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Opium in the Far East
The poppy is a magnificent red flower.
From the seed head, after an incision is made exudes a thick
white juice abounding in opium. No one can say definitely just
where and when this opium juice was first diverted from
medicinal use and employed as a narcotic. Probably it was in the
Mohammedan Orient where it is still used extravagantly. However,
it is known that at the beginning of the eighteenth century
Chinese traders introduced it into Formosa, and from there to
the opposite coasts of China. Today, the periphery of its use
includes all the Far East, touches Australia in the South,
Manchukuo in the North and spans the Pacific Ocean to the coast
of America.
The use of opium is a passion, a passion
glibly justified by those who, finding their immediate
environment insuperable, seek escape into the world of unreality
created by the opiate. And it is, in fact, an enchanting world
tot he smoker of opium, a world devoid of bodily pain and
emotional attrition. Still, the price of purchase for this dream
world is far too high for the ordinary being. It is a price
weighed in human degradation and measured in human misery. It is
the price of vice.
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In China alone, 40 million people are
enthralled by the pleasures of opium, while many
millions more contract the habit yearly in India,
Malacca, and Siam. Nor has opium poisoned merely the
yellow races. for among the Caucasians in Europe, and
particularly in America, the drug is taken in greater
quantities than is generally known. Concerning the
domestic traffic, the Treasury Department recently
reported that it "continued to be a problem of
major magnitude." |
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Arrests during 1937 for violations of the
drug laws alone approached 3,500.
In the Far East, the sale and consumption of
opium has been big business for more than a century. Opium
revenues have not only contributed to the support of Oriental
governments but have been complacently received by the British
and French authorities in the Far East. With characteristic
realism the Japanese military staffs have found opium an
unspectacular though highly effective weapon for subduing the
populations of the confiscated Chinese provinces. And it is this
deliberate drugging of China's hard working millions by the
Japanese that, as yet, has not received its deserved publicity.
In Manchukuo, Jehol, Darien, Tientsin, and Shanghai, the
Japanese are now manufacturing and lavishly dispensing hundreds
of tons of the habit forming drug.
It is considered a military and economic
tactic, as much a part of the Japanese strategy in the
subjugation of China as was the deliberate bombardment of
Shanghai. It is their purpose to poison and corrupt the Chinese
farmers, the workmen, the students, so that in the future they
will be unable to resist the invader either morally or
physically.
"Wherever Japan goes, drug manufacture
and traffic follow," says Stuart J. Fuller, United States
representative to the League of Nations. According to his
official reports the Japanese have legalized the narcotic trade
in China while, at the same time, sternly forbidding the use of
opiates to all Japanese subjects.
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In the face of these facts the
Chinese authorities have attempted to restrict the opium
trade by drastically punishing violators of the
anti-drug laws. They not only registered and
scientifically treated two million addicts, but executed
nearly a thousand law violators last year. But the
futility of such enforcement in the face of Japanese
propagation of the traffic is obvious. The firing squad
is a useless cure because the subtle seductions of an
official drug-peddler can create more addicts in one
year than the Chinese can kill off in ten. Still the
Chinese continue to make an intelligent effort to
register, cure, and rehabilitate as many addicts as
their limited financial resources will permit. |
It is their hope that such a policy of
good faith will result in the cooperation of foreign governments
heretofore above and beyond the Chinese law. For such purposes
they have appealed to the League of Nations.
As a result of specific charges made at
Geneva that their oriental Colonial establishments have been
partially supported by revenues from the official sale of opium
to Chinese residents, the British authorities are becoming
increasingly restive. Colonial administrators meeting in
Bangkok, Siam decided gradually to reduce the drug traffic. Both
the Straits settlement and federated Malay States have set up a
reserve fund to take the place of opium reserves, which in the
case of Malaya amounted to $45,000,000. however, the Hong Kong
authorities failed to participate in this agreement. To them the
loss of opium revenues constitutes a serious financial problem,
especially serious at the present time when huge sums are being
spent for the island's defenses.
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Instead, the Hong Kong government has
advertised warnings against heroin (a derivative of
opium) in all the local papers. the official advertising
copy warns against the mistake belief that heroin will
cure venereal disease and reduce the pain of syphilis. |
Unfortunately, the use of drugs falls into a
category of vice similar to that of prostitution, that age-old
malady of the race which there is no antidote, despite the
economic theories of the Marxists, and the puritanism of
Christians. The dope traffic once enfranchised and legally
restrained is incompatible with morality. While to
disenfranchise and to suppress the traffic is merely to drive it
underground where its revenues will subsidize the criminal
elements of society. perhaps, however, there is more than one
alternative.
For many people believe that with the
education of the masses, and the end of poverty will come a
diminution in all forms of vice, including the pleasures and the
miseries of opium.
Source: Current History, March 1938
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