Opium Suppression Research Articles

The political economy of opium reduction in Myanmar: the case for a new ‘alternative development’ paradigm led by and for opium poppy farmers

ABSTRACT Opium use and cultivation have flourished in the northeast of Myanmar for at least 250 years. From the 1960s onwards, various state and non-state actors have resorted first to forced eradication, and more recently to ‘alternative development’ programmes to achieve opium suppression. There is no indication, however, that any of these strategies can effectively bring down opium cultivation, unless the structural factors that lead farmers to grow opium in the first place are directly confronted and addressed. The concept of ‘alternative development’ needs to be urgently redefined to challenge the dominant political and economic paradigms and place opium farmers at the forefront of this transformation.

A Slow March from Social Evil to Harm Reduction: Drugs and Drug Policy in Vietnam

Abstract The suppression of drug consumption and trade is high on the Government of Vietnam’s agenda. To accomplish this goal, Vietnam employs repressive policies that often contravene international human rights law. Among the most detrimental and problematic policies are the incarceration of drug users in compulsory treatment centers, and the stigmatization and abuse of consumers by the police. Vietnamese drug policy is, however, slowly changing in the face of one of Asia’s worst ongoing HIV epidemics. While the Communist Government of the early-1990s designated illicit drugs as a “social evil” to be eradicated through punitive and often repressive means, the recent implementation of harm reduction approaches have reduced the level of needle sharing, and thus HIV transmission. This briefing will explore the current trends in drug consumption, production, and trafficking before looking at the key harms and threats associated with drugs in Vietnam. This will be followed by a summary of Vietnam’s drug policies, including the country’s approach to drug treatment, harm reduction, and illicit opium suppression: Vietnam is one of a small number of states to have suppressed illicit opium production, an intervention that centred upon coercive negotiations with limited alternative development. The briefing will conclude with some tentative recommendations for reform and thoughts on what could be expected from Vietnam during the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016).

Myanmar. Opium and empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating consumption in British Burma By Ashley Wright Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 214. Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Opium and empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating consumption in British Burma By ASHLEY WRIGHT Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 214. Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi:10.1017/S0022463414000757 Opium was a mainstay of colonial revenues throughout Asia during the high colonial age. The Dutch, French, Spanish, and, briefly, Americans all sold opium to their subjects through one state-led scheme or another. Britain was the key player in this vast enterprise. It sold opium to its own subjects in India and Southeast Asia and to legions of others in China and elsewhere. And it was largely British opium from the poppy fields of Bengal that flowed through government and private hands to smokers in the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and countless other markets in Asia. Opium and empire in Southeast Asia tells a small part of this large story. It traces how Britain went about selling opium to its subjects in British Burma and how its officials managed to square this practice with both their imperial priorities and their imperial consciences. Opium was significant enough in the kingdom of Burma for King Bodawhpaya (r. 1782-1819) to declare it a capital crime. Yet, as the English East India Company moved into Arakan and Tenasserim--outlying territories of the kingdom's large mandala--after the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824, among the first institutions it imported from British Bengal was the retail opium-licensing system, alongside similar revenue-farming arrangements for gambling and toddy shops. A certain amount of trial and error followed. A.D. Maingy, the first commissioner of Tenasserim, became an early critic of selling opium to native subjects. By the time the Company seized Lower Burma (Pegu) following the Second Anglo-Burmese War, certain assumptions about opium were in place. In this discourse, it was perfectly all right to peddle opium to some colonial subjects, including Chinese, Indians, and certain local ethnic minorities such as the Shan and Kachin; no ill effects appeared to accompany the practice among these groups. But it was not all right to peddle opium to ethnic Burmans, whose childlike ways and self-indulgent habits made them prey to addiction, sloth, and crime. Britain's solution to this dilemma, never perfectly executed, was to regulate opium sales so that consumption among Burmans was curtailed, if not completely eliminated, and so that profits flowed freely from selling opium to the others. This strategy was the essence of Chief Commissioner Charles Aitchison's landmark 1881 memorandum, adopted as law in 1891. Wright's book emphasises the recurring policy debates around this strategy--as Britain completed its conquest of Burma in 1885, executed the India-wide Royal Commission on Opium inquiry of the 1890s (in response to anti-opium sentiments in Britain), confronted rising international and much-resented American pressure in the twentieth century in one international opium conference after another, and as reformist Burmese nationalists agitated for prohibition from within the colony itself. To the end, as Wright amply demonstrates, colonial officials nimbly adopted the rhetoric of opium suppression even as they employed every strategy possible to prevent or delay the end of government opium sales. …

