.
Although a high-profile lawsuit eventually brought attention to the dangers of Oxycontin, opioid overdose deaths have continued to rise, in large part due to the introduction of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, into the global market. In 2023, for the first time in U.S. history, fatal opioid overdoses peaked above 112,000, with young people and people of color among the hardest hit. Drug policy experts and people living with addiction say that this scourge now eclipses every previous drug epidemic, from crack cocaine in the 1980s to the prescription opioid crisis of the 2000s (NPR).
In a video interview with The Wire, From Opium Wars to Opioid Crisis, . . . How the Poppy Made and Unmade West and East, Ghosh talks about the lucrative U.S. opium trade with China. His January 2024 article in The Nation, Merchants of Addiction: The Blue-Blood Families That Made Fortunes in the Opium Trade, is a lengthy excerpt from Smoke and Ashes, focusing on the merchants, mostly from New England, who made their fortunes and their family name in the opium trade. An earlier article by Martha Bebinger, How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston,
reminds us that the opium trade was a global affair that affected and continues to affect us all, not just India, China, and Britain. Ghosh ends his piece in The Nation by noting that: “[i]f the role that privileged, upper-class white Americans played in the history of the opium trade were better known, it would surely be more difficult, if not impossible, to impose xenophobic, anti-immigrant framings on issues concerning narcotics, as is still so often done in the United States.” It was not “Oriental depravity” that was to blame for Chinese opium addiction, but a deliberate policy that destroyed the lives of millions of people.
Two opium smokers in a Shanghai, China, den in the early 20th century
The only ray of hope Ghosh offers in his story is that if we are to address problems of global proportions like the opioid crisis or the climate crisis, we will need to work together to do so, cultivating a transnational network. He discusses successful anti-opium campaigns in China and in India during the British colonial era. (Then again, he reminds us that “[i]n those days the trade was operated by colonial regimes, whereas today much of it is run by criminal networks that cannot be controlled by governments, especially in a world that is increasingly destabilized by war, internecine conflict and climate change” (Smoke and Ashes, 306).) He cites Indian social reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who said in 1907, “I have always felt a sense of deep humiliation at the thought of this [opium] revenue, derived as it is practically from the degradation and moral ruin of the people of China” (Smoke and Ashes 137). Indians, he writes, should remember these words in the current climate in which they feel aggrieved and threatened by China.
In the United States, if we are to curb the soaring opioid death rates due to fentanyl trafficking, China and the U.S. will need to cooperate. Perhaps that prospect is the best news of all.
Tell Me Another 