Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (12 page)

Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.

‘Another?’ says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. ‘Have another?’

He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.

‘Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,’ the woman goes on, as she chronically complains. ‘Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here’s another ready for you, deary. Ye’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle high just now? More nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful! And ye’ll remember than nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the court; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of mixing it? Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t ye?’

She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it, inhales much of its contents. ‘O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready for ye, deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off! I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, “I’ll have another ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay according.” O my poor head! I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, ye see, deary – this is one – and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I fills, deary. Ah, my poor nerves! I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of. And it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.’

She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on her face.

He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearthstone, draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three companions. He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his colour, are repeated in her. Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still. ‘What visions can SHE have?’ the waking man muses, as he turns her face towards him, and stands looking down at it. ‘Visions of many butchers’ shops, and public-houses, and much credit? Of an increase of hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this horrible court swept clean? What can she rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that! – eh?’

The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, 1870

Jean Cocteau

T
HE LINKAGE THAT
comes at once to mind between the word
Chinese
and the word
opium
might make one suppose that the Chinese had been drugging themselves with the stuff for thousands of years. In fact the Chinese took to opium a long while after Europeans first started drinking coffee or smoking tobacco. The opium poppy travelled from Asia Minor along Arab routes into Persia, reaching India only with the Mongols, and China even later.

When, in the mid-eighteenth century, they conquered Bengal, the soldier-merchant-administrators of Britain’s Honourable East India Company inherited, along with much else worth having, the Moghul Emperor’s monopoly of selling Patna opium, which came in 1778 under the direct control of the Bengal government. Into their hands had accidentally fallen abundant supplies of a product which any keen merchant might be forgiven for regarding as the answer to his dream – an article which sold itself, since any purchaser who has acquired a taste for opium always comes back anxiously for more, cash in hand.

As well as being a painkiller, opium is a specific against dysentery, and the word then current in China for opium was
a-fu-jung
, derived from Arabic, and signifying
foreign medicine
. In 1678 the Chinese had put a duty on the small quantity of opium they imported for medical needs, and for the next seventy-seven years the annual import of the drug was fairly steady, never rising above 200 chests a year. As a medicine, opium was swallowed raw. Meanwhile, the remotest western provinces of inland China were becoming familiar with opium as a drug of addiction, the poppy having reached them by overland trade routes through Tibet and Burma. The ban on opium-smoking was apparently not complete. By 1767 the Chinese were importing 1,000 chests of opium a year.

Opium-smoking was, however, strongly condemned in China, since according to Confucian morality the smoker’s body was not his own, to demolish exactly as he chose, but had been entrusted to him by his ancestors as their link with his descendants. Since using the drug habitually led to this gross offence against filial piety, the Imperial decree against opium-smoking was supported by public opinion . . .

In 1799 a new and more thoroughgoing Imperial decree condemned a growing traffic in opium. Observing that opium-smoking was now beginning to spread inland from the coastal provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien, the Emperor’s Edict prohibited both the smoking of the drug and its importation. Opium alone was to be exempted from the ‘free interchange of commodities’ permitted with the foreign nations at Canton. ‘Foreigners obviously derive the most solid profits and advantages,’ said the decree of the opium trade, ‘. . . but that our countrymen should pursue this destructive and ensnaring vice . . . is indeed odious and deplorable.’

During ten days of its annual life cycle, the seed-box of the white poppy exudes a milky juice of extraordinary chemical complexity, not yet fully understood, and from this is derived a bitter, brown, granular powder: commercial opium.

The white poppy had been grown as a crop in antiquity in Egyptian Thebes. Later, opium and poppy seeds were carried in the caravans of Arab traders all through Asia. Some time before 1750 the white poppy was being grown as a crop in Szechwan, a remote Chinese province on the borders of Tibet, but the opium habit remained local there. What encouraged the spread of the drug on the sea coast of China was the new technique of opium-smoking. The taste of raw opium in the mouth was somewhat repugnant and its absorption into the body slow; smoking overcame both these disadvantages. The smoker dipped a needle into his prepared extract, dried it over a flame, and put the bead of flame-dried opium into a tiny pipe-bowl of tobacco. The smoke reached the bloodstream through the lungs, giving a quick narcotic effect.

A drug culture can spread fast, and not least in such times of social unease as no doubt existed when the Manchu emperors were beginning to fail at their job.

Sensing that their ancient culture – which had surrounded them comfortingly from cradle to grave – might be entering the agony of breakdown, some Chinese must have sought a similar consolation to that found by the opium-eating romantic writers of Europe in their escape from the early horrors of urban industrialism. The use of opium in China was not simply a question of economics, though supplies may have been pumped in under an urgent economic pressure.

