Chinese people enjoyed opium for centuries before the Opium wars. Opium was a legal and commonly traded item, and it was only since the 1790s that the imperial court started to worry about the effects of abuse.
And even ~1000 years before then, Wu Shi San was a popular, but toxic psychoactive drug used by the elite in China.
or the mindset of living in a country that was induced into drug addiction by a “free” country before.
I can’t seriously believe that Chinese people didn’t abuse psychoactive substances before they discovered the joy of British opium
they probably did, but there wasn’t an abuse epidemic before
Chinese people enjoyed opium for centuries before the Opium wars. Opium was a legal and commonly traded item, and it was only since the 1790s that the imperial court started to worry about the effects of abuse.
And even ~1000 years before then, Wu Shi San was a popular, but toxic psychoactive drug used by the elite in China.
COPY - CES_WP136.pdf - https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/uploads/files/Working-Papers-Archives/CES_WP136.pdf
Cold-Food Powder - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-Food_Powder
Also Imperial Britain was a monarchy, not a free country. Brunacho’s comment makes zero sense.
To be fair just before the time of the opium wars they were relatively far along in their process of converting to a democracy.
A country with an unelected House of Lords is still not a free democracy.
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