Re: Ending the losing 'War on Drugs'

Docky Wocky wrote:
> How did communist China do away with the drug trade and users?
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  Hmmm, some would argue that Communist China got rid of opium through 
ultra-harsh enforcement and draconian penalties; the gulag and machine 
gun. That answer suits the prohibitionists because they can point to it 
and say "well see, you can get rid of drugs if you have the will". How 
many of them would actually ditch every concept of freedom for this 
fabled "drug free society" I dont know, but I fear many would stumble 
blindly into mass roundups of "drug suspects".


BUT,

The truth is likely much more subtle than that, after all many societies 
have penalties every bit as harsh as Maoist China without making much 
impact on drug use -Singa****e for example. What is much more likely to 
have been the real reason for the sudden drop in opium consumption in 
China was probably the civil war followed by years of devastating 
famine. Opium, after all is a luxury good, as is coffee wine fa****onable 
clothes and foreign holidays.
  When there isnt enough to eat in your society you are happy with water 
to drink, you sell your fa****onable clothes and foreign holidays is a 
euphemism for the rich fleeing to the lands of plenty. In other words 
the poor of China worried about putting rice in the bellies rather than 
opium in their pipes.


The point is, whenever you hear a prohibitionist talking about the 
Chinese opium policies you can bet they are lying. They present a black 
market as a legal one, and ignore several other very im****tant facts 
-most im****tantly that opium was often a huge benefit to millions of 
Chinese peasants.

  How? Because they worked year in year out planting rice in freezing 
cold wet paddy fields, and were therefore subject to constant rheumatic 
and bronchial illnesses. Opium as an effective painkiller and cough 
supressant allowed them to overcome the physical pain associated with 
rice growing, thereby putting in longer hours, missing less days to 
sickness with the result that they harvested bigger yields  and 
increased their earnings.

That possibility is an anathema to any prohibitionist, who only wants to 
imagine a China full of begging opium addicts, which had it of been the 
case would have been much more widely re****ted.


It is also extremely interesting that the official British reaction to 
the announcement that the Chinese mandarins had succeeded in banning 
opium was that it was merely a strategy by the hugely corrupt mandarin 
class to pass a law that banned a desired commodity, thereby giving 
them, [the mandarins], almost unlimited power and scope to exact bribes 
from those engaged in the opium trade. In other words the Imperial ban 
on opium had NOTHING to do with trying to eradicate opium use, and 
everything to do with maximising profit and increasing control?

Surely it couldn't be that those very same smugglers who made such a 
mint from the illegal opium trade in China found the situation to their 
liking, and decided that the best way to ensure their profits continued 
to grow was to make sure that the new Chinese prohibition regime begun 
in  became an international affair........so the found for rent 
politicians and got a moral crusade going.