A patron of a Sandakan opium farm
Each smoker is provided with a lamp for heating his "pill" and a wooden head-rest
Running parallel to the Jalan Tiga is another street—I do not recall its name—in which are the opium farms. Far from being veiled in secrecy, they are operated as openly as American soda fountains. A typical opium farm consists of a two-story wooden house, one of a long row of similar buildings, containing a number of small, ill-lighted rooms which reek with the sickly sweet fumes of the drug. The furniture consists of a number of so-called beds, which in reality are wooden platforms or tables, their tops, which are raised about three feet above the floor, providing space on which two smokers can recline. Each smoker is provided with a block of wood which serves as a pillow and a small lamp for heating his "pill." The number of patrons who may be accommodated at one time is prescribed by law and rigidly enforced, signs denoting the authorized capacity of the house being posted at the door, like the signs in elevators and on ferry-boats in America. For example, the door of one farm that I visited bore the notice "Only fifteen beds. Room for thirty persons." Over-crowding is forbidden by the authorities, not, as in the case of elevators and ferry-boats, for reasons of safety, but for financial reasons. The more opium farms there are, you see, the greater the company's profits.
The opium is purchased by the chartered company from the Government of the Straits Settlements for $1.20 a tael (about one-tenth of a pound troy) and, after being adulterated with various substances, is sold to the opium farmers, nearly all of whom are Chinese, for $8.50 a tael, the company thus making a very comfortable margin of profit on the transaction. The opium farmers either keep opium dens themselves or sell the drug to anyone wishing to buy it, just as a tobacconist sells cigars and cigarettes. The sale of the opium privilege in Sandakan alone nets the government, so I was informed, something over $500,000 annually.
Now, iniquitous and deplorable as such a traffic is, the British North Borneo administration is not the only government engaged in the sale of opium. But it is the only government, so far as I am aware, which virtually forces the drug on its people by insisting that it shall be purchasable in localities which might otherwise escape its malign influence. A planter who, actuated either by moral scruples or by a desire to maintain the efficiency of his laborers, opposes the opening of an opium farm on his estate, might as well sell out and leave Borneo, for the company will promptly retaliate for such interference with its revenues by cutting off his supply of labor. It will defend its action by naïvely asserting that, as the coolies would contrive to obtain the drug any way, the planter, in refusing to permit the opening of an opium farm on his property, is guilty of conniving at the illegal use of the drug!
The British North Borneo Company professes to find justification for engaging in the opium traffic by insisting that, as the Chinese will certainly obtain opium clandestinely if they cannot obtain it openly, it is better for everyone concerned that its sale and use should be kept under government control. The fact remains, however, that China, decadent though she may be and desperately in need of increased revenues, has succeeded, in spite of the powerful opposition of the British-owned Opium Ring, in putting an end to the traffic within her borders, while Siam, likewise under Oriental rule, is about to do the same. It is a curious commentary on European civilization that this vice, which the so-called "backward" races are vigorously attempting to stamp out, should be not only permitted but encouraged in a country over which flies the flag of England. Its effects on the population are summed up in this sentence from a letter written me by a former high official of the chartered company: "Fifty per cent of the thefts and robberies committed during the period that I was magistrate in that territory can be directly traced to opium and gambling."
There is held each year, at one of the great London hotels, the North Borneo Dinner. It is one of the most brilliant affairs of the season. At the head of the long table, banked with flowers and gleaming with glass and silver, sits the chairman of the chartered company, flanked by cabinet ministers, archbishops, ambassadors, admirals, field marshals. The speakers work the audience into a fervor of patriotic pride by their sonorous word-pictures of England's services to humanity in bearing the white man's burden, and of the spread of enlightenment and progress under the Union Jack. But the heartiest applause invariably greets the announcement that the North Borneo Company has declared a dividend. Whence the money to pay the dividend was derived is tactfully left unsaid. The dinner always concludes with the singing of the anthem Land of Hope and Glory. Yet they say that the English have no sense of humor!