Legalised Plunder

Here I am, banging on about the slave trade again, but does anyone else find it ironic that when the slave trade was banned and compensation had been paid in 1837, the trafficking of opium to China took on a sudden exponential trend? 

It's even more ironic when it is constantly trumpeted that Britain was the first country to ban the slave trade, as if it was some act of altruism, rather than a contract involving massive amounts of compensation from the public purse for loss of earnings; compensation that was immediately invested into an equally nefarious business that brought misery to millions of Chinese.

The East India Company had kept shipments of opium to China quite low, so as to increase profit margin, while farming out the actual smuggling to smaller operators so as to keep their hands unsullied. However, once the British government took over the East India Company (and India) and realised the huge profits to be made, shipments rocketed, resulting in prices falling dramatically, necessitating further increases in shipments and a vested interest in spreading the habit of chasing the dragon as widely as possible among the Chinese. In the mid 1800s, Britain was, in effect, the world's largest drug trafficker, but greed eventually killed the golden goose when the trade was no longer profitable. 

The two Opium Wars the Brits engaged in with China (fondly remembered by the Chinese to this day - not) were fought in order to force China to legalise the trade through gunboat diplomacy, which the Chinese Emperor had banned since the early 1700s. The ban was, after all, a barrier to free trade. The wars seriously weakened the political system in China which, indirectly and arguably, culminated in the emergence of the People's Republic of China.

The French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, once said; "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it." Nothing could be truer.

Another irony is that the type of people who were profiting from the Chinese opium trade were cut from the same cloth as those who today are busy declaring a War on Drugs. Perhaps there's a lesson here for the War on Drugs - make something legal and it becomes unprofitable.