70. The Opium Wars

Summary

Flipping Tables, Episode 70: “The Opium Wars”

Host: Monte Mader
Date: August 3, 2026

---

Episode Overview

Monte Mader, a former alt-right evangelical, explores the Opium Wars as a prism for understanding the dark intersection of Christian empire, state-sponsored addiction, and patterns of exploitation that echo into today’s opioid crisis and international affairs. Mader reflects on how empires—particularly Britain and the United States—have justified profit-driven violence via moral language, focusing on the mechanics and enduring legacy of the Opium Wars while continually interrogating how faith is weaponized for imperial ends.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Humen Opium Destruction & Lin Zexu’s Moral Stance ([00:00 - 10:00])

• Lin Zexu’s actions: In 1839, Lin Zexu, a respected Qing official, publicly destroyed 20,000 chests (c. 2.6 million lbs) of British opium at Humen, apologizing even to the fish for poisoning their habitat, highlighting the morality of his actions versus the British state’s silence.
  • Quote: “He apologized to the fish. The men who put the opium there never apologized to anyone.” (Monte, 03:50)
• Open destruction: Lin wanted foreign witnesses to confirm China didn’t profiteer from or steal the opium, exemplifying transparency above profit-driven crime.
• Letter to Queen Victoria: Lin’s extraordinary moral letter to Queen Victoria remains unanswered—questioning how a Christian empire could justify such harm.

2. Tea, Trade Imbalance, and the British Turn to Opium ([10:00 - 25:00])

• Britain’s addiction to tea led to a silver drain, as China only accepted payment in silver and didn’t desire British goods.
• British response: The East India Company monopolized and ramped up opium production in India, exporting it to China via intermediary traders to generate massive profits and balance trade.
  • Quote: “Britain could not compete because Britain did not have a product good enough to sell to them. The product it finally found… was opium.” (Monte, 22:15)
• Mechanics of the trade: Smuggling networks and bribes became entrenched; by the late 1830s, opium imports had soared along with catastrophic silver outflows from China.

3. Societal Impact of Addiction and British Engineered Dependency ([25:00 - 40:00])

• Opium’s effects: Mader details the physical and social destruction wrought by opium addiction, referencing 19th-century medical descriptions and societal collapse—villages shrinking, families selling daughters, soldiers incapacitated, government unable to function.
• British addictiveness: China’s opium addiction reached, by 1906, 13.5 million, with as many as 27% of adult men using.
• Failed responses: Late Qing attempts to eradicate opium were overwhelmed by how deeply dependency and economic structures were embedded.
• Imperial hypocrisy: Britain outlawed opium at home while forcibly exporting it to China.

4. Indian Poppy Farmers & Structural Extraction ([40:00 - 51:00])

• Colonial exploitation: British East India Company forced Indian farmers, especially in Bihar, to grow poppy instead of subsistence crops, destroying soil, community self-sufficiency, and creating generational poverty.
  • Quote: “The company counted output, yield per acre, chests and shipments. It never counted the bodies.” (Monte, 50:48)
• Legacy: Today, Bihar remains among India’s poorest regions, illustrating how imperial extraction leaves scars centuries later.

5. The First Opium War and Unequal Treaties ([51:00 - 1:10:00])

• Moral challenge: Lin Zexu’s letter accused Britain of hypocrisy—outlawing opium at home, pushing it abroad. William Gladstone in Parliament condemned the war as a grave sin, but profit motives and reframing of the debate—property rights over moral hazard—prevailed.
• Military mismatch: British ironclads decimated a weakened, debilitated Chinese military. The Treaty of Nanking (1842) humiliated China: $21 million indemnity, loss of Hong Kong, forced open ports, extraterritoriality for British subjects, but never once mentioning opium in writing. The trade expanded, and dependency deepened.
  • Quote: “Britain did not defeat a healthy nation in a fair fight. It poisoned them, then attacked…” (Monte, 1:06:33)

6. Second Opium War: Religion Written Into Empire ([1:10:00 - 1:33:00])

• Flimsy pretexts: The Arrow Incident (over expired ship registration and piracy) and execution of a French missionary justified new war. Real goal: expand opium and missionary access.
• Treaty of Tianjin (1858): Legalized the opium trade, opened 11 more ports, guaranteed missionary access/protections, and institutionalized permanent Western presence in Beijing—all signed at gunpoint.
  • Quote: “Drug legalization and missionary access... How does someone do enough mental gymnastics to justify that?” (Monte, 1:28:13)
• Consequence: Anti-missionary riots, most notably in Changin (1870), as Christianity was experienced not as faith but as arm of imperial subjugation.

7. Cultural Destruction—Burning of the Summer Palace ([1:33:00 - 1:38:15])

• Looting and burning: British and French troops burned the Summer Palace, looted artifacts, and split plunder with official precision—an act of cultural theft and humiliation remembered in every Chinese school.
  • Quote: “You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burned. He knew he was destroying something irreplaceable. He said so in writing. And he did it anyway.” (Monte quoting Captain Gordon, 1:37:30)

8. Aftermath: The Taiping Rebellion ([1:38:15 - 1:45:45])

• Opium’s political aftershocks: Hong Xiuquan, failing civil service and influenced by Western missionary literature, declared himself Christ’s brother and led the Taiping Rebellion, the deadliest civil war—20-70 million dead, possibly more than World War II casualties.
• Rebellion’s roots traced to:
  • Mass opium devastation and economic collapse.
  • Loss of faith in Qing legitimacy post-opium wars.
  • Missionary presence delivering religious ideas.
• Irony: Britain helped destroy the movement opium created by helping crush the Taiping who threatened renewed profits.

