Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839) | Hacker News Reader

Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

cyber.harvard.edu

78 pointsdmitriy_ko79 comments

>We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile, ordinarily] from China Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries -- how much less to China! Of all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not beneficial to people: they are of benefit when eaten, or of benefit when used, or of benefit when resold: all are beneficial. Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries?

>Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. We have heard heretofore that your honorable ruler is kind and benevolent.

>We have further learned that in London, the capital of your honorable rule, and in Scotland, Ireland, and other places, originally no opium has been produced. Only in several places of India under your control such as Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Patna, Benares, and Malwa has opium been planted from hill to hill, and ponds have been opened for its manufacture. For months and years work is continued in order to accumulate the poison. The obnoxious odor ascends, irritating heaven and frightening the spirits. Indeed you, O King, can eradicate the opium plant in these places, hoe over the fields entirely, and sow in its stead the five grains [millet, barley, wheat, etc.]. Anyone who dares again attempt to plant and manufacture opium should be severely punished. This will really be a great, benevolent government policy that will increase the common weal and get rid of evil. For this, Heaven must support you and the spirits must bring you good fortune, prolonging your old age and extending your descendants. All will depend on this act.

Reading this was pretty sad. So many vain appeals to reason. "We know you know it's bad for you, you've banned it yourself, please stop dumping it on us." Unfortunately the people he wrote that letter to didnt see them as equals.

From the wiki page it seems like there was actually a very strong anti-war sentiment in the West at the time (this was not covered in my history classes!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War#Reaction_in_Br...

A lot of the complaints voiced by the pro-war people ironically hinge on feeling slighted by the imperial court and that the Qing "didnt see them as equals"

What's ironic? The Qing clearly saw them as inferiors. Read the letter.

Unfortunately the people he wrote that letter to didnt see them as equals.

Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text...

---

"The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness."

"Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers of your country deeply understand the grand principles and are grateful for the Celestial grace."

"This is the source from which your country has become known for its wealth."

"Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries -- how much less to China!"

"We take into to consideration, however, the fact that the various barbarians have still known how to repent their crimes and return to their allegiance to us"

"Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive? Moreover the woolens, camlets, and longells [i.e., textiles] of foreign countries cannot be woven unless they obtain Chinese silk. If China, again, cuts off this beneficial export, what profit can the barbarians expect to make?"

"Our Celestial Dynasty rules over and supervises the myriad states, and surely possesses unfathomable spiritual dignity."

"May you, O King, check your wicked and sift your wicked people before they come to China, in order to guarantee the peace of your nation, to show further the sincerity of your politeness and submissiveness"

---

The constant, repeated subtext is that Britain is merely a far flung tributary nation of China. Lin states outright that all Britains wealth is derived from from China and needs Chinese good just to survive.

The Imperial Qinq court was completely delusional.

Personally I read barbarians as describing ships enforcing trade, not the kingdom or its peaceful inhabitants.

This was almost the absolute tail end of separate systems of international diplomacy and law. The British were working under the Westphalian system where there’s a pretense at legal though not practical equality. Under the Confucian system China was the hegemon and all others were subordinate. States either paid tribute and were civilised tributary states or were barbarians. See how the Macartnety Mission refused to pay obeisance and thus was refused leave to establish diplomatic relations in 1792.

https://blog.gale.com/the-george-macartney-mission-to-china-...

> Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals?

No. Chinese emperors saw every other state outside the Celestial Empire as a tributary state and expected a full submission to the Chinese emperor, hence the language.

> The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text

«Barbarian» (蠻夷) was a term to refer to anyone else other than a direct subject of the Chinese Empire. Only the Chinese people were considered to be civilised, everyone else outside the Celestial Empire was not. As the opium wars progressed, one of the clauses in the follow-up treaty of Tianjin was forbidding the Chinese from the use of the 夷 character (meaning «a barbarian») to refer to the Westerners.

The word for «barbarian», 野蠻人 / 蠻夷 are still occasionally used as an insult between some Northern and Southern Chinese to refer to each other (as some Southern Chinese consider themselves to have descended from the true Tang Han Chinese and consider the Northerners to be bastard children of Mongolians, Manchu and the Han Chinese whereas some Northern Chinese consider the Southern Chinese to have descended from barbarian tribes, or Baiyue (百越) – the human history gets unpleasantly messy at times). Or as a pejorative to refer to Westerners, although mostly in the domestic nationalistic narrative.

