Pubdate: Sun, 12 Dec 2004
Source: Taipei Times, The (Taiwan)
Page: 19
Copyright: 2004 The Taipei Times
Contact:  http://www.taipeitimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1553
Author: Bradley Winterton, Contributing Reporter
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?1043 (Christianity)

A WAR ON DRUGS OR A WAR ON TRADITION?

'Narcotic Culture' By Frank Dikotter Takes A Fresh Look At The Usual Take 
On History That Suggests The Use Of Opium By The Chinese Was Entirely Negative

Opium has always been associated, for better or worse, with China. And 
almost invariably it's been for the worse.

The myth, in both the Christian West and the communist East, has been that 
this pernicious substance was brought to the Celestial Empire by the 
perfidious British, forced onto a gullible people, and as a result 
accelerated the decline of a once-great nation.

This is simply untrue, says Frank Dikotter (supported by his two research 
assistants) in his controversial new book 'Narcotic Culture'. Opium was 
consumed at all levels of Chinese society, he argues, both as a highly 
effective medication and for relaxation and civilized pleasure. The British 
certainly cornered the trade of importing opium into China in the early 
19th century, but they were in no sense imposing a substance they knew to 
be harmful on a passive market.

Not only was opium already well-known and well-loved in China, it was also 
used throughout Europe in a far stronger form and without any legal 
controls, as a cure-all and the only reliable pain killer available.

If opium was so harmful to the Chinese, Dikotter asks, why was it so 
harmless when administered to the English? The reality was, he claims, that 
towards the end of the Victorian era a movement arose among evangelical 
Christians in the UK urging the abolition of the opium trade in Asia. The 
campaign was strongly resisted by the government in London. Eventually, 
however, its force became overwhelming, so that wherever the Communists 
extended their control in China they pointed to opium-use and prostitution 
(another subject for Dikotter, you feel) as the two most evil products of 
capitalism in its vicious colonial form. A policy of mass executions 
quickly put a stop to both products.

A hostile view of opium had meanwhile come to prevail almost world-wide. 
(Even so, Hong Kong didn't prohibit its use until 1945, and there were 
flourishing opium houses in Southeast Asia well into the 1950s.)

This is a brave and powerful book, not least because it questions readings 
of China's history that up to now have gained almost universal acceptance: 
The opium trade was a crime as great as slavery, the present trade in 
cigarettes (typically by American companies operating in Asia) is "a modern 
opium trade," opium symbolizes every kind of exploitation of poor nations 
by richer ones. How often have such scenarios been given unquestionable 
authority?

They're all wrong, says Dikotter. Opium was almost invariably smoked in 
moderation, and the "opium den" of legend was in reality a neat and 
well-ordered house offering tea, fine food and a refined and congenial 
atmosphere. What came in the wake of prohibition when it finally arrived 
were genuinely harmful intoxicants: heroin, morphine, hard liquor and tobacco.

Defenses of narcotic cultures are not new, but they've typically come from 
the mouths of enthusiastic users urging their pleasures on the rest of us. 
Frank Dikotter is not of this company.

Instead, he's Professor of the Modern History of China at London 
University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and is a widely 
admired historian.

His special area is China during its Republican era (1911 to 1949), and 
he's the author of celebrated books on concepts of race, sexual attitudes 
and the pursuit of eugenics, all in China, plus China's prison system 
during the Republican period (where he was the first Western researcher to 
get into selected archives, or indeed to find they were open at all).

In all of these books he has, to some extent or other, upset the 
apple-cart. The Communists, for instance, have long claimed that Republican 
China was a mess, and one they subsequently cleaned up. Not so, Dikotter 
argued.

There were many enlightened movements afoot, many attempts to modernize and 
rationalize, in China in the 1920s and 1930s. It was generally a civilized 
and enlightened time, and what came after was in almost every way a great 
deal worse.

Dikotter's analysis will be challenged, nonetheless. It wasn't, for 
instance, only evangelical Christians in the UK who thought opium was 
harmful to the Chinese. The government in Beijing thought so too, and from 
an earlier date, though they were always careful to make a distinction, as 
Dikotter tells us, between its use for medical purposes and its use -- 
characteristically when mixed with tobacco -- for pleasure. He also makes 
much of a distinction between drinking and smoking cultures (in other words 
West and East) that sounds rather generalized for a scholar who habitually 
rejects over-arching theories. The text is also quite short for its large 
subject matter (though there are 100 pages of notes and bibliography). But 
concision is appropriate to its nature: that of a clarion-call challenging 
scholars to a debate in an area where, up to now, there has effectively 
been none.

The wider implications of Dikotter's perspective are immense.

The current "war on drugs," for example, attains an entirely new look. It's 
nothing more than the modern continuation, he argues, of a wrong-headed 
19th century assault on the traditional and, in the main, harmless Asian 
use of narcotics (backed even then by evangelical Christians in the US with 
astute business motives behind their rhetoric).

'Narcotic Culture', then, is a ground-breaking, and indeed astonishing, 
book. It may not represent a final analysis, but there is more than enough 
within its pages to support the author's belief, expressed elsewhere, that 
the best way to win the modern "war on drugs" may well be to stop fighting 
it forthwith.

[PHOTO AND SIDEBAR]

(http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/photo/2004/12/12/2003152267)

Title: 'Narcotic Culture', by Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun 
Hurst, 319 pages [Hardback, UK]
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