9. Modern Parallels: Purdue Pharma and America’s Opioid Crisis ([1:45:45 - 2:04:00])

• Purdue’s rise: OxyContin’s aggressive, deceitful marketing—mirroring the British model—manufactured a new wave of mass addiction for profit in the US.
• Targeted regions: Pill mills in economically devastated areas, similar social disintegration as Chinese towns in the 1840s.
• Corporate impunity: Minimal fines, no jail sentences for responsible executives.
• Addiction as violence: “Manufacturing addiction is a form of violence and a deadly one... The company never counted the American dead.” (Monte, 2:02:30)

10. Geopolitics: The Fentanyl Crisis, “Reverse Opium War,” and Sino-American Tensions ([2:04:00 - 2:14:30])

• Fentanyl flow: US officials accuse China of waging a “reverse Opium War” by exporting fentanyl precursors. Chinese officials respond with historic grievances, framing Western demands as predatory.
• Legacy: Opium War history underpins Chinese national identity and foreign policy, explaining deep, justified suspicion toward Western overtures.

11. Christian Nationalism and Faith as Empire ([2:14:30 - end])

• Weaponized faith: Mader draws a direct line from the British Empire to current-day Christian nationalism: “The Christianity of the British Empire was not a side project unrelated to the opium trade. It was the moral infrastructure that made it possible.”
  • Quote: “God is on our side. Our civilization is the right one… And if people are hurt, they were asking for it. They just don’t count. The Opium War is the historical proof of what that framework produces…” (Monte, 2:19:40)
• Echoes in America: The same pattern—praying on Sunday, dealing harm on Monday—recurs in American political and religious life. The same mechanisms of justification, denial, and violence repeat.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “He knelt and offered prayers to the spirit of the sea, apologizing to the fish for the poison about to flow into their home. He apologized to the fish. The men who put the opium there never apologized to anyone.” (Monte, 03:40)
• “Britain could not compete because Britain did not have a product good enough to sell to them. The product it finally found… was opium.” (Monte, 22:15)
• “The company counted output, yield per acre, chests and shipments. It never counted the bodies.” (Monte, 50:48)
• “Britain did not defeat a healthy nation in a fair fight. It poisoned them, then attacked…” (Monte, 1:06:33)
• “Drug legalization and missionary access... How does someone do enough mental gymnastics to justify that?” (Monte, 1:28:13)
• “You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burned. He knew he was destroying something irreplaceable. He said so in writing. And he did it anyway.” (Monte citing Capt. Gordon, 1:37:30)
• “Manufacturing addiction is a form of violence and a deadly one. The company never counted the American dead.” (Monte, 2:02:30)
• “The Christianity of the British Empire was not a side project unrelated to the opium trade. It was the moral infrastructure that made it possible.” (Monte, 2:18:02)
• “The Opium War is the historical proof of what that framework produces when it’s handed military power, economic resources and zero accountability.” (Monte, 2:19:40)
• “By what right does a nation that prays on Sunday ship poison on Monday?” (Monte, 2:21:50)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00] The Destruction at Humen – Lin Zexu’s Defiant Stand
• [10:00] Britain’s Tea Addiction and Imperial Trade Dilemma
• [22:15] Birth of the Opium Trade – East India Company & Jardine Matheson
• [31:00] Effects of Opium Addiction in Chinese Society
• [40:45] The Indian Farmers’ Experience – Colonial Extraction
• [51:50] Lin’s Letter to Queen Victoria & Gladstone’s Parliamentary Condemnation
• [1:03:50] Military Realities & Treaty of Nanking
• [1:20:00] The Treaty of Tianjin: Opium and Missionaries Inscribed Together
• [1:33:00] Burning of the Summer Palace – Cultural Trauma
• [1:39:30] Taiping Rebellion’s Roots in Imperial Exploitation
• [1:45:45] Modern Opioid Crisis Parallels – Purdue/OxyContin
• [2:04:00] Fentanyl, “Reverse Opium War,” and Chinese-American Relations
• [2:14:30] Christian Nationalism, Moral Infrastructure, and Ongoing Legacy
• [2:21:00] Five Takeaways – Lessons for Deconstruction and Activism

---

Five Major Takeaways (as outlined by Monte, [2:21:00])

1. Separate Faith from Empire: Christianity and Christian nationalism are not the same. Deconstruction is about learning the difference.
2. Follow the Money, Not the Language: Institutions use moral rhetoric to mask profit motives and atrocities.
3. Always Ask “By What Right?” Question the legitimacy of institutional power and its claims.
4. Addiction is Manufactured, Not Chosen: Blaming individuals serves and protects profiteers; solve structurally, not punitively.
5. Historical Memory is Leverage: Understanding and teaching true history is essential for accountability and prevention of repeated harm.

---

Conclusion

Monte Mader exposes the Opium Wars as a blueprint for understanding how addiction, empire, and moral language intertwine, with direct resonance in today’s opioid crisis and global politics. The episode challenges listeners—especially those deconstructing faith or learning hidden histories—to separate spiritual ideals from the actions of empire, to compassionately understand addiction, and to interrogate whose interests are always served.

---

For more resources or to join community discussions on deconstruction and active resistance, Monte encourages listeners to visit her newsletter or Patreon.

