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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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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