this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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I can't seriously believe that Chinese people didn't abuse psychoactive substances before they discovered the joy of British opium
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.
The wackiest thing is that it's often the Lords who have stopped the Commons enacting some really authoritarian stuff!
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
they probably did, but there wasn't an abuse epidemic before