Transcript

[A]

There is a beach in southern China near a town called Humen in Guangdong province, where a June morning in 1839, a government official named Lin Zetsu stood at the edge of three enormous trenches dug into the sand and looked at 20,000 wooden chests of opium. Each chest weighed roughly 140 pounds, packed with narcotic resin grown in India by the British government and shipped across the Indian Ocean to China. 20,000 chests, that's nearly £3 million of poison, enough to sustain the addiction of millions of people for months. Lin Zetsu was one of the most respected leaders in China, risen through the civil service examination system, so demanding that only one in several hundred candidates passed its final level. He had governed two provinces with a reputation for fairness and efficiency. And he was staring at the physical evidence of a crime so large no law had a name for it. It was the deliberate, state sponsored poisoning of his people by the government of Great Britain. He ordered every chest to be destroyed. Trenches were dug and filled with fresh water. Workers carried opium balls across planks, cracked them under their heels and kicked the fragments into the water, where other men beat the dissolving resin with hose and spatulas and spread lime and salt over it to break it into an inert slurry. 500 workers did this for 23 days straight, their skin burning from the mixture, the smell carrying for miles on the sea wind. The total destroyed was about 1,200 metric tons, over 2.6 million pounds of processed narcotic. Lynn invited foreign observers to watch. He wanted witnesses. He wanted the record to show China had acted openly, that had not stolen the opium or profited from it, but destroyed it in plain view of the same merchants who had shipped it before the first chest was cracked open. Lynn knelt and offered prayers to the spirit of the sea, apologizing to the fish for the poison about to flow into their home. He apologized to the fish. The men who put the opium there never apologized to anyone. Months earlier, Lynn had written a letter to Queen Victoria that remains one of the most extraordinary moral documents of the 19th century of the a very clear case that no British official has ever answered. The 20,000 chests on that beach were not put there by criminals in dark alleys or smugglers hiding in the shadows. They were put there by agents and merchants working for the government of Great Britain, the most powerful empire on earth, a nation that called itself Christian and had just finished congratulating the world on abolishing the slave trade. At the very moment it was celebrating the end of one moral horror, it was running one of the largest state sponsored drug trafficking operations in history. It was grew opium in India with the coerced labor of millions of farmers, Shipped it to China and sold it to a population that had begged it to stop through letters, laws, and every diplomatic channel available. What followed were two wars. The British Empire fought China from 1839 to 1842 and again from 1856 to 1860. Not to defend freedom or to protect innocent people. Not to spread civilization as the government claimed. Of course, they always, they always claim that. And western textbooks, of course, have repeated that it was about spreading civilization. These wars were fought to force a sovereign nation to accept a drug that was destroying its people and then to punish that nation with cannons and warships and burning cities for having the courage to say no. This is also a story about addiction. What it means to deliberately and systematically hook millions of human beings on a substance that destroys their bodies, families, communities and country. Addiction has been around since humans have been recording their own history. A Christian empire that prayed on Sunday and shipped poison on Monday, that wrote missionary access and drug legalization into the same treaty that burned a civilization's greatest cultural treasure and then called it progress. The damage rippled forward for generations. The deadliest civil war in human history. A rebellion that killed between 20 and 70 million people. Regions of India impoverished so deeply they remain among the poorest on earth today. And a wound between China and the west that sits right now at the center of the fentanyl crisis, killing tens of thousands of Americans a year. And a lot of our current administration's conversation Red scare terminology around China. The question is not about silver or trade routes or geopolitics. The question what kind of civilization manufactures addiction on an industrial scale, defends it with military force, and wraps the whole operation in the language of God and moral progress? And it's not just about the opium wars. It's about the formula that allowed the opium wars to happen, as well as has been replicated over and over and over and over by the British empire and the United States. What does that tell us about the Christianity the empire carried forward when the gospel and opium arrived on the same ships under the same treaties, enforced by the same guns? Probably going to cover a history that maybe you're not super familiar with today, but I think is a powerful reflection of the idealism around colonialism. The excuses to take Christianity and claim that it's the reason you're taking over other nations, or in this case, poisoning them or attacking them. And what does it really mean? What does it really look like for history? And how far does that impact truly carry? Because it didn't end in the 1800s, the Opium wars and Britain's hand in it. Today on Flipping Tables. Hello and welcome back, everybody. Welcome to Flipping Tables. I'm your host, Monte Mater. Probably recognize me from living in your phone. I hope everyone had a decent week. I feel like a lot of people this week, myself included, had a really, really tough week last week. Just everyone I talked to was like, man, I'm going through it. I felt the same way. I had a few days last week where I just couldn't. I just couldn't. I didn't do yesterday's news. Most of last week. I didn't have the bandwidth. I was also in LA and the hotel I was staying at did not have Internet fast enough to upload the videos. I couldn't upload anything. It was so slow. So here we are, couple quick announcements. One's a little bit of a teaser. If you are someone over on Patreon. Patreon.com montemater we have some big changes coming over there. We're going to do a big rebrand, a really big new community focus around giving, especially people who are either leaving or have left high control groups, a place to land a community space where we really focus on deconstruction. There's going to be, there's going to be some cool changes happening over there. So if you're not already over there, please consider going over and getting a free or paid membership. And there's going to be some changes. I'm really excited for my only other announcement, especially if you live in Missouri. I am joining a protest walk across the country next week. I will be starting the walk with the woman who founded this walk on the 6th. I'll be leaving from Jefferson City. I'll start literally starting my walk at the Capitol building on the 6th with her. Um, and I'll share more about her on social media. But she's a mom from Oregon who decided she couldn't sit at home and just do nothing. And she has organized a protest walk across the country that will end at midterms in D.C. and I am going and giving her a week off. I will be taking over the walk for a week. If you live in Missouri, we are looking for volunteers to help drop people off to the walking points. Pick them up at the end of the day because we're doing about 20 miles a day, 14 to 20. And also if you want to come