/0/12894/coverbig.jpg?v=bc941b8f5c82199c0045c1994201b032)
Drugging a Nation by Samuel Merwin
In September, 1906, an edict was issued from the Imperial Court at Peking which states China's predicament with na?veté and vigour.
"The cultivation of the poppy," runs the edict, in the authorized translation, "is the greatest iniquity in agriculture, and the provinces of Szechuen, Shensi, Kansu, Yunnan, Kweichow, Shansi, and Kanghuai abound in its product, which, in fact, is found everywhere. Now that it is decided to abandon opium smoking within ten years, the limiting of this cultivation should be taken as a fundamental step ... opium has been in use so long by the people that nearly three-tenths or four-tenths of them are smokers."
"Three-tenths or four-tenths" of the Chinese people,-one hundred and fifty million opium-smokers-mean three or four times the population of Great Britain, a good many more than the population of the United States!
The Chinese are notoriously inexact in statistical matters. The officials who drew up the edict probably wished to convey the impression that the situation is really grave, and employed this form of statement in order to give force to the document. No accurate estimate of the number of opium victims in China is obtainable; but it is possible to combine the impressions which have been set down by reliable observers in different parts of the "Middle Kingdom," and thus to arrive at a fair, general impression of the truth. The following, for example, from Mr. Alexander Hosie, the commercial attaché to the British legation at Peking, should carry weight. He is reporting on conditions in Szechuen Province:
"I am well within the mark when I say that in the cities fifty per cent. of the males and twenty per cent. of the females smoke opium, and that in the country the percentage is not less than twenty-five for men and five per cent. for women." There are about forty-two million people in Szechuen Province; and they not only raise and consume a very great quantity of opium, they also send about twenty thousand tons down the Yangtse River every year for use in other provinces. The report of other travellers, merchants, and official investigators indicate that about all of the richest soil in Szechuen is given over to poppy cultivation, and that the labouring classes show a noticeable decline of late in physique and capacity for work.
In regard to another so-called "opium province," Yunnan, we have the following statement: "I saw practically the whole population given over to its abuse. The ravages it is making in men, women, and children are deplorable.... I was quite able to realize that any one who had seen the wild abuse of opium in Yunnan would have a wild abhorrence of it."
In later chapters we shall go into the matter more at length. Here let me add to these statements merely a few typical scraps of information, selected from a bundle of note-books full of records of chats and interviews with travellers of almost every nationality and of almost every station in life. The secretary of a life insurance company which does a considerable business up and down the coast told me that, roughly, fifty per cent of the Chinese who apply for insurance are opium-smokers. Another bit comes from a man who lived for several years in an inland city of a quarter of a million inhabitants. The local Anti-opium League had 750 members, he said and he believed that about every other man in the city was a smoker. "It is practically a case of everybody smoking," he concluded.
Twenty-five years ago, when the consumption of opium in China could hardly have been more than half what it is to-day, a British consul estimated the proportion of smokers in the region he had visited as follows: "Labourers and small farmers, ten per cent.; small shopkeepers, twenty per cent.; soldiers, thirty per cent.; merchants, eighty per cent.; officials and their staff, ninety per cent.; actors, prostitutes, vagrants, thieves, ninety-five per cent." The labourers and farmers, the real strength of China, as of every other land, had not yet been overwhelmed-but they were going under, even then. The most startling news to-day is from these lower classes, even from the country villages, the last to give way. Dr. Parker, the American Methodist missionary at Shanghai, informed me that reports to this effect were coming in steadily from up country; and during my own journey I heard the same bad news almost everywhere along a route which measured, before I left China, something more than four thousand miles.
Perhaps the most convincing summing up of China's predicament is found in another translation from a recent Chinese document, this time an appeal to the throne from four viceroys. The quaintness of the language does not, I think, impair its effectiveness and its power as a protest: "China can never become strong and stand shoulder and shoulder with the powers of the world unless she can get rid of the habit of opium-smoking by her subjects, about one quarter of whom have been reduced to skeletons and look half-dead."
This then is the curse which the imperial government has talked so quaintly of "abandoning." This is the debauchery which is to be put down by officials, ninety per cent of whom were supposed to be more or less confirmed smokers. Such almost childlike optimism brings to mind a certain Sunday in New York City when Theodore Roosevelt, with the whole police force under his orders, tried to close the saloons. It brings to mind other attempts in Europe and America, to check and control vice and depravity-attempts which have never, I think, been wholly successful-and one begins to understand the discouraging immensity of the task which China has undertaken. Really, to "stop using opium" would mean a very rearranging of the agricultural plan of the empire. It would make necessary an immediate solution of China's transportation problem (no other crop is so easy to carry as opium) and an almost complete reconstruction of the imperial finances; indeed, few observers are so glib as to suggest offhand a substitute for the immense opium revenue to the Chinese government. And nobody to accomplish all this but those sodden officials, of whom it is safe to guess that fifty per cent have some sort or other of a financial stake in the traffic!
