The Age of Intoxication by Benjamin Breen;

Author:Benjamin Breen; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2019-08-12T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Three Ways of Looking at Opium

I must mention with gratitude the goodness of God Almighty, who has given opium to human beings for the relief of their miseries.

—THOMAS SYDENHAM, OBSERVATIONES MEDICAE (1683)

The workers in the warehouse have learned not to fear heights.

To look down, when standing at the highest levels, is to face death. The shelves seem to go up forever. Seven men standing at their full height, arms held upward to pass the spheres of the substance, one to the next, would reach only halfway to the top. Most keep their hair in tightly woven braids; a few wear turbans. The work has made them muscular. They spend their lives in this series of vast chambers. There is a geometric rigor here—a system of spheres, planes, and lines. The spheres are why this place exists. There are tens of thousands of them, each capable of killing more than a hundred people. The total contents of the chambers would likely be sufficient to poison each and every inhabit of Patna, the Indian city in which the workers live.1 But these workers do not deal in poison. They deal in opium.

Did the laborers in this warehouse sample the drug itself? Certainly, opium’s innocuous smell, a pleasant but cloying scent of flowers, would have been ever-present. And so, too, was the evidence of wealth. Vast wealth: the kind of wealth that builds cathedral-like warehouses, and moves empires to action.

The image of these anonymous laborers in an opium warehouse in northeast India was created in the 1850s. By this time, the global opium trade was old and comfortable. Its participants had famous names like Delano and Forbes. And although the opium trade would not become a true black market until well into the twentieth century, by the 1850s it was already a commerce of a substance that was (in some places and in some contexts) an illegal drug. In 1799, a public edict of China’s Jiaqing emperor had sought to ban imports of opium into Chinese territory.2 “The use of opium originally prevailed only among vagrants, and disreputable persons,” the edict lamented, “but it has since extended itself among the members and descendants of reputable families,” as well as groups like students and even some “officers of government who, infatuated in their attachment to this drug, make an habitual use of it.”3 The edict was duly reported in British newspapers, but was effectively ignored by the European opium merchants of Canton (present-day Guangzhou).

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