walk for a day or part of a day, you are also welcome to come Join us. Please make sure you're subscribed on Instagram and my newsletter. If you go to montemater.com and go to the contact page, all of this will be in the newsletter as well. We're really hoping to get some eyes on what she's done. This woman has walked from Oregon to Missouri. Okay. So I met her at the National Organization for Women. I was so inspired by her story and her just determination of, like, I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to do it. So more on that later. But we're going to dive in because got a big episode today. I'm really excited to do this. I was really thinking about a lot of the history that we don't learn the history of. You know, often the U.S. great Britain, Western Europe, a lot of times, they get painted with broad strokes as the good guys. They brought civilization to the world. They did all these wonderful things, you know, and in the US Especially with the history that I grew up with in the United States, the schools I went to, and it was basically taught like, well, I mean, you know, yeah, the US has some problems, but we're basically perfect. We're basically perfect. We got almost everything right. We're this godly nation and. And the white men who founded us were perfect. And they're lovely. And then we learn things like how we sabotaged people's neighbors, neighborhoods, or we infused drugs into certain communities, or we. Or we penalize certain drugs to punish communities who wouldn't vote for a certain person, how we ostracize people, Jim Crow laws, violations of civil rights, how we weaponized language against anybody who was different. And I was trying to think of, how do we kind of tell this story and learn from it? How do we tell it in such a way that this is a pattern that empires have done? This is not unique to us. Right? We're not some, you know, cartoon super villain. It's the way that empires work. And I decided I landed on the Opium wars as my way to talk about this. And I hope that it's interesting. I hope that you learn a lot. I learned a lot about this. A couple years ago. I had. I didn't really know any of the history of China, much less the Opium Wars. Also, please know that I do have a pronunciation cheat sheet in front of me. I will do my best. Most of these I feel relatively confident, but I obviously do not speak Chinese. So if it is not perfect, I apologize in advance. Let's dive in to understand how any of this happened. We have to understand tea got a little bit of that history in the US by the 1700s, the entire nation of Great Britain had developed a total addiction to a Chinese leaf that grew only in China and that Britain could not stop drinking no matter what it cost. China, ruled by the Qing dynasty, controlled tea the way a country controls oil. All trade with the west ran through a single port, Guangzhou Canton to Westerners. Foreign merchants were confined to a strip of warehouses on the waterfront, forbidden from entering the city, learning Chinese or carrying weapons. The Chinese were very good about being like, we'll sell you this, but you can't come in here, this is our spot. They did business through a licensed group of Chinese merchants called the Koh Hong, who set prices and managed the flow of goods. Britain could not simply buy all the tea it wanted and call it a fair deal because China did not want anything Britain sold. Britain didn't have anything the Chinese wanted and it wasn't. They weren't being stubborn or backward as British politicians would claim they were, because of course they did. It was Chinese. Silk, porcelain, lacquerware and tea were better than anything that Britain made. The Chinese market had no use for Britain wool or tin or clocks. The only way Britain could pay for tea was in silver, actual bars and coins shipped across the ocean and deposited in Chinese treasuries year after year until the drain got so severe that British officials began to panic. They were losing too much money and China wasn't giving it back because China didn't want anything that Britain had. The numbers are staggering. In 1700, Britain imported about 20,000 pounds of Chinese tea a year, mostly for the wealthy. By 1800, it was £20 million a year, a thousand fold increase in a single century because tea had become the drink of the working class, of every meal, every kitchen table in Britain. And if you ever spent time in the uk, I mean they drink tea all the time, all day long. The tax on tea imports alone accounted for roughly a tenth of the British government's entire income. For the whole government, tea was not a beverage Britain enjoyed. It was a financial pillar Britain could not survive without. The standard Western textbook blames China for the imbalance. A xenophobic empire that refused to join the modern world and had to be forced open for its own good. Of course, the very good, decent, not at all incentivized by wealth. White folks running the empire. We had to open the country for good. I say we because we are essentially the child of Great Britain. The set piece is the McCartney embassy of 1793, when George III sent Lord McCartney to Beijing with a shipload of British goods and a request for expanded trade. The Qianlong Empire reportedly replied that China already had everything it needed and had no use for products of barbarian nations. Amazing response. Julia Lovell, professor of Modern Chinese history at Burbeck and author of the opium war from 2011. One of my primary sources for this episode established that the Emperor was not being arrogant. He was just being accurate. He was just telling the truth. We don't need anything from you. Chinese goods were superior by far. And the Canton system was not a wall to keep the world out, but a structure to manage trade on terms that reflected what each side actually brought to the table. Britain could not compete because Britain did not have a product good enough to sell to them. The product it finally found was not a technological breakthrough, a manufacturing innovation, or anything the nation claiming to represent Christian civilization could be proud of. It was opium. The East India Trading Company, a massive trading corporation that functioned as the arm of the British government and had controlled much of India since the mid-1700s, had held a monopoly on opium production in Bengal since 1773, when Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of British India, consolidated poppy farming in the fertile corridor between Bihar and Benares. The whole trade was designed to maximize British profit while hiding British fingerprints. The company grew the opium. The company processed its giant factories. Company auctioned it in Calcutta to private quote country traders who shipped it to the Chinese coast, where Chinese smuggling networks moved it inland. At every stage, the profit climbed toward the colonial treasury and the London trading houses. While the legal fiction that the company did not technically sell the opium to Chinese people let the Crown deny that it was running a drug operation. To be very, very clear, this was orchestrated by the British government through the East India Trading Company. The firm that dominated the trade was Jardine Matheson and Company, founded in Canton in 1832 by two Scottish surgeons turned opium merchants, William Jardine and James Matheson. By 1830, it controlled roughly half of all foreign trade with China. By 1839, its opium profits alone topped 1 million British pounds, a fortune built chest by chest on the addiction of Chinese bodies. Jardine Matheson still exists today. It's one of the largest conglomerates in Hong Kong and the city's biggest private employer. It owns the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, supermarket chains across Asia, and car dealerships from Jakarta to London. The company founded on opium money in 1832 never closed. It just changed what exactly it sold. Each opium ball weighed about 6 pounds. 