Harms caused by China's 1906–17 opium suppression intervention

Between 1906 and 1917 China (under the Imperial and then Republican regimes) enacted a highly effective intervention to suppress the production of opium. Evidence from British Foreign Office records suggest that the intervention was centred, in many areas, upon a highly repressive incarnation of law enforcement in which rural populations had their property destroyed, their land confiscated and/or were publically tortured, humiliated and executed. Crops were forcefully eradicated and resistance was often brutally suppressed by the military. As few farmers received compensation or support for alternative livelihood creation the intervention pushed many deeper into poverty. Importantly, the repressive nature of the opium ban appears to have been a contributing factor to the fragmentation of China, highlighting the counter-productivity of repressive interventions to reduce drug crop production.

Evaluating Economic Warfare: Lessons from Efforts to Suppress the Afghan Opium Trade

In the mid-2000s, U.S. anti-opium policy intensified with a goal of reducing the resources available to Afghan insurgents. To achieve this objective, I show that opium suppression efforts must accurately distinguish between insurgent and non-insurgent suppliers. The required level of accuracy will be particularly high if demand for opium is inelastic and if the insurgents’ initial market share is large. Empirically, I show that demand for Afghan opium is relatively inelastic, that the market share of Taliban-heavy areas is large, and that enforcement has primarily impacted non-Taliban territory. Consequently, anti-opium efforts have significantly increased the drug-trade resources flowing to the Taliban.

Insights for Contemporary Drug Policy: A Historical Account of Opium Control in India and Pakistan

Opium, as a tradable commodity, has a long history in the Indian sub-continent. This article offers a history of the production and distribution of both licit and illicit opium from 1773 to the present day in order to explore the lessons that the experiences of Indian and Pakistani can offer to contemporary drug policy. Four insights for contemporary drug control policy are developed from the historical analysis: (1) post-independence Pakistan and India illustrate the difficulties of controlling a regulated, licit, opium industry; (2) the relationship between Chinese and Indian opium production and exports may suggest that competition can be an effective impetus to production suppression; (3) developmental approaches to reducing production can limit the damages caused by opium suppression; (4) effective suppression requires alterations to institutional and structural conditions that facilitate production (i.e. reducing violent conflict, improving civil and criminal justice institutions efficiency or extending transport infrastructures).

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s (review)

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s (review)

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s–1920s. By Joyce A. Madancy. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 227. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. xvi, 430 pp. $50.00 (cloth).

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s–1920s. By Joyce A. Madancy. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 227. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. xvi, 430 pp. $50.00 (cloth). - Volume 64 Issue 2

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin. The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s

AddictionVolume 100, Issue 3 p. 414-415 The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin. The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s SARAH MARS, SARAH MARS Public and Environmental Health Research Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UKSearch for more papers by this author SARAH MARS, SARAH MARS Public and Environmental Health Research Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 October 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2005.01045.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume100, Issue3March 2005Pages 414-415 RelatedInformation

Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China. Frank Dikötter , Lars Laamann , Zhou XunThe Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s. Joyce A. Madancy

<i>Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China</i>. Frank Dikötter , Lars Laamann , Zhou Xun<i>The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s</i>. Joyce A. Madancy

The troublesome legacy of Commissioner Lin: the opium trade and opium suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s

