Instrument of empires

Ghosh details how the East India Company took control of opium production in Bihar and coerced Indian farmers to cultivate opium poppies (as Deeti does in Smoke and Poppies), a capital and labour-intensive crop, to sell in China through a system of auction houses and smugglers. When international pressure pushed Britain to engage in drug-control negotiations, the UK Government used diplomacy to delay practical action, an approach that other industries “would use later to forestall regulation; similar tactics are still being used by fossil fuel companies in relation to climate change”, writes Ghosh. “In one of those uncanny synchronicities that haunt the history of opium, it was in the Low Library's splendid rotunda, in 1962, that Brooklyn-born Arthur M Sackler, the brain behind the marketing of the addictive and widely abused drug Valium, held the first major show of his collection of Chinese art and antiquities”, writes Ghosh; Arthur's nephew Richard Sackler attended the show and would later go on to launch “a massive drive to promote prescription opioids”. Ghosh describes how the same dynamics of class and race that protected opium traders in the 19th century, “resurfaced during the opioid epidemic, when the top executives of Purdue Pharma were often afforded preferential treatment by the legal system, merely because they were able to present themselves as respectable white businessmen who were 'temperamentally incapable of committing the kinds of crimes that should land a person in prison’“.