40 balls packed a chest at the Calcutta auctions. A chest sold for 4 to 500 rupees. By the time it reached Chinese buyers on the coast, it went for double or triple that, because smuggling a banned substance into a country that had outlawed it created exactly the premium pricing that makes drug trafficking so profitable. That's the thing about bans with, like, these drugs, because there's always a lot of conversations about legality, decriminalization. The bans actually make it so much more profitable to get that substance into that country. Haynes and Sonello, in the Opium wars, the addiction of one empire and the corruption of another, from 2002, documented how the smuggling infrastructure grew so elaborate that entire port communities were restructured around the drug receiving ships. Floating warehouses anchored just off the coast in international waters where Chinese law could not reach, served as distribution hubs. The largest, the Linton island depot, ran openly for years. Fast boats called scrambling dragons and centipedes, crewed by men who knew every cove of the southern coast, carried opium ashore in the dark. Officials tasked with stopping the trade were bribed so consistently that corruption became the default. The British had not just introduced the drug, they built a criminal economy so entrenched it captured the Chinese government's own enforcement apparatus. The numbers climb year by year by year. In 1820, opium imports into China stood at 9,708 chests. By 1835, 35, 445. By 1838, the year before, Lynn's cracked down 40,000 chests. About 5.6 million pounds of opium in a single year. The silver drain was catastrophic. And this is. This is all orchestrated by Britain to get their silver back. In the early 20s, early 1820s, China lost about 2 million ounces of silver a year to opium. By the 1830s, it was more than 9 million ounces a year. Across the decade, China hemorrhaged an estimated $26.6 million in foreign silver, 25.5 million in Sisi, the silver ingots that served as Chinese currency, and $3.6 million in gold, nearly 56 million in a single decade. Enough to destabilize the currency, collapse the tax system, and impoverish millions of farming families who owed their taxes in silver but earned their income in copper. By 1837, 57% of everything China imported was poison. Manufactured in India by the British government. By 1843, opium had become the second largest source of revenue for the entire colonial government of British India. The Crown was not merely tolerating the drug trade, it was financially dependent on it. Now addicted to opium revenue the same way China was addicted to the Opium itself, this was not a trade. It was an engineering of dependence. Because they did not like that they could not get their money back from China. They did not like that China would not give them what they wanted in regards to trade. So they decided to essentially ruin their economy. Every chest that crossed from Calcutta to Canton existed because a human being on the other end would smoke it, become dependent on it, and eventually be consumed by it. To understand what Britain did to China, you have to understand what opium does to a person. And I also want to briefly say, and I do plan on doing a whole episode on addiction, because we have so many negative thoughts or stereotypes around addiction, we don't really have a clear, concise 100%. This is what causes addiction, right? There is a physical, genetic property to it in the sense that certain people are more predisposed to it than others. Not by race. That's a common thing that racists will say. It's not. It's not based on race. It's based a lot on environment. Nature versus nurture plays a role. There does seem to be some genetic components, but we don't know. But this is a disease. It is a disease, and that's why it can affect anybody. No matter how you grew up, where you work, what you do, what you believe, it can get to anyone. And that's why we see opium crisis as we see the crack epidemic. But we also see, we see the prescription crisis here in America. Again, it can get you. So I want to lead with a lot of compassion for people who struggle with addiction. And we do need to treat it like a disease and treat it with a multifaceted approach. And what we see now in the US or across the world is not new. Again, this has been documented throughout history. So opium is the dried latex of the poppy. Score the unripe seed pod and weeps a milky fluid that darkens as it dries into this brown black resin containing more than 20 alkaloids, the most important of which is morphine. Named after Morpheus, the God of dreams, morphine binds to receptors in the brain and the spinal cord, flooding the body with warmth, calm, and intense physical pleasure, which, while suppressing pain, anxiety, and fear, it does not create these sensations from nothing. It hijacks your body's pain management system, overwhelming the natural reward circuits with a signal so strong that food, sleep, love, touch, and the satisfaction of anything else you do will fade compared to it. And that's the trap. So the body begins to adapt. Within weeks, the brain treats the artificial signal as normal, cuts Its own production of the chemicals that regulate mood and pain. The user needs more of the drug to feel the same relief. Without it, the body revolts. 19th century physicians documented the withdrawal symptoms with growing horror. Sweating, vomiting, uncontrollable diarrhea, shaking, muscle cramps, bone pain so severe addicts said it felt like their skeleton was tearing free of their flesh. Streaming eyes, a running nose, no sleep, a racing heart, goosebumps so characteristic of opioid withdrawal. They gave English the phrase cold turkey. That's what that means. That's where that cold turkey phrase comes from. A case published in 1833 in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal described a patient in withdrawal who, quote, convulsed for hour after hour in every muscle and vomited almost intermission. The only thing physicians could do was administer more of the drug that had caused the crisis in the first place. Right. How do you relieve pain in that scenario? It's morphine. Opium was often smoked in dedicated dens that worked as both marketplace and prison. Zhang Hyankwen, historian and University of Manchester, documented the social life of opium in China. How the ritual of smoking structured entire days and then entire lives. A moderate user smoked once or twice a day. A heavy addict smoked four, five or six times, spending hours in a stupor and every clear moment finding money for the next pipe. As tolerance built, doses grew and intervals shrank until existence contracted into a single repeating cycle of smoke. Nod, waken, pain, find money, smoke again. A person in that condition can't farm, they can't work, they can't tend to shop, staff a government, stand in a military post, or parent. The addict became a single purpose organism. The body organized around obtaining and consuming a substance. Everything else doesn't matter anymore. Frank Decotter, Lars Lehman and Zhou Tsun, a narcotic, a history of drugs in China, estimated that by 1838, China had between 4 and 12 million opium addicts. 