In 'Smoke and Ashes,' Amitav Ghosh draws comparisons between America's modern opioid crisis and the West's flooding of China with opium in the 18th century.

In 'Smoke and Ashes,' Amitav Ghosh draws comparisons between America's modern opioid crisis and the West's flooding of China with opium in the 18th century.

War on Drugs. Anti-Chinese Xenophobia Fueled America's First Drug War San Francisco's prohibitionists worried that opium dens were patronized by "young men and women of respectable parentage" as ...

China banned the importation of opium as early as 1729, for which reason the East India Company “could not formally or explicitly acknowledge that its opium was intended for the Chinese market.” ...

It was in Javanese ports that Chinese sailors learned the habit of smoking tobacco dipped in Dutch-made liquid opium. They brought the practice back to Chinese port cities, where opium dens ...

ZHONGSHAN, China — Looked at through the Chinese prism, opium is a singularly bad thing. On this issue mainstream public opinion is as black and white as a panda. Only if you step out of China ...

Although China had partially enforced a ban on opium importation since 1729, heavily guarded ships took the product from the Ghazipur and Patna factories to Calcutta, where it was auctioned to ...

The National Anti-Opium Association of China noted in 1929: “We are quite taken by surprise by the fact that inversely as the evil practice of opium smoking is on the decrease through the united ...

The Opium Exclusion Act applied only to the opium processed for smoking that was favored by Chinese immigrants —not the medicinal opium that white Americans commonly kept in their household ...