> The constant, repeated subtext is that Britain is merely a far flung tributary nation of China […] The Imperial Qinq court was completely delusional.

Very much. In the historical context, the First Opium War was a disaster that had been waiting to happen and the British happened to be the trigger. The Daoguang Emperor was an exceptionally backward individual who flatly refused to grasp the understanding that the world had changed and self-imposed Chinese isolationist policies could not longer work, and that the Celestial Empire had fallen behind the progress. Most of his successors were just as myopic and delusional.

It's a little funny because a word like barbarian carries so many connotations to us today, which is so different from even what Westerners back then would have known. And the connotations of the Chinese word might never have shared any of them.

BTW, barbarians were originally the non-Greek from the West, i.e. Europeans.

Chinese characters do not always have a clearly defined, unambiguous, meaning when gazed upon on their own in isolation. But they do acquire a specific meaning when used in a specific context. Typically, when complemented with other characters (it varies across Chinese languages, e.g. Chinese words tend to be shorter in spoken Cantonese as opposed to spoken Mandarin due to the historical loss of multiple finals in the latter as the former has retained many original sounds from Middle Chinese, hence also the historical divide). The context is very important in the Chinese languages.

For example, 夷 (the main character compounding the word 蠻夷, a «barbarian») – on its own – means «wild» or «ferral»; it can also be used to refer to a massacre (夷族 or 夷戮), but it can also be used to mean «calm», as in 夷然 (a fringe written word).

Most translations to European languages have historically used approximations due to the lack of the comprehension of a culture unfamiliar to Europeans. Therefore, the Greek word for «barbaric» / «barbarian» has been used as the closest appoximation of the meaning of 夷, but not it does not equate to its true semantic meaning for a native speaker.

Thanks for this breakdown. Do you have confirmation that 蠻夷 was what was used in the original text?

No, 夷人(foreigner)，was used.

Source? It's probably classical chinese and I barely read any mandarin, but still curious :)

"擬諭英吉利國王檄", https://kknews.cc/zh-tw/history/ybvzq2k.html has original and pretty good "白話文" translation.

I had not consulted the original text prior to replying, so I used a collective 蠻夷 as a guess. 蠻 and 夷 both translate as barbarian, an adjective and a noun (so to speak). 夷 is the character used in Archaic (Classical) Chinese that was used to write the letter (Archaic Chinese, which had a very different grammar and vocabulary was used for all written communication in China, Korea, Japan and Viet Nam until the early 20th century) to refer to barbarians whereas 蠻 has been used more recently.

In the text being referenced further down the thread the following words are used:

  眾夷 – crowd(s) of barbarians
  夷人 – barbarian(s), literally «barbarian person(s)»
  夷船 – barbarian ships
  外夷 – foreign barbarians
  夷 – barbarian(s)
  奸夷 – wicked / evil barbarians
  國夷 – barbarian countries/states, literally «country/-ies of barbarians».

蠻 is not found anywhere due to not being used in Classical Chinese.

Curiously, in Viet Nam, being written as 越南, the 越 refers to Baiyue or «one hundred yue (tribes)» (百越 that had formed an ancient Yue Kingdom and were considered barbarians at the time). And therefore 越 has had pretty strong barbaric connotations in the historical context for a long time. The actual name of the Viet Nam is, in fact, Nam Viet 南越, but words had to be swapped around at the behest of the Jiaqing Emperor of Qing to conform with the Classical Chinese grammar.

>The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text...

Are you trying to suggest that the phrase is inaccurate? If so, what justifications do you present?

Agreed, quite a shame.

> see them as equals

That’s the history of the church and king much from 800AD. At its peak, the British stole 200+ trillion wealth rom India and its other colonies.

And queue the first Opium War.

The Chinese did indeed start a crackdown on opium trade after this, including sending troops to seize warehouses full of it. This action sparked off the first Opium War with Britian, and kicking off the so-called Chinese “Century of Humiliation”.

It is important to stress that China was ruled, at the time, by a government that was widely seen as "Nonchinese" -- this sense of external rule surely had a great deal to do with the emergence of mass addiction, as the Ching state that imposed the laws had serious legitimacy issues (and would collapse less than a century later.)

How was it nonchinese?

It's Chinese, but non-Han.

The Qing were originally Manchu invaders. And yes, the Qing empire is still viewed by many in China to be illegitimate.

Which is what I find strange about the Century of Humiliation. Why is China losing a minor war that killed a couple thousand Chinese soldiers a great humiliation while getting outright conquered at least twice (once by the Mongols and once by the Manchu) isn't?

