Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (review)

The conventional story of opium is well known both in China and around the world. According to this narrative, the Western powers willfully eviscerated the Qing empire by turning millions of its subjects into opium addicts, weakening the national economy, and eventually plunging China into political turmoil. Opium has been identified as a key source of the humiliation and degradation that China experienced from 1842 to 1949, and the emaciated figure of the "opium wastrel" has served as an object lesson on the inherent dangers of opiates ever since.

Narcotic Culture seeks above all to dispel this commonly held view of opium's negative impact on Chinese society. The three authors maintain that the image of China as "a nation of hopeless addicts, smoking themselves to death while their civilisation descended into chaos" (p. 1) is a myth, part of a "narcophobic discourse" constructed by an alliance of zealous Christian missionaries and ardent Chinese reformers. China's real drug problem began only after the early twentieth-century criminalization of what had been an openly tolerated and, in their eyes, generally benign narcotic. Prohibition led to arrests, prison overcrowding, and subsequent disease and death for many; detoxification centers utilizing strange treatments killed still more. Moreover, the banning of opium, which most users smoked only in moderation, led to the proliferation of potentially dangerous injectable narcotics that were controlled by Chinese gangsters.

Advancing such sweeping revisionist claims requires a meticulous use of evidence. Unfortunately, in this regard, the book is a disappointment. The main problem lies in the authors' selective treatment of fragmentary data. For example, their assertion that opium was effectively used in the nineteenth century as a prophylactic against infectious disease relies largely upon the contemporaneous anecdotal observations of foreign medical workers (pp. 79–88). Citing one missionary in China who acknowledged that he had never "seen a case of malaria in an opium smoker" (p. 83) and European practitioners in Bengal who observed that opium eaters enjoyed "remarkable immunity from malarial infection" (p. 86), the authors conclude that opium smoking was "'the best possible and sure shield' against malaria" (p. 88). Moreover, although no documentation of the drug's efficacy in preventing plague is provided, the authors conclude that "the smoke generated by . . . opium . . . produced a considerable defence shield against the host of epidemics such as the plague" (p. 82). Without clinical evidence, it is not clear why these unsubstantiated opinions deserve more weight than those of opium's nineteenth-century opponents.

Contradictory assertions abound, with no attempted reconciliation. In chapter 5, for example, the authors state that the "chief motive for smoking opium in China was self-medication" (p. 74); yet in the previous chapter, they argue that for many it was primarily a form of "competitive conspicuous consumption" (p. 61). Individuals or different groups obviously had multiple and varying reasons for smoking opium, and both of these rationales are plausible—but these two arguments are never woven into a coherent analysis that accounts in a systematic way for differences in consumption patterns along class or gender lines. Nor do the authors address temporal or spatial variations in narcotic use; indeed, such changes are elided by removing most evidence from its specific historical or locational context. Thus, the experiences of a present-day heroin user are employed to make a point about republican-era China (p. 189), and the example of a 1950s opium den in Bangkok stands in for hostelries in nineteenth-century China (pp. 67–68). In a discussion of the spread of the hypodermic needle out of Hong Kong into the mainland in the 1890s, the coastal cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Shanghai become "the rest of China" (p. 177).

Statistical evidence is similiarly not contextualized. The sentencing of 2,600 people for drug-related crimes in Shanghai in 1931 is cited as evidence of an "explosion in the prison population" (p. 127), with no discussion of the...