In the minds of most of us, I think, there has been a vague notion that the Chinese have always smoked opium, that opium is in some peculiar way a necessity to the Chinese constitution. Even among those who know the extraordinary history of this morbidly fascinating vegetable product, who know that the India-grown British drug was pushed and smuggled and bayoneted into China during a century of desperate protest and even armed resistance from these yellow people, it has been a popular argument to assert that the Chinese have only themselves to blame for the "demand" that made the trade possible. Of this "demand," and of how it was worked up by Christian traders, we shall speak at some length in later chapters. "Educational methods" in the extending of trade can hardly be said to have originated with the modern trust. The curious fact is that the Chinese didn't use opium and didn't want opium.
Your true opium-smoker stretches himself on a divan and gives up ten or fifteen minutes to preparing his thimbleful of the brown drug. When it has been heated and worked to the proper consistency, he places it in the tiny bowl of his pipe, holds it over a lamp, and draws a few whiffs of the smoke deep into his lungs. It seems, at first, a trivial thing; indeed, the man who is well fed and properly housed and clothed seems able to keep it up for a considerable time and without appreciable ill results. The greater difficulty in China is, of course, that very few opium-smokers are well fed and properly housed and clothed.
I heard little about the beautiful dreams and visions which opium is supposed to bring; all the smokers with whom I talked could be roughly divided into two classes-those who smoked in order to relieve pain or misery, and those miserable victims who smoked to relieve the acute physical distress brought on by the opium itself. Probably the majority of the victims take it up as a temporary relief; many begin in early childhood; the mother will give the baby a whiff to stop its crying. It is a social vice only among the upper classes. The most notable outward effect of this indulgence is the resulting physical weakness and lassitude. The opium-smoker cannot work hard; he finds it difficult to apply his mind to a problem or his body to a task. As the habit becomes firmly fastened on him, there is a perceptible weakening of his moral fibre; he shows himself unequal to emergencies which make any sudden demand upon him. If opium is denied him, he will lie and steal in order to obtain it.
Opium-smoking is a costly vice. A pipefull of a moderately good native product costs more than a labourer can earn in a day; consequently the poorer classes smoke an unspeakable compound based on pipe scrapings and charcoal. Along the highroads the coolies even scrape the grime from the packsaddles to mix with this dross. The clerk earning from twenty-five to fifty Mexican dollars a month will frequently spend from ten to twenty dollars a month on opium. The typical confirmed smoker is a man who spends a considerable part of the night in smoking himself to sleep, and all the next morning in sleeping off the effects. If he is able to work at all, it is only during the afternoon, and even at that there will be many days when the official or merchant is incompetent to conduct his affairs. Thousands of prominent men are ruined every year.
The Cantonese have what they call "The Ten Cannots regarding The Opium-Smoker." "He cannot (1) give up the habit; (2) enjoy sleep; (3) wait for his turn when sharing his pipe with his friends; (4) rise early; (5) be cured if sick; (6) help relations in need; (7) enjoy wealth; (8) plan anything; (9) get credit even when an old customer; (10) walk any distance."
This is the land into which the enterprising Christian traders introduced opium, and into which they fed opium so persistently and forcibly that at last a "good market" was developed. England did not set out to ruin China. One finds no hint of a diabolical purpose to seduce and destroy a wonderful old empire on the other side of the world. The ruin worked was incidental to that far Eastern trade of which England has been so proud. It was the triumph of the balance sheet over common humanity.
And so it is to-day. British India still holds the cream of the trade, for the Chinese grown opium cannot compete in quality with the Indian drug. The British Indian government raises the poppy in the rich Ganges Valley (more than six hundred thousand acres of poppies they raised there last year), manufactures it in government factories at Patna and Ghazipur-manufactures four-fifths of it especially to suit the Chinese taste, and sells it at annual government auctions in Calcutta.
The result of this traffic is so very grave that it is a difficult matter to discuss in moderate language. To the traveller who leaves the railroad and steamboat lines and ventures, in springless native cart or swaying mule litter, along the sunken roads and the hills of western and northwestern China, the havoc and misery wrought by the "white man's smoke," the "foreign dust," becomes unpleasantly evident. Some hint of the meaning of it, a faint impression of the terrible devastation of this drug-let loose, as it has been, on a backward, poverty-stricken race-is seared, hour by hour and day by day into his brain.