Tens of millions of Chinese died during the Manchu invasion of China. The Qing forced every Han Chinese male to shave their forehead and wear a queue on the threat of death, but that's apparently not humiliating.

Following the Opium Wars and other conflicts in the 19th century China actually lost territory and sovereignty in part of its own territory in the heart of China. Suddenly areas of Beijing are controlled by Europeans, and so are many Treaty Ports" along the coast.

When the Mongols and Manchu conquered the Chinese "Crown" it was more of a change of dynasty and they they effectively became Chinese. Mongolia was part of the Chinese empire until its fall in 1912, for instance.

Mongol or Manchu brings more lands to them, and eventually they (Han Chinese) assimilate the invaders. The English took land and the Chinese haven't able to reverence yet. Not to mention this event happened more recently.

I think this is the main thing. While the Mongols and the Manchus defeated China militarily, they were assimilated culturally within a few generations. Even before the Manchu invasion began, the Manchu leaders were larping as Chinese rulers. Chinese culture always won.

But in England and the West in general, China found an adversary that could defeat them militarily, and which had no interest in adopting their culture or civilization. Quite the contrary, the new foreign invaders were disrepectful of Chinese culture in a way that was new and shocking.

https://www.history.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Evelyn-Rawsk... Professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. They saw themselves as ruling five different peoples: Han China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. She argues that sinicization is a modern invention.

Quotes from the PDF "What is at issue is not the magnitude of Qing achievement, but Ho's statement that "the key to its [Qing] success was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization". The new scholarship suggests just the opposite: the key to Qing success, at least in terms of empire-building, lay in its ability to use its cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia and to differentiate the administration of the non-Han regions from the administration of the former Ming provinces."

""Sinicization" -- the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture -- is a twentieth century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."

To be frank, it's clear the Brits were the baddies here. They used guns to force a state that had banned terrible drugs to unban it.

Whether that state was totally nice or democratic or "Chinese" or whatever value you cherish, is besides the point. It does not legitimize any of what GB did during either Opium War, and therefore I disagree that it's "important to stress".

Some people think banning drugs is a bad idea, and that it's better to allow free trade.

A good response to that would be, "yeah, but it was for the Chinese to make their minds up about that, not the British!"

And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"

>And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"

It was the early 19th century. You could count the number of democratic countries on one hand. (If you counted countries where only men could vote)

Really zero hands; there was nowhere in 1839 that would be considered democratic by modern standards (no-one even had universal male suffrage at that point, never mind universal suffrage).

Right. But this renders moot the whole question of force and consent here. One undemocratic government did something to another undemocratic government. Or at least, if you think democracy is the sole source of legitimacy, that's what happens. I think there are other possible stories that could be told.

Neither side of this battle thought that allowing 100% unfettered trade in the terrorities they controlled was a good thing. This wasn't some ideological war by starry eyed libertarians.

19th century Britain is probably as close to "starry-eyed libertarianism" as has ever been seen before or since. They repealed the Corn Laws.

The Manchu were not Han, but they were Chinese in a broader sense: they've lived for centuries in what is now considered Chinese territory, and by the 19th century they were already assimilated to such an extent that most Manchus spoke Chinese, not Manchu. Today there are still ~10 million Manchus in China, but virtually none speak the language anymore. (Admittedly this is in part because in the early days of Communist China it was not a great idea to show any traces of potentially reactionary Manchu heritage.)

Manchu "foreignness" was a major contributor to the Taiping Rebellion, a war sufficient to kill something like 30 million people -- many more than were killed even in WW1. It was a big deal.

Eh. China had a number of "foreign", or certainly non-Han, dynasties. I'd suggest that the Qing-era opium problem had more to do with the world's pre-eminent nation acting as a sort of state drug cartel, to be honest.

>queue

...aeons ago, mixing up cue and queue would have been considered an eggcorn. [0] Nowadays, however, "queue" is perfectly cromulent to use in this idiom: the first Opium War has been added to the end of the playlist, and will soon commence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

Thanks for writing this (and teaching me what an eggcorn is) - it made me laugh.

However, I think I'll chalk my use of "queue" rather than "cue" to it being 1 AM when I wrote the comment. :)

Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt gives this letter a lot of context https://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Twilight-Opium-Chinas-Golden...