A few grains of opium give the novice a feeling of euphoria. His first pipe is the future addict’s honeymoon; but afterwards comes a wearisome listlessness. To face life once more he must decide either to leave opium alone, or to go on repeating and, usually, increasing his dose. The Chinese formed from experience the view that one pipe smoked daily for a week or ten days would leave a man in the grip of addiction thereafter.

He would soon work up to three pipes a day, and at this point one day without opium would bring on acute withdrawal symptoms: giddiness, watering of the eyes, prostration, torpor. A three-pipe addict, denied his drug for longer than one day, might expect to go through hell: a chill over the whole body, an ache in all his limbs to the very bone, diarrhoea, and agonising psychic misery. To break the habit by an act of will was somewhat rare.

A smoker well able to afford his daily dose, if by some lucky chance of body chemistry he was under no compulsion to increase it, might hope to reach equilibrium – as with the present-day heroin ‘user’, so-called. This was the lucky man the professional apologists for the opium trade were later fond of pointing to – the addict who lived to be
eighty
. A prosperous Chinese official might well manage his life like this, but the money income of an ordinary Chinese who began smoking opium was liable to be so small that he could afford his drug only by neglecting his family, which would eventually exile him from Chinese society, and make of him a social pariah.

Intelligent Chinese saw opium in extreme terms – as a social poison introduced by foreign enemies. To their country’s two armed conflicts between 1838 and 1860 with Britain (later allied with France) – periods of open warfare linked by a turbulent armed truce – they have, reasonably enough, given the name, the Opium Wars.

The Chinese Opium Wars
, 1977

Thomas De Quincey

A
SOCIAL PROBLEM
in one country may often be held up as an example to others, but it is rare for it to bring forth an internationally coordinated response with a world-wide application. One of these rarities is the campaign against ‘hard’ drugs. While liquor laws differ widely from country to country, the modern system of laws against cocaine and the opiates have been established by international convention. These arrangements evolved out of the measures taken to help imperial China with its opium problem, which was regarded, at least in part, as a foreign responsibility arising out of the vast quantities of Indian opium which had been imported by foreigners into China throughout the nineteenth century, often in questionable circumstances. The behaviour of the opium merchants and their governments seemed all the more reprehensible because of the encouragement which it gave to the Chinese to break their own government’s laws against opium-smoking and poppy cultivation. The first International Opium Commission met in Shanghai in 1909 and passed a number of resolutions to help China; it also laid down principles of cooperation between producing and consuming countries which tended logically to expand in scope and force, leading to a global system of control of all narcotic substances, and to the institutionalisation of these arrangements under the United Nations.

China has also been a major influence on the world’s understanding of the ‘opium evil’. Unfortunately much of the information about China was tendentious from the start as missionary and philanthropic organisations tried to mobilise public opinion against opium and exert political leverage against the trade. The classic depiction of the Chinese opium smoker – a pathetic and degenerate creature with ‘lank and shrivelled limbs, tottering gait, sallow visage, feeble voice and death-boding glance of eye’ – became established as a stereo-type and was reinforced by literary and journalistic depictions of opium dens, xenophobic reactions to Chinese communities abroad and late-nineteenth-century intellectual movements such as progressive and social Darwinism. The depiction of the Chinese opium smoker now finds its echo in the popular image of the modern junkie, ‘screwed up’ by heroin into an emaciated human wreck. These mental images seem to be ineradicable, despite the fact that many chronic opiate users are indistinguishable in everyday life from their fellow citizens and despite the scientific studies which have uncovered ‘either only minor injurious effects or none at all that can be traced directly to the drug’.

This last point needs to be stressed because the physiological dangers of opium consumption were greatly exaggerated in the late nineteenth century and these exaggerations have shaped our assumptions about the drug ever since; in addition, our anxieties about opium have been reinforced in modern times by the activities of the underworld drug pusher, with his heavily adulterated heroin and his financial interest in maximising the damage to his clients. The Chinese smoker consumed
chandul
, a purified and concentrated solution of poppy sap and water. Medical experiments with this form of the drug and with pure samples of its derivatives, heroin and morphine, have shown few if any harmful effects upon the human body.

Historians have done little to clarify these aspects of the subject. Some have found it useful to repeat the condemnations of opium, since these provide evidence of the social damage done by British imperialism. Others have treated the subject more dispassionately but without breaking away from the assumptions that the missionaries so vigorously promoted: that all opium use is harmful and that it leads to addiction and therefore to physical ruin.

If we are to understand the true effect of opium on the health of individual Chinese, and cumulatively on Chinese society, we must distinguish carefully between those who were addicted, those who were damaged in some way by the addiction, and the many millions of light and moderate consumers who were not addicted at all.