4 and 12 million. So many people. Even the low figure means 4 million human beings trapped in that cycle. By the end of the century, it reached an estimated 40 million people, 10% of China's entire population. By 1906, the scale forced the world to notice. Thirteen and a half million Chinese were addicted, 27% of all adult men. More than one in four grown men in China was physically dependent on opium, consuming roughly 39,000 tons a year, the largest concentration of drug addiction in recorded history. That year, the Qing issued an imperial edict to eliminate opium cultivation and smoking within 10 years. Pipes, lamps and paraphernalia were burned at public rallies. Anti Opium societies were granted police powers. Governors were ordered to destroy poppy fields. It was the most ambitious anti drug campaign ever attempted. And it came 70 years too late because British commerce had embedded the infrastructure of addiction so deep that removing it meant dismantling the economic base of entire regions in China. In February of 1909, the International Opium Commission met in Shanghai. Thirteen nations, including the U.S. britain, China, France, Germany, Japan and Russia. The first international drug control effort in history. It took 13 governments meeting in the very city forced open by the Treaty of Nanking to begin the slow, inadequate work of undoing what one empire's greed had built at the scale of a civilization. It looked like this. A village of 500 where 125 of the adult men are somewhere. In that process, harvest shrank because the labor force has collapsed. Families sell their furniture. Furniture, then their tools, then their land, then their daughters to pay for the drug. The local economy contracts because everyone is spending every copper coin on opium. The elderly and the children are going hungry. Temples fall into disrepair. The garrison cannot field a patrol because half of its soldiers are addicted to the substance. The tax collector demands silver. But the silver has already left. Upstream through the smuggling networks onto those receiving ships, across the ocean and into the vaults of the East India Company and into the banks of London. And this was not one village. This was China. Like province after province, town after town, the tax system again ran on silver. As the silver drained out to pay for British drugs, its value shot up against copper coins that ordinary people earned. A family that owed taxes and silver watched its bill double and triple while its income never changed. Provincial treasuries emptied. Government workers went unpaid. Garrisons hollowed out into shadows of what they had been just a generation before. Opium addiction is not a private vice. It was a systematic planned demolition of a civilization's capacities to sustain itself. Britain engineered that demolition, profited from it, defended it with worships, and then called it trade. And before I really get into the human cost of the opium crisis that led to the opium wars, I'm going to take my first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you'd like to get these episodes ad free, you can subscribe to support both my work and the [e-mail] montymater thank you for listening to those ads. It helps me a lot. Let's jump back in. The human cost was not measured only in Chinese bodies. In northeastern India, in a corridor of fertile land between ancient cities of Bihar and Benares, the East India Company had built the productive engine of the whole operation. And the communities it conscripted had never recovered. The company's opium department designated land for mandatory poppy cultivation, forcing farmers by colonial law to grow poppies on the soil. The government chose Amitav Ghosh, who spent years researching the Indian side of the trade for smoke and ashes back in 2023, documented a system that ran like a factory. Once land was claimed for poppies, no other crop could be grown on it. Farmers who tried to plant rice or vegetables faced eviction from their own fields. The company set the price it paid for raw opium always low enough to guarantee its margin, always too low to lift farmers out of poverty. The farmers bore the cost of seed, fertilizer, and labor. The company collected the profit. Sounds a lot like corporations today, quite frankly. By 1850, nearly 500,000 acres in Bihar alone had been converted to poppy. Between 5 and 7 million people were pulled into the production chain. The diversified farming that fed the communities for generations like vegetable gardens, grain rotations, market crops was ripped out and replaced with rows of beautiful, deadly flowers that no one could eat. They destroyed the food source to create the drug. A region that fed itself for centuries became a narcotics plantation that could barely survive, feeding the addiction of a population 4,000 miles away. And for those of you that didn't grow up in farming or ranching of any kind, one of the things to know that crop rotation is critical for the health of a soil. If you continue to plant the same crop over and over and over, it will eventually deplete the nutrients of the soil, and then nothing will grow very well. It can take years to recover or may never recover, depending on the plant. So crop rotation is very, very important. So when they take a parcels of land like this and they say you can only grow this thing, they're not just taking away people's food sources, which they did, and then chose to pay them far less than they needed to get out of poverty. But they're also actually actively destroying the soil. Inside the two great processing factories, the Patna on the Genghis and the Gaza poor a hundred miles upstream, production was industrial, and conditions were medieval. At Patna, a thousand men worked as cake makers from 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, in sheds that regularly topped 40 degrees Celsius, or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a bell rang every 20 minutes, and each man's output was checked. The factory turned out 16,000 to 20,000 opium cakes a day, each about six pounds. These are those opium balls, each kneaded and rolled by hand in stifling heat by men Whose skin and lungs were saturated with narcotic residue. They handled raw opium barehanded for the whole shift and breathe the fumes constantly. The drying sheds covered acres and smelled for miles. Children worked in this environment alongside adults because there were no workers rights back then. Understand that unions and workers rights protects all of us. Right empires in the past have had no issue using slave and child labor. Children worked alongside adults. No health records were kept. No compensation was paid for injury or sickness from constant exposure to the fumes across both factories and the cultivation feeding them. Roughly 10 million Indians were involved in some stage of poppy production Constrict conscripted into making the drug that would cross the ocean ocean and poison China, addict a foreign population and would later trigger two two wars. And they were conscripted to do that work while earning wages too low to feed themselves. Living wages A human right. The Gaza poor factory which at its peak processed more opium than any facility on earth still stands and still operates. The Indian government makes legal pharmaceutical opium there today. In a building whose walls absorb the labor of millions of anonymous workers whose names were never recorded and whose suffering never counted. They were too poor for it to count. The company counted output yield per acre, chests and shipments. It never counted the bodies. The poverty the system created in Bihar did not reverse when the trade declined, it calcified. It hardened into the soil that they destroyed. The region subjected to mandatory poppy cultivation remain among the poorest, least literate and most medically abandoned in India right now. Again, the decisions that we make, the decisions for empire don't end when the war is over. They don't end when the economy temporary temporarily recovers. Very often the people at the bottom of that abuse don't recover for hundreds of years