One thing to keep in mind is that the Ching government had already launched an opium war before the British began their narcopolitics. This is from P.E Caquet's "Opium's Orphans"

“n the leafy town of Taiyu, Shanxi, an inland Chinese province southwest of Beijing, the district magistrate Chen Lihe had a stele put up for public display. The date was 1817 and, four years earlier, the emperor had issued a raft of regulations against opium, including severe punishments for handling, selling or consuming it. The stele read: Opium is produced beyond the seas, but its poison flows into China. Those who buy it and consume it break their families, harm their own lives, and violate the law. Treachery, licentiousness, robbery, and brigandage all arise from it. Both the young and vigorous and the old and weak die from it. Wealthy and luxurious houses are impoverished by it. Brave and bright sons and younger brothers are made stupid and unfilial by it. People who dwell in peace in their houses well stocked with delicacies feel the heavy blows of the bamboo and the weight of the cangue because of it; they also suffer strangulation, exile, and banishment at the hands of the law because of it. As for its injurious effect on custom, opium destroys the five natural relationships, and its harmful effect on individual character is even more unspeakable."

No, issuing regulation against drugs on their own territory is not a "war".

But deploying Royal Navy to acquire foreign territory for trade is the "war".

I did not know Qing sent their Royal Navy to attack England. Can you provide any reference?

England took Hong Kong.

Ok, now I know. I assumed HK was a Qing territory annexed by England. Like Russia annexed Donbas

I think he meant opium war in the same sense that Americans say war on drugs.

I think you're right, but it's a perfect illustration of why we should definitely not be using "war" as a word for every task we undertake. Calling it a "war on drugs" is bad because it implies that we are attacking someone or something rather than looking at it as healing a nation from the harm caused by drugs, which even though it's just a difference of phrasing, lends itself to a more empathetic approach. Framing matters. Language matters. Nowadays every act of vandalism is "terrorism" and everything we do is a "war". But as you can never eliminate drugs or terror or vandalism or poverty completely, it's a war that can never be won, so it's dishonest both in terms of scope and in terms of how it frames possible action.

> No, issuing regulation against drugs on their own territory is not a "war".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs

Chinese court rejects Canadian’s appeal against death sentence for drug smuggling https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/china/china-robert-schellenbe...

Singapore executes disabled Malaysian convicted in drug case https://www.npr.org/2022/04/27/1094965375/singapore-executes...

Not surprising, given how Canada imprisoned Chinese folks on purely political charges. It takes two to cooperate.

> Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them.

I'm curious where the idea that rhubarb was a major dependency came from. Or indeed the idea that it was a Chinese monopoly; it was grown in Europe in this era.

Rhubarb started being cultivated in England either a few decades earlier or at most a century, and the kind grown in Europe was a different species many considered inferior. Rhubarb was also frequently used in medicine, though it had little effect. It was a major export for centuries, primarily to Russia.

This is timely- I happen to be reading Tai-Pan by James Clavell at the moment, which is a wonderful bit of historical fiction set at this time.

For more context, here is a great, brief history of the Opium wars:

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/First...

I highly recommend the Ibis Trilogy by Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh

I highly recommend the Ibis Trilogy by Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh about the Opium Wars

Makes one wonder about the flood of fentanyl coming in to the US from China.

It did not get much media coverage, but when Donald Trump was giving a speech in Las Vegas last week, he suggested that stricter laws for Fentanyl trafficking should be enacted, including capital punishment. Instead, Nevada (and many other states) have reduced penalties and now will not even arrest somebody with less than 28 grams (14k times the lethal dose).

China solved their drug problem. Ours is spinning out of control.

5,502 opium, 3,946 fentanyl deaths in California for 2020, which is the most recent this dashboard presents: https://skylab.cdph.ca.gov/ODdash

For comparison: There were 3,449 gun related deaths reported in the same year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

* edited to clarify that gun deaths were from all cause, not just homicide

Nearly 100k deaths from opioids in 2020 (the most recent year with full data). https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html

Fentanyl is an opioid, albeit a synthetic one. The CDC numbers don't break down the percentages of which drug killed the most people. The California site that you cited does, but the 5,502 number you cite is "Deaths Related to Any Opioid Overdose", which includes Fentanyl. So according to the link you cited, nearly 72% of all opioid deaths (in California) were caused by Fentanyl. The California firearm death count you cite is still lower than California's Fentanyl death rate for the same period. Extrapolating for the whole country using California's Fentanyl/Opioid ratio yields an approximate US Fentanyl death count of 65,838 for 2020.

https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/fentanyl

"Rates of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, which includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased over 56% from 2019 to 2020. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2020 was more than 18 times the number in 2013. More than 56,000 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids in 2020. The latest provisional drug overdose death counts through June 2021 suggest an acceleration of overdose deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic."

https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/fentanyl.html

The behavior of the few barbarians undid all the good work done by the company to help both the nations. And sadly the queen did not do anything to stop the barbarians.