In 1908, a very public crusade against opium was in full swing throughout China, and the provincial capital and treaty port of Fuzhou was a central stage for the campaign. This, the most successful attempt undertaken by the Chinese state before 1949 to eliminate opium, came at a time when, according to many historians, China's central state was virtually powerless. This volume attempts to reconcile that apparent contradiction. The remarkable, albeit temporary, success of the anti-opium campaign between 1906 and 1920 is as yet largely unexplained. How these results were achieved, how that progress was squandered and why China's opium problem proved so tenacious are the questions that inspired this volume. The attack on this social problem was led by China's central and provincial authorities, aided by reformist elites and seemingly supported by most Chinese. The anti-opium movement relied on the control and oversight provided by a multilayered state bureaucracy, the activism and support of unofficial elite-led reform groups, the broad nationalistic and humanitarian appeal of the campaign, and the cooperation of the British government. The extent to which the Chinese state was able to control the pace and direction of the anti-opium campaign and the evolving nature of the political space in which the elite reformers publicized and enforced that campaign are the guiding themes of this analysis.

‘In My Heart I Opposed Opium’: Opium and the Politics of the Wang Jingwei Government, 1940–45

The Wang Jingwei government has been reviled as the Chinese collaborationist regime par excellence, and one of the major indictments against it was its involvement with the alleged Japanese ‘narcotisation policy’. The politics of collaboration, however, were complex, and are not fully captured by a one-dimensional portrayal of the leading collaborators as ‘national traitors’. The Wang Jingwei government was, indeed, complicit in facilitating the Japanese-sponsored opium monopoly during its early years, although it played only a marginal role in running this monopoly. At the same time, as this article seeks to demonstrate, the regime did attempt to continue implementing the pre-war Nationalist government’s opium suppression programme. Its motives were mixed: it wanted to bolster its legitimacy by portraying itself as the successor regime to the pre-war Nationalist government, and, also like that government, it sought to bolster its parlous finances by recourse to an opium tax. Political developments in Japan in 1943 enabled the Wang Jingwei government to gain control of the opium monopoly, and from 1944 until its demise it made a genuine attempt to implement a policy of opium suppression. This policy achieved some success. The government, however, never resolved the ambiguity between the political aims and the financial needs that drove its policy; nor did it effectively overcome the demoralisation produced by years of open trafficking; and it was never able to curb the Japanese military’s narcotic operations.

Unearthing Popular Attitudes toward the Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Late Qing and Early Republican Fujian

It has long been axiomatic among historians of late imperial and early Republican China that opium was a plague on the Chinese people-sapping their willpower and stamina, weakening the military, draining the Qing treasury while padding the coffers of the colonial Indian government, and reinforcing China's international image as an empire in decline. The settlements with Great Britain following the Opium War of 1839-1842 and the Arrow War of 1858-1860 ultimately compelled China to drop its own long-standing legal restrictions against the importation of foreign opium and sparked the growth of a lucrative domestic opium economy that eventually extended throughout the Qing empire.' By the turn of the twentieth century, opium was perceived as having caused widespread social dysfunction, and the drug served as a powerful metaphor for China's political somnambulism in the age of Western imperialism. In short, China had developed a serious opium problem-and along with it, a public

Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839-1952 (review)