if they recover at all. Bihar's multidimensional poverty index stands at 33.76%. More than one in three people poor across income, health, education, living standards all at once. Its Human development index score 0.609 is the lowest of any major Indian state. On par with some of the poorest nations of sub Saharan Africa. Literacy is 74.3%, second lowest in the country. Bihar also has the highest infant mortality rate of any Indian state. The schools, hospitals, roads and water systems the opium department never built were never built by anyone who came after. These are very underdeveloped regions. They were. They were functionally surf labor and then they were abandoned when it was no longer profitable. They just got left there. This is what extraction looks like across countries. Not one dramatic act of violence but a Slow structural draining of a region's ability to sustain its own people. The poppy fields of Bihar were not a side effect of the opium trade. They were its engine. The wealth crossed the ocean, the poverty stayed. And I think of this with when we look at the rollbacks of clean water and air, the attack on national parks, the destruction now the open to mining of national monum, the data centers. When we destroy these ecosystems, we'll never get them back when we don't consider what it means for many of us. And I speak for myself, if you were born in the states, you, you have never had to question having access to clean water. We are now facing decisions like that. If we choose to move forward and drain and kill our ecosystems, then we will end up in situations like these regions because you don't recover. You can only destroy an ecosystem so much before it doesn't recover again. In the spring of 1839 months before Humen Lynchu sat down and wrote to Queen Victoria with a care of a man who believed that if the ruler of Britain understood what her merchants were doing, she would order them to stop. Lin was not a low ranking official firing off an angry complaint. He was one of the most accomplished leaders in China. A scholar who had risen through examination system that tested philosophy, history, literature, governance and a governor general of two provinces that had already shown he could fight the opium crisis by combining medical treatment for addicts with the gradual legal pressure on dealers. The Dao Guang emperor picked him personally because the crisis had outgrown the government's ability to contain it. Millions were addicted. Officials and military officers were among the users and also being paid to let it come in the silver drain threatened to bankrupt the empire. His argument to Victoria was not the begging of a weak man pleading for mercy. It was very, very structured moral challenge that turned Britain's own logic into a It was very well done. The merchants who brought opium, he wrote, did it purely for profit. They, quote, seek merely to advantage themselves and care not about injuring others. A principle heaven's providence despises and mankind looks upon with abhorrence. He pointed out that Britain's own laws proved it understood the danger. Quote we have heard that in your own country opium is prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity. This is strong proof that you know full well how hurtful it is to mankind. Then the question that no British official since 1839 has ever answered, he said, quote, since you then do not permit it to injure your own country, you ought not to have the injurious drug transferred to another country and above all others, how much less to the inner land. He closed with a warning, informal language of Chinese diplomacy, saying, quote, if merchants of your honorable country wish to enjoy trade with us on a permanent basis, they must fearfully observe our law by cutting off, once and for all the supply of opium. End quote. The warning was real. Lyn had the emperor's authority behind him, was prepared to use it. Most scholars believe Victoria never received the letter or never read it. If she did, its questions stripped the enterprise down to the bone. Were Chinese lives worth less than British ones? And if so, by whose authority? Western history has treated Lynn as a minor figure, a zealous bureaucrat who overreacted to a trade dispute and provoked an unnecessary war by seizing private property. The framing has worked so well that generations of British and American students met Lynn, if they met him at all. As a footnote in a chapter about trade, rather than the author of one of the great moral challenges of the modern era, Stephen Platt, historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Imperial Twilight 2018, showed three years of archival work that the war was far more controversial inside Britain than the standard story alone. The opposition came from the center of British politics. William Gladstone, future four time prime minister and one of the most important figures in British history, rose in the House of Commons on April 8, 1840, and delivered a judgment still echoing in the parliamentary record. He said, quote, a war more unjust in its origin, more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace. I do not know and have not read of, end quote. China, he held, had, quote, a perfect right by every principle of justice and equity to prohibit the opium trade if she thought fit. Gladstone knew what opium did to a person. His own sister, Helen, was so consumed by addiction that she was confined by the Lunacy Commission of 1846. He had watched the drug destroy someone he loved in his diary, where he could say what he believed without political cost. He framed the war in the Christian language the empire claimed. He said, quote, I am in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China. And that was not metaphorical. He was a true devout Christian who believed his country was committing a grave sin and big enough to bring divine punishment. And he was right about the sin. But the punishment fell on someone else. The vote to authorize military action passed the Commons by nine votes, 271 to 262, the narrowest margin for any declaration of war in the history of British Parliament. And literally this. This war starts because China says We are not going to allow the opium trade and we're going to push back and we're going to fight you on this. And so the British brought war. So much for the inevitable collision of civilizations. It was a political choice made by a razor thin majority who had been personally lobbied by drug dealers, specifically whose confiscated product this that Lynn destroyed had triggered the crisis in the first place. Jardine sailed to London in September of 1839 and secured private meetings with the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, where he handed over what historians call the Jardine Paper. Military maps of the Chinese coastline, proposed battle plans, troop estimates, a list of financial demands to impose after the inevitable British victory, and a schedule of Chinese ports to force open the entire blueprint for a war to protect a drug trade written not by a military planner, but by the drug dealer who wanted to get richer selling more opium. Peter Word Fay, historian at Caltech, whose The Opium War 1840-1842 remains probably the most exhaustive Western account of the first war. This came out in 1975 documented how Jardine's campaign worked by reframing opium as a matter of national honor and British property rather than a moral question about the drug. By the time the vote reached the floor, the debate had shifted from quote, should a Christian nation wage war to protect a drug trade? To should Britain tolerate the seizure of British property by a foreign government? Always pay attention to the reframe they are so good at that the drug disappeared