Well, England had a massive trade deficit, and failed to find anything the Chinese wanted to buy, except opium. In the end, this was approved by the queen to balance their trade deficit, as they were bleeding silver.

How is it possible that the England had nothing China wanted to buy when England was so technologically superior that they were able to defeat China's military, fighting in China, on the other side of the planet, outnumbered 10 to 1?

The same smugness and sense of superiority that China held for England, was also held by England for China. As such, the English only primarily tried to sell knickknacks and things the Chinese could produce better. This ended up backfiring and cementing the view to the Chinese that the English were simple barbarians.

They did indeed have weapons the Chinese (and other nations) wanted, but only sold a limited amount of them, to avoid arming the other nations too well, in case they ever wanted to go conquering.

There are reasons you wouldn't sell your best military tech to a country other than them being on your list to be taken over.

Traditionally, in history and now, you sell your best military tech to your strongest allies, and not to random countries.

It was difficult to sell into China because import was monopolized by a few Chinese firms and geographically restricted.

To say that preindustrial China wouldn't benefit from good produced in industrialized Britian or America is highly suspect and defies common sense.

You're correct that British made factory goods would have been good for China, specifically the Chinese poor, as it would have enabled them to have many low quality goods rather than a few higher quality goods.

The issue is that when you present goods like mass produced clay teapots, cotton textiles, etc to the customs agents of the country which invented fine china, and silk, you're not going to impress them.

And yes, Britain coveted China. As did Japan, Russia, Germany, The United States, France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. Even after they won the opium wars and got their favorable trades, they continued to work to overthrow or minimize the Qing dynasty and take political power. The Qing ended up sputtering out a few years before it became unfashionable to be a colonialist, so China dissolved into rule by warlords, then conquered by Japan, then the communists won and the rest is history.

FYI, Celestial grace in his letter meant the grace of Qing Emperor, and Celestial Court the Qing Government. Lin's perspective was pretty Qing-centric which was of course orthodox in his ideology. The letter reads so supercilious as if it were written by someone much worse than D. Trump. I doubt if the messenger had the guts to deliver or just burnt it silently.

For sure, the UK was deeply responsible for so much death and suffering from the Opium trade in China in this era.

Just like modern China (and Mexico) should be considered deeply responsible for the current massive opioid crisis in the United States: 1. https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-... 2. https://www.science.org/content/article/underground-labs-chi... 3. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/916890880/we-are-shipping-to-... 4. https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...

If the drugs are produced in China and thus are available there, why doesn't China (nor Mexico) have the same level of problems?

And the other way round: For sure, Opium was imported to England. Why didn't it become a problem?

UK had a better government and more cohesive society, also much smaller.

10X the population, you'll see anything worked before becomes useless.

So one problem in UK is nusaise, in China would be catastrophe.

Just because Opium is not a problem in UK, doesn't mean that it would be a problem in China.

Also, liberal voting politics works in the West, could be a disaster in the majority of the world today outside of the West.

>And the other way round: For sure, Opium was imported to England. Why didn't it become a problem?

Opium was produced around Calcutta(Kolkata). Shipping it to China was cheap, shipping it to the UK was expensive. Only the wealthy British could afford opium, and they used a ton of it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opiu...

Well, in that historical case, the sale of Opium to China was a state sponsored project. Opium was only a minor problem in England, but it wasn't being smuggled into England by a quasi-hostile foreign country trying to re-balance its trade deficits.

If you think opium wasn't a problem in England, you're delusional. A quick google search will prove you wrong: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Opium...

The drugs that China exports to the US aren't legal to be sold in China, but are legal (for them) to export to other countries.

The drug dealers were British subjects, in general. China didn't have an easy way to punish them (the actual merchants responsible generally wouldn't be entering China), but Britain absolutely did, so could enforce its own laws against opium (which were then fairly strict; it would've been a death penalty thing). Britain _did_ have an opium problem, incidentally, but the volumes imported were just much smaller.

Opium was produced in British India, not China, for the most part.

is it China and Mexico who refuse to secure the US borders?

is it China and Mexico who are behind the narrative that the war on drugs is immoral and unnecessary and that we'd better just legalize everything?

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