China's
drug lesson
for the world
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
May 5, 2006
LONDON - During the difficult years
that preceded the British handover of Hong Kong to China
the Chinese government's intense antipathy to opium and
the still fresh memories of the evil that eighteenth
century buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and
Hong Kong added an extra emotional charge to what,
anyway, was a most complicated transition. Without opium
there would have been no Hong Kong. The British only
acquired it because of the Opium Wars, and the city's
early economic success was built on the opium
trade.
It was the British who fed the
Chinese propensity for opium. Historians point out that
the Chinese would have found it elsewhere, even grown
some of it themselves. But the truth is the Indian-grown
opium was the brand the Chinese smokers savoured and the
British East India Company marketed it with commercial
élan.
Today the Chinese authorities
regard opium as a singularly bad thing. On this issue
mainstream opinion is as black and white as a panda. But
in Hong Kong there is a public debate, shades of grey,
layers of complexity, both historically and currently.
The study of opium becomes as complicated as an addict's
dreams and the solutions to abuse as tortuous as cold
turkey.
It was the Communist revolution
that expunged opium in mainland China. Mao Zedong with
his political apparatus that reached into every hamlet
and home was able, as he repressed so many attributes of
human nature, both good and bad, to lay the beast
low.
It was a mixture of carrot and
stick. Addicts were not condemned but offered medical
help and rehabilitation. But those who were uncooperative
were sent to labor camps or imprisoned. Dealers were
summarily executed, often without trial.
China was clean for 40 years, until
the demise of Maoism. Gradually opium has returned. Now
China is one of the world's most important opium growers
and its addict population exceeds
800,000. Although China still regularly executes drug
traffickers, demand in its freewheeling economic society
finds willing suppliers prepared to take the risk. As a
Chinese proverb puts it, "If you open a window, sunlight
comes in, but so do mosquitoes".
Government attitudes in China have
not changed. But the market is a match for government, as
it is almost everywhere. The black market grows by the
decade and repression, unless it is totally totalitarian,
leaves enough loopholes for the determined to wriggle
through.
The zeal to repress has become
quite counterproductive, building up the wealth and
criminal reach of the drug barons who have become so
powerful that they often have a political influence that
distorts, even threatens, good governance. By all
accounts their influence is growing in most parts of the
world and the various types of control - from Europe's
tolerance of soft drugs but toughness on hard, to China's
rigorous policy on executing dealers - are clearly not
working. At least in Hong Kong there is a reasonably
informed and intelligent debate. In China, as in many
parts of America and Europe, debate is barely tolerated.
Here it is understood that opium is not heroin and
hashish is not crack.
Of course, heroin addiction is in
another league than opium. Towards the end of the
nineteenth century heroin, a derivative of opium, was
discovered by a German chemist working at the Bayer
Company - the same laboratories that gave us aspirin. It
is heroin that can cut an addict to pieces faster than
any other drug, although let it be said that many people
who have taken heroin moderately have lived quite
productive and acceptable lives, witness the poet
Coleridge.
Hard drugs may be forbidden today
in Britain and Hong Kong - dare we ask how would Sherlock
Holmes have had the insights to catch his criminals in
today's London without his white powder? - but at least,
unlike America, there is no longer any debate about its
medicinal uses. This is why it is probably best to die
from some painful cancer in a British hospice, as my
mother did, one of the few countries to allow the use of
heroin as a pain suppressive, the strongest painkiller of
them all.
The truth is that neither China
with its millennia of centralised government nor the U.S.
with its technological prowess is a match for the drug
traders. The tough policies of China, Malaysia, Singapore
and Thailand who execute minor traffickers have rarely
touched the big barons.
We either do what Mao did - allow
our governments to be simply totalitarian on this issue
and implement a scorched earth policy - or we legalize
opium and other drugs to break the back of the underworld
trade. We then deal with addiction by educational and
medical means. It is the present and almost universal in
between that is so unsatisfactory and so
dangerous.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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