Recent comments in /f/history

DaveyGee16 t1_izncxvu wrote

Reply to comment by War_Hymn in The Japanese cigarette brand weaponised against Chinese smokers in wartime by zhumao

Some of your ideas and characterizations are wrong. In fact, pretty much everything you wrote is wrong.

Heroin, cocaine and morphine were not “harder stuff” and weren’t designed for export to China. They were available off the shelf pretty much everywhere in Europe, North America and the rest of the world.

Cocaine didn’t become a controlled drug in the U.S. until 1914, 1920 in the U.K.

Your ideas on heroin are wholesale wrong, it was first synthesized in 1874, it wasn’t commercialized until 1895. It was banned in 1924 in the U.S. but was available off the shelf until then. 1920 in the U.K.

Opium, much the same as the other two, not banned until the 1920s anywhere.

You are conflating a bunch of ideas without proof, drugs weren’t used to control colonial possessions, they were normal every day consumer items everywhere in the West too.

Furthermore, your ideas on the U.S. fighting to stop the drug trade and the U.K. stalling is also wrong, in most cases, the U.K. banned drugs before the U.S. did. An even worse comparison to suggest when you know more on the subject. The U.K. was a signatory to The Hague convention on opium of 1912 which restricted the sale and consumption of opium, including in their trade with other nations and in the colonies, the U.S. was not.

Your ideas on drugs in the golden triangle being because of the French is preposterous. The Golden Triangle appeared because the communist Chinese outlawed the domestic opium trade in southern China, the growers and dealers shifted south in the 1950s following action by the Chinese.

Your ideas on Japan are equally wrong. The Japanese didn’t “flood” colonial India with cocaine, that’s just plain preposterous. Nor did the Japanese play a major part in the Chinese opium trade, you are either reading the wrong material or you aren’t reading well. The Japanese made a fortune from the drug trade in Taiwan after they acquired it with Shimonoseki.

166

War_Hymn t1_izmxiwg wrote

Reply to The Japanese cigarette brand weaponised against Chinese smokers in wartime by zhumao

I just wanted to mention that in the period between the 1830s to the end of WWII, China was basically the largest unregulated narcotic market in the entire world. Concessions to foreign powers left the Chinese government(s) unable to restrict or stop shipments of foreign narcotics coming into their country (or unwilling, as they were often involved and benefited from the trade itself) .

Every major nation wanted to get in on the action. The British having defeated the Chinese in war and forced them to accept their opium, were eagerly joined by the French, Dutch, Americans, Germans, and of course, Japanese. By the start of the 20th century, these foreign narcotic importers were moving on to harder stuff - morphine, heroin, and cocaine had been developed and they flooded the enormous Chinese market with the new drugs.

For them, the stronger potency of these refined drugs meant less bulk and weight had to be shipped to serve their overseas markets. The Dutch set up coca plantations on Java to directly produce refined cocaine for the Asiatic market. Japan, not wanting to miss out on the action, also started coca plantations in their new colony of Formosa (modern-day Taiwan). By 1920, it is estimated that combined heroin and cocaine imports into China amounted to 1500 tonnes per year.

Luckily for the Chinese, the Americans after WWI were heading international efforts and treaties to curb the global narcotic trade. Having experienced the bane of epidemic substance abuse in the aftermath of the American Civil War - and now seeing a resurgence of it in returning American soldiers at the end of the Great War, American politicians were adamant in pushing the British and other foreign powers to put a stop to their involvement in the global drug trade. Drugs that were prohibited in their own home countries, but which they hypocritically had no qualms selling and pushing to the Chinese and even their own colonies (the French colonial government directly distributed opiates to their Vietnamese and Laotian subjects in French Indochina).

The British and other powers whinge and moaned about the proposals to impede or stop their lucrative trade and tried to stall, but American eventually strong-armed them to signing and ratifying the first set of international anti-narcotic treaties in modern history. For the British, pressure had ironically, come in the form of Japanese cocaine that was flooding their colony of India, starting massive and disruptive drug epidemics there.

The French signed, but continued to distribute opiates to their colonial possessions in Indochina - even while the colony was being invaded and occupied by the Japanese during WWII. This odd situation gave the cooperating French colonial government the bright idea of growing and refining opium in Indochina itself instead of importing it from the now blockaded Middle East, laying the seeds of what will eventually be known as the Golden Triangle.

The Japanese, who signed these same treaties - continued to allow their firms to produce and distribute cocaine and opiates on the international market - now getting a bigger piece of the pie as other foreign powers had pulled out from the trade due to American pressure. When confronted by the other powers about their continuation in the trade, they simply shrugged their shoulders and acted innocent (even when seized drug shipments had boxes and packaging bearing the emblem of Japanese pharmaceutical firms). For China, their situation would have to worsen before getting better, as invasion and occupation by the Japanese bought increased availability of narcotic drugs to the country's millions of addicts.

125

LouisdeRouvroy t1_izmr1y7 wrote

Reply to comment by frenchchevalierblanc in “Being Madame is a miserable job” Liselotte of the Palatinate lived at the court of the French king Louis XIV and wrote countless letters that offer a unique insight into the intrigues and everyday life of the nobility. by swissnationalmuseum

Her husband was openly homosexual, so much so that in one of her letter she said she had never thought she could become a virgin again, because her sex life was obviously nil.

3