Reviewed by: Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839–1952 Kathryn Meyer Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839–1952. (Berkeley: University of) We all already know that opium is an evil that brings dependency and destruction in its wake wherever it is habitually consumed. Books abound that demonstrate this point. Whether the market is Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries or American ghettos of the present day, vulnerable communities become more so when drug dealers arrive, making them easier targets for social and political dependency. Thus it is no surprise that opium sales were part of the larger process of European colonization of Asia. What has not been described so commonly are the subsidiary effects of the narcotics traffic. The sixteen contributors to Opium Regimes make significant strides in correcting this need by analyzing institutions that developed around the sale and consumption of opium in China in the early half of the 20th century. The results may challenge many of the assumptions we have about the opium trade. For example, we learn that early British opium sales and the movement to end it brought together diverse national groups and so contributed to early globalization, while anti-opium organization played a role in the development of budding Chinese nationalism and in the reassertion of state control. By “regimes” the editors mean any system used by authorities to control certain practices, in this case opium consumption. Thus the various articles include not just governments, international regulations, but the sort of organizations that we might consider as civil society. For instance Joyce Mandancy looks at Chinese bureaucratic leadership in the Anti-opium crusade in Fujian in 1906 to 1916. She shows the way that local elites used the programs sponsored by the central and provincial Chinese governments to promote their own control and nurture a budding nationalism. The essays involved approach the problem from a diverse group of disciplines and national points of departure. For instance, Gregory Blue, in “Opium for China: The British Connection,” describes how the British opium trade which led to war with China in 1840 and the subsequent opening of that country to foreign trade, acted to bring together multinational groups both in carrying out the traffic and in opposing it. “Drug Operations by Resident Japanese in Tianjin” by Motohiro Kobayashi describes the way that any attempts made by the Japanese consular authorities to control narcotics trafficking by Japanese nationals and Koreans as Japanese subjects living in China was undermined by the Japanese military who received under-the-table kickbacks from those in the business. “Opium/Leisure/Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption” by Alexander Des Forges describes the drug culture that grew out of opium smoking and the ways it was described in popular literature of the 1920s. Looking at the regimes formed by both the trafficking and control of the drug links these seemingly diverse essays. Alan Blumler in “Opium Control versus Suppression” describes the way in which the Guomindang six-year opium suppression campaign represents an official shift from moral condemnation of the traffic to pragmatic desire to control the trade and its profits. This became a political and financial tool that permitted the Chinese government to extend its influence into previously independent territory such as Yunnan province. Timothy Brooks in “Opium and Collaboration in Central China” demonstrates that the Japanese occupying army instituted much the same control system as the Guomindang; however, the nature of their occupation insured that while the first monopoly system met with international praise, the second was condemned. As the above essays demonstrate, opium, reaction against opium and the control of the traffic could be instrumental in state building and decolonization as well as the more destructive aspects of invasion and encroachment. The best example of the ways in which this could function comes from the excellent essay “Nationalism, Identity and State Building” by Zhou Yongming. Zhou describes the process used by the Chinese Communist Party after their successful revolution in ridding China of opium and narcotics and in the process of extending their own political agenda through the population in the early 1950s. This book makes a great contribution to the literature...

Reform, Nationalism and Internationalism: The Opium Suppression Movement in China and the Anglo-American Influence, 1900–1908

Of the late Ch'ing reforms, perhaps none is more surprising than the opium suppression movement. Beginning in late 1906, it had by the end of 1908 succeeded in markedly curtailing the cultivation and consumption of opium at home and in obtaining formal assurance from the British to terminate gradually opium imports. These startling achievement are further magnified when we consider the setting within which they occurred.

The Opium Trade in Szechwan 1881 to 1911

This paper examines three aspects of the Opium trade in Szechwan from 1881, when for the first time there is evidence that China consumed as much native as foreign opium and that Szechwan was both the largest producer and consumer, until 1911, when the cultivation of the poppy was completely suppressed in the province as a result of the vigorous imperial campaign against the trade. It will consider first, the demand for opium who smoked it and why; second, the production of opium, how it fitted into and contributed toward the economy of the province; finally, the character of the suppression campaign of 1906–1911 as it affected Szechwan will be considered. The conclusions of the paper may be summarised as follows. (1) While the expansion of the opium habit in Szechwan, as in the rest of China, had no one cause, in Szechwan it has for its background a prospering society whose values and accepted goals had not kept pace with its economic expansion, a society which provided increasing wealth and leisure on the one hand, but only limited opportunities for socially approved spending on the other. (2) The rapid expansion of opium production in late nineteenth century Szechwan was part of the development of a market economy both within the province and in its relations with the rest of China. (3) The opium suppression campaign, because it undermined a developing economy, was much less popular in Western China than it was in the east, and contributed to the widespread unrest in those parts, which in turn led to the revolution of 1911.