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Author: Frank Dikötter Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226149059 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 100
Book Description
To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium—a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip of dependence. Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the "war on drugs," which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the beginning of Chinese communism. But, as Narcotic Culture brilliantly shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition. In a stunning historical reversal, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun tell this different story of the relationship between opium and the Chinese. They reveal that opium actually had few harmful effects on either health or longevity; in fact, it was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints preventing excessive use. Opium was even used as a medicinal panacea in China before the availability of aspirin and penicillin. But as a result of the British effort to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other psychoactive substances. Narcotic Culture provides abundant evidence that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a "cure" that was far worse than the disease. Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition.
Author: Frank Dikötter Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226149059 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 100
Book Description
To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium—a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip of dependence. Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the "war on drugs," which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the beginning of Chinese communism. But, as Narcotic Culture brilliantly shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition. In a stunning historical reversal, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun tell this different story of the relationship between opium and the Chinese. They reveal that opium actually had few harmful effects on either health or longevity; in fact, it was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints preventing excessive use. Opium was even used as a medicinal panacea in China before the availability of aspirin and penicillin. But as a result of the British effort to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other psychoactive substances. Narcotic Culture provides abundant evidence that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a "cure" that was far worse than the disease. Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition.
Author: Ko-lin Chin Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 080145719X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
The Golden Triangle region that joins Burma, Thailand, and Laos is one of the global centers of opiate and methamphetamine production. Opportunistic Chinese businessmen and leaders of various armed groups are largely responsible for the manufacture of these drugs. The region is defined by the apparently conflicting parallel strands of criminality and efforts at state building, a tension embodied by a group of individuals who are simultaneously local political leaders, drug entrepreneurs, and members of heavily armed militias.Ko-lin Chin, a Chinese American criminologist who was born and raised in Burma, conducted five hundred face-to-face interviews with poppy growers, drug dealers, drug users, armed group leaders, law-enforcement authorities, and other key informants in Burma, Thailand, and China. The Golden Triangle provides a lively portrait of a region in constant transition, a place where political development is intimately linked to the vagaries of the global market in illicit drugs.Chin explains the nature of opium growing, heroin and methamphetamine production, drug sales, and drug use. He also shows how government officials who live in these areas view themselves not as drug kingpins, but as people who are carrying the responsibility for local economic development on their shoulders.
Author: Huan Gao Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136661565 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Accompanying China’s economic reform and open-door policy in 1978, illicit drug use emerged in the late 1980s, and gradually developed into a serious social problem. Heroin was the dominant illicit drug consumed in the new drug epidemic, and the number of female heroin users has increased rapidly in the country. While heroin use in China is soaring, little is known about women’s heroin use in the context of China’s rapidly changing society. Using intensive interviews with 131 female heroin users, this book explores the careers of female heroin users in China under changing social contexts in the reform era. It investigates the impacts of sociological and individual factors on women’s heroin use in each developing stage of their drug use careers. It also examines the social consequences of women’s heroin use by looking at connections between women’s heroin use and criminality, and the change in women’s social relations after heroin use. Lastly, the book analyzes and ascertains the impact of current narcotics control policies on women’s drug use careers. This groundbreaking book has important policy implications for both China and the international society in the context of increasing global concern about women’s substance abuse.
Author: Timothy Brook Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520222366 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 470
Book Description
Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.
Author: Ko-lin Chin Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479895407 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
In a country long associated with the trade in opiates, the Chinese government has for decades applied extreme measures to curtail the spread of illicit drugs, only to find that the problem has worsened. Burma is blamed as the major producer of illicit drugs and conduit for the entry of drugs into China. Which organizations are behind the heroin trade? What problems and prospects of drug control in the so-called “Golden Triangle” drug-trafficking region are faced by Chinese and Southeast Asian authorities? In The Chinese Heroin Trade, noted criminologists Ko-Lin Chin and Sheldon Zhangexamine the social organization of the trafficking of heroin from the Golden Triangle to China and the wholesale and retail distribution of the drug in China. Based on face-to-face interviews with hundreds of incarcerated drug traffickers, street-level drug dealers, users, and authorities, paired with extensive fieldwork in the border areas of Burma and China and several major urban centers in China and Southeast Asia, this volume reveals how the drug trade has evolved in the Golden Triangle since the late 1980s. Chin and Zhang also explore the marked characteristics of heroin traffickers; the relationship between drug use and sales in China; and how China compares to other international drug markets. The Chinese Heroin Trade is a fascinating, nuanced account of the world of high-risk drug trafficking in a tightly-controlled society.
