The truth about opium

by William H. Brereton

6. That no death from opium smoking, whether indulged in moderately or excessively, has ever occurred, and that death from such cause is a physical impossibility.

7. That opium smoking is a custom far less enslaving and more easily discontinued than dram drinking or even tobacco smoking.

8. That opium smoking is a luxury which can only be indulged in by those who are well-to-do and is wholly out of the reach of the poor, and, save in Western China and certain other districts, where the poppy is very extensively cultivated and opium comparatively cheap, beyond the means of the working classes.

9. That opium smoking is a universal custom throughout the whole of the immense empire of China, just as tea, wine, or beer drinking is with the people of the United Kingdom, its use being limited only by the ability of the people to procure the drug.

10. That it is admitted by Sir Robert Hart, a high official of the Chinese Government, that the greatest quantity of Indian opium of late years imported into China is only sufficient to supply about one million of people with a modicum of the drug, and that, in his own words, “neither the finances of the State, nor the wealth of the people, nor the growth of its population,” can be specially damaged by a luxury which only draws from five-pence to eleven-pence a-piece from the pockets of those who enjoy it, and which is indulged in by a comparatively small number of the Chinese people.

11. That the poppy is extensively cultivated in all the provinces of China proper as well as in Manchuria, and that there is probably three or four times as much native drug produced annually in China as is imported from abroad.

12. That in the western parts of China, where the poppy is more extensively cultivated and opium more generally smoked than in other parts of the empire, no decadence whatever is produced in the mental or bodily health, or the wealth, industry, and prosperity of the people, but on the contrary, that these very people are peculiarly strong and vigorous.

13. That the Chinese Government is not, and never was, sincere in its professed desire to put down the practice of opium smoking in the empire, which is evidenced by the fact that the poppy is largely cultivated throughout the country, and that a revenue is derived by the Government from the native drug.

14. That Hong Kong being the great depôt of Indian opium and the place where the drug is most largely prepared for smoking purposes, and where also the native population (about three-fourths of whom are adult males) are in good circumstances, and therefore better able to indulge in opium smoking than their countrymen in the mainland of China, is the place where the alleged evils of opium smoking, if they existed, would be found in their worst form, yet that those evils are unknown there.

15. That the outcry, got up and disseminated for so many years past in England against the Indo-China opium trade has not, and never had, any substantial foundation; that such outcry has arisen from the complaints, of the Protestant missionaries in China, which also are equally baseless, those missionaries having been simply made dupes of by certain designing and mendacious natives for purposes of their own, or of the Government of China.