A terrible drama is now being enacted in the Far East. The Chinese race is engaged in a fight to a finish with a drug-and the odds are on the drug.
* * *
Samuel Merwin, Sr. was an American playwright and author. He attended Northwestern University and between 1905 and 1911 he worked as associate editor and finally editor of SUCCESS magazine. In 1907 the magazine sent him to China to investigate the opium trade.
"Sign the divorce papers and get out!" Leanna got married to pay a debt, but she was betrayed by her husband and shunned by her in-laws. Seeing that her efforts were in vain, she agreed to divorce and claimed her half of the properties. With her purse plump from the settlement, Leanna enjoyed her newfound freedom. The constant harassment from her ex's mistress never fazed her. She took back her identities as top hacker, champion racer, medical professor, and renowned jewelry designer. Then someone discovered her secret. Matthew smiled. "Will you have me as your next husband?"
On their wedding night, Rogelio wrapped his fingers around Marian's neck and spat at her, "Congratulations! From now on, you live in hell!" The reason for his wrath was that he believed she was responsible for the death of his elder brother. So, he married her but refused to touch her, determined to make her suffer for the rest of her pitiful life! However, due to an unforeseen accident, Marian was forced to sleep with Rogelio in order to save him, and she ended up getting pregnant. Concealing her pregnancy, Marian lived cautiously under Rogelio's watchful eyes. He hated her and relentlessly humiliated her, yet he would never allow anyone else to lay a finger on her— "Mr. Bailey, your wife got into a fight with someone!" Rogelio secretly took action, eliminating that person completely. "Sir, your wife claimed that all of your family's wealth belongs to her!" Rogelio quietly transferred all the shares to her. Unaware of all this, Marian only wanted to escape, but Rogelio pulled her into his warm embrace, whispering, "Mrs. Bailey, where do you intend to go with our unborn child?"
Kallie, a mute who had been ignored by her husband for five years since their wedding, also suffered the loss of her pregnancy due to her cruel mother-in-law. After the divorce, she learned that her ex-husband had quickly gotten engaged to the woman he truly loved. Holding her slightly rounded belly, she realized that he had never really cared for her. Determined, she left him behind, treating him as a stranger. Yet, after she left, he scoured the globe in search of her. When their paths crossed once more, Kallie had already found new happiness. For the first time, he pleaded humbly, "Please don't leave me..." But Kallie's response was firm and dismissive, cutting through any lingering ties. "Get lost!"
Iris grew from an orphaned child to the adopted daughter of the Stewart family at age ten, finding warmth in her nominal uncle Vincent's kindness. Seven years later, she became his secret lover. When Vincent's engagement was announced, gossip spread about the notorious playboy CEO finally settling down. But only Iris knew the extent of his cold, two-faced nature. Iris fell for Vincent and, through tears, begged, "Marry me," only to be met with his frosty refusal. Defeated, she accepted a lawyer's proposal, sparking public excitement. Then, on her wedding day, Vincent pleaded desperately, "Don't marry him…"
Melanie married Ashton out of gratitude, but she quickly found herself entangled in a web of relentless challenges. Despite these struggles, she stayed true to her commitment to the marriage. In the hospital room, Ashton indifferently attempted to draw her blood, disregarding her discomfort. This callous act was a harsh revelation for Melanie, awakening her to the grim reality of their relationship. Resolved to prioritize her own welfare, she decided to sever ties. With newfound resolve, Melanie filed for divorce. In the process, she unveiled her concealed identities, leaving everyone in shock. Throughout these turbulent times, Melanie realized that Derek, Ashton’s uncle, had been discreetly protecting her all along.
Janet was adopted when she was a kid -- a dream come true for orphans. However, her life was anything but happy. Her adoptive mother taunted and bullied her all her life. Janet got the love and affection of a parent from the old maid who raised her. Unfortunately, the old woman fell ill, and Janet had to marry a worthless man in place of her parents' biological daughter to meet the maid's medical expenses. Could this be a Cinderella's tale? But the man was far from a prince, except for his handsome appearance. Ethan was the illegitimate son of a wealthy family who lived a reckless life and barely made ends meet. He got married to fulfill his mother's last wish. However, on his wedding night, he had an inkling that his wife was different from what he had heard about her. Fate had united the two people with deep secrets. Was Ethan truly the man we thought he was? Surprisingly, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the impenetrable wealthiest man in the city. Would he find out that Janet married him in place of her sister? Would their marriage be a romantic tale or an utter disaster? Read on to unravel Janet and Ethan's journey.