Author: Stephen R. Platt Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307961745 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 609
Book Description
As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Author: Ben Westhoff Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press ISBN: 080214795X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
A four-year investigation into the world of synthetic drugs—from black market factories to users & dealers to harm reduction activists—and what it revealed. A deeply human story, Fentanyl, Inc. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. “A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape,” writes Ben Westhoff. “These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs” —and all-too-often tragically lethal. Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice—and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe—were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes. Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay ahead of the law, making the drugs’ effects impossible to predict. Westhoff has infiltrated this shadowy world. He tracks down the little-known scientists who invented these drugs and inadvertently killed thousands, as well as a mysterious drug baron who turned the law upside down in his home country of New Zealand. Westhoff visits the shady factories in China from which these drugs emanate, providing startling and original reporting on how China’s vast chemical industry operates, and how the Chinese government subsidizes it. Poignantly, he chronicles the lives of addicted users and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug awareness organizers in the United States and Europe. Together they represent the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a calamity we are just beginning to understand. From its depths, as Westhoff relates, are emerging new strategies that may provide essential long-term solutions to the drug crisis that has affected so many. “Timely and agonizing. . . . An impressive work of investigative journalism.” —USA Today “Westhoff explores the many-tentacled world of illicit opioids, from the streets of East St. Louis to Chinese pharmaceutical companies, from music festivals deep in the Michigan woods to sanctioned ‘shooting up rooms’ in Barcelona, in this frank, insightful, and occasionally searing exposé. . . . Westhoff’s well-reported and researched work will likely open eyes, slow knee-jerk responses, and start much needed conversations.” —Publishers Weekly “Our 25 Favorite Books of 2019” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Best Books of 2019” —Buzzfeed “Best Nonfiction of 2019” —Kirkus Reviews “50 Best Books of 2019” —Daily Telegraph “Best Nonfiction Books of 2019” —Tyler Cowen “Best Books of 2019” —Yahoo Finance
Author: John M. Jennings Publisher: Praeger ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) found Japan guilty of deliberately promoting drug abuse as a weapon to further its imperialistic aims in Asia. This study provides the historical context behind the IMTFE's findings from the annexation of Taiwan in 1895 to the end of World War II. Given the extent to which drug use permeated the politics, economy, and culture of Asia, it was inevitable that Japan's rise as an imperial power would lead to contact with, and increasing involvement in, the opium and narcotics trade. This study argues that the nature of that involvement should be understood not simply in terms of a conspiracy to drug the people of Asia into submission, but rather as indicative of the general twists and turns of Japanese imperialism. Thus, opium and narcotics emerge not so much as a weapon of, but rather as a metaphor for, Japanese imperialism in Asia.
Author: Stephen Snelders Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526151383 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called ‘Colombia of Europe’ or, ‘the international drug supermarket’. Increasing state regulations and interventions led to the proliferation of a ‘hydra’ of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumvent the enforcement of regulation. Networks of smugglers and suppliers of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, XTC, and other drugs were organized without a strict formal hierarchy and based on personal relations and cultural affinities rather than on institutional arrangements. These networks created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself. Their operations were made possible and developed because of the deep historical social and cultural ‘embeddedness’ of criminal anarchy in Dutch society. Using examples from the rich history of drug smuggling, Drug smuggler nation investigates the deeper and hidden grounds of the illegal drug trade, and its effects on our drug policies.
Author: Frank Dikötter
Author: Frank Dikötter
Author: Ko-lin Chin
Author: Huan Gao
Author: Timothy Brook
Author: Ko-lin Chin
Author: Stephen R. Platt
Author: Alfred W. McCoy
Author: Ben Westhoff
Author: John M. Jennings
Author: Stephen Snelders