Narcotic Culture

"This book is very informative and thought-provoking in its discussions of the substance over which the war was fought. Opium was an illegal narcotic in China from the 18th century onwards, and the Chinese state crackdown against it particularly intensified during the 1830s. The standard narrative about opium – both in modern China and in a more muted way in the West – has long been that it was an apocalyptic blight for China. It was frequently thought that any Chinese person who tried opium would inevitably end up an opium slave, squandering their entire family’s fortune and destroying their health. This is a view that Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun try to nuance. They don’t deny that opium claimed many victims. But at the same time, they are usefully trying to complicate our understanding of the way that opium culture worked in China, from the early modern period through to the 20th century. They move away from the idea that opium turned every casual smoker into a pathetic victim, because when you think about it such a view is implicitly racist, in the assumptions that it makes about Chinese moral and physical weakness. In Britain, if somebody had a glass of wine , we wouldn’t assume they were one step away from becoming an alcoholic. What is also eye-opening about the book is how it illuminates the complexity of the way in which opium was used – not only its recreational but its medicinal importance. Dikotter and his co-authors argue that opium was China’s aspirin until the 1920s and 30s. They also fascinatingly describe the intricate aesthetics of opium culture. Opium was a social drug, and for the best families smoking it necessitated all kinds of exquisite objects. To be a truly discerning smoker, you needed the long, beautifully carved dark wood chaise longue to recline on, and the bejewelled pipes made of silver and ivory. This material culture that grew up around the drug turned smoking opium into the perfect act of conspicuous consumption – sending money up in smoke."