We arrest drug dealers,
we criminalize people,
mainly black and brown people,
for possessing small amounts
of drugs like weed.
We do this because drugs are bad.
Unless, of course, it’s your
government that’s dealing the drugs.
Like that time the British Empire
got China hooked on opium.
Empires of Dirt,
a show about Europeans getting rich
at the expense of everyone else.
[How Britain Hooked
A Nation On Drugs]
Opium had been grown in China
since the 11th century,
but it was only until the 17th
century that usage really took off,
when people realized you could
smoke it instead of just chewing it.
By the 1800s, there were
foggy back alley opium dens
in the streets of Canton,
now known as Guangzhou, Shanghai,
and even in London’s Limehouse
on Pennyfields Street.
In the early 19th century,
Chinese exports like silk,
ceramics, and tea
were hugely popular in Britain.
Opium was one of the few things
the British Empire could trade back.
It’s estimated that
as many as 15 million people
were addicted to opium by 1890,
making it one of the worst cases of
national drug addiction ever seen.
They would ship opium
grown in colonial India to Canton,
where Chinese traders
would take it into China.
As opium grew in popularity,
British trade increased.
In 1800, 300 metric tons of opium
was shipped into China.
Four decades later,
this had increased to
3,500 metric tons of opium.
Opium was a highly addictive drug
with similar effects to
modern-day heroin.
Long-term users could experience
liver, kidney, and heart problems,
and could die of withdrawal.
Opium use had been banned by
the Chinese Emperor Yongzheng
in 1729,
after he saw the effects of addiction
on his citizens,
and again in 1796
by the Emperor Jiaqing,
after everyone ignored the first ban.
But Britain continued
smuggling opium into China.
It was simply too profitable not to.
The opium monopoly out of India
was worth £981,000 in 1831,
that’s the equivalent of
about £100 million today.
By the 1830s,
people from every level of
Chinese society were hooked on opium.
After Emperor Daoguang
received reports of
mass addiction all over the country,
he’d had enough.
Soldiers burned
all the opium they found.
British traders lost
20,000 chests of opium,
equivalent to about £2 million.
This led to the First Opium War,
in 1839.
The British were so angry that
their drugs had been stolen
that they sent troops to the region
to demand economic reparations
for the financial losses
they’d incurred
while illegally trafficking
narcotics into a foreign country.
They were also angry that
China refused to open up
more ports to British trade
and had disrespected their traders.
Back in the UK, the press
depicted the Chinese as
barbarians who had insulted 
the honor of Brits abroad.
In an act of war,
Britain occupied Hong Kong,
then a sparsely inhabited island
off the southeast coast of China.
In 1841,
China ceded the island to Britain.
A year later, the Treaty of Nanking
was signed,
marking an end to
the First Opium War.
So, Britain got what it wanted:
money for illegally trafficking
drugs into China,
and a shiny new island base
to smuggle opium from Hong Kong.
Opium remained illegal after the war,
but the Chinese authorities were
basically forced to accept
the drug trade into China.
Opium consumption ripped through
Chinese society like never before.
Chinese smugglers
quickly realized that
if they registered their ships
in Hong Kong as British ships,
they could keep smuggling
opium into China.
This triggered the Second
Opium War in 1856,
when a Chinese ship
flying the Union Jack
was seized by the authorities.
The Chinese crew was arrested
and the British flag was torn down.
The British navy,
supported by the French troops,
retaliated by seizing Beijing
and looting and burning down
the Imperial Summer Palace.
China was forced to legalize
the import of opium.
With the opium trade finally legal,
imports from British-controlled
India nearly tripled
to hit 6,500 metric tons in 1880.
Fed up with the British running
drugs into their country,
the Chinese authorities decided that
if you couldn’t beat them,
you might as join them.
By around 1915,
moral and political opposition to
the drug trade had grown.
Britain stopped
importing opium to China.
It simply wasn't profitable anymore.
It's hard to quantify the scale of
the misery that Britain
caused in China,
or the mess they left behind.
And I know personally
because my own great grandfather
was addicted to opium
and eventually
died of withdrawal in Hong Kong.
And it’s something my family
still talks about all the time.
The British Empire were one of
the biggest drug pushers in history.
But hardly anyone in the UK
knows what we did in China.
Pablo Escobar?
He’s got nothing on
the British Empire.