from the conversation. All that remained was a question of property. They confiscated our property. We have to fight them. Obviously. Let's talk about the First War. The textbook frames the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842 as a clash between two great civilizations meeting on an even field. One side simply proving stronger. That framing is a lie. The technologically superior empire with steam powered iron hold warships attacked a nation it had already spent decades weakening from the inside by deliberately addicting its population so they could get their silver back. Consider what opium had already done before the first shot was fired. Remember, the silver drain had destabilized the economy. The tax system was collapsing. The treasuries were empty. The military had been infiltrated by the drug. So many of the men, like one in four were addicted. Officers smoked opium, soldiers garrison towns. Britain did not defeat a healthy nation in a fair fight. It poisoned them, then attacked it while they were weak and sick with with weapons the nation could not match. This was not a war between civilizations. It was assault by a drug dealer on a customer who tried to give up who tried to get sober. The expeditionary force that arrived off the Chinese coast In June of 1840 was 16 warships, 4 armed steamers, 27 transports, a regiment of Irish infantry, regiments of Indian sepoys and a battery of royal artillery. Against it, Child fielded a coastal defense built for an earlier area. They had wooden war junks, shore batteries with cannons that could not elevate or traverse, and garrison troops, many of whom were debilitated by opium. The mismatch is disgusting. At the Battle of Twin Pea In January of 1841, British warships destroyed an entire fleet of war junks in an hour. Hundreds of Chinese sailors died. British casualties were in the single digits. This was not a gap of degree, but like centuries. We're talking about someone, someone who has a wooden sword fighting against someone who has a semi automatic rifle. The Nemesis, an iron hold steamer built for the campaign, became the symbol of British supremacy. Was 184ft long, drawing only 5ft of water. Carrying two 32 pound pivot guns, five 6 pounders and a rocket launcher, it could navigate shallow inland waterways while Chinese cannonballs bounced off the iron hill like stones off a wall. The defenders had never seen an iron ship. They didn't know that that was possible. It moved up and down the coast destroying everything in its path like a weapon from another century. Like. The Chinese probably looked at this and was like what that would be like us seeing a flying car. At Ningbo in March 1842, a Chinese counterattack of thousands was turned back with the firepower of British officers. Described not as a battle but as a slaughter. At Chapu, Manchu garrison troops fought until their ammunition was gone, then killed their own wives and children before taking their own lives rather than be captured. At Zhenjiang In July of 1842, the final major engagement of the war, Manchu bannermen fought to the death. When the walls were breached, soldiers killed their families before killing themselves. Haynes and Cinello described British soldiers entering a city where the defenders had chosen collective death over submission to a foreign drug empire. They died by the hundreds and thousands for the crime of defending their own country against an invasion launched to protect a foreign drug trade. The Treaty of Nanking, signed 8-28-1842 aboard the HMS Cornwallis in the Yangtze, imposed terms calculated to humiliate. This was such an unfair treaty. It's not even a treaty, it's. I don't know. I don't know what to call it. The Chinese named it the first of quote unequal treaties. That's one way to say it and mark it as the Beginning of this, what's called the century of humiliation. If you've ever felt like China has an ax to grind, they absolutely do. They have an absolute reason to have animosity towards Western countries. It was a period of national subjugation that did not end until 1949 and whose weight has not lifted to this day. China is still suffering the impact of what Britain did to them and, and obviously they have their own reasons to be resentful towards the US and the 13 articles of the Treaty of Nanking are a blueprint for the economic subjugation of a defeated state. China paid a 21 million silver dollar indemnity, itemized with the cruelty of a bill handed to the victim of a robbery. Six million for the opium Lynn had destroyed. Opium China had every right to destroy because it was an illegal narcotic that was being smuggled in. The British made them paid for that. 12 million for the cost of the war itself. China was forced to pay for the military campaign waged against it. To protect the right to keep selling drugs, Hong Kong was handed to Britain in perpetuity. Five ports, Canton, Amoy, Futsal, Ningbo and Shanghai were forced open to British trade and permanent residence. British citizens were granted extraterritoriality. A British subject could commit any crime on Chinese soil and be tried only under British law in a British court before a British judge. Chinese tariffs were capped at 5%, stripping the government of the power to protect its own economy. The Kohong system was abolished. The financial demands written into the treaty matched almost article for article, the demands Jardine had outlined for Palmerston three years earlier. So the drug dealer handed the government official his demands and the government official made it into a treaty and made it happen. The war's outcome was written in advance by the drug dealer. The treaty was his bill of sale. The treaty never mentioned opium by name, ever. The whole war was fought to protect the opium trade. Yet the document that ended it could not bring itself to write the word down because it was all about. No, this was about protecting our property and our interests and, and decency and goodness, no. It was about being drug dealers. Because putting the drug's name into the peace treaty signed under a warship, guns would strip the last, last coat of paint off the enterprise and reveal it for what it was. Leaving opium out left it in a legal gray zone where the trade expanded faster than before. The military was broken, the coastal defenses shattered, the ports were forced open. More opium flowed into China after the war than before. The addiction deepened, the silver kept draining and the silence in the treaty was the loudest confession the Empire ever made. And before we get into the second Opium War, I'm going to take my second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. These episodes are available ad free [e-mail] montymater the Second Opium War, 1856-1860 is where the drug trade and the Christian religion were written into the same text of international law. And this was part of my reason for choosing this story. The Treaty of Tinsin that we get to in a minute because be very careful whenever religious language and I use Christian as the example because that's the example from Britain. And here in the US when religious language is used to justify military conflict, a political decision, political maneuvering or the any kind of conquest of Empire, be very, very careful because every war that has ever been fought has been fought for quote, God and country, every single one. That's always been the excuse. So when you see this language wrapped up in that, understand that religion's got nothing to do it do with it. Personal interests do. So the second Second Opium War was triggered by two incidents so flimsy they would be laughable if the destruction had not been so awful. First, the Arrow Incident of October 1856. Chinese law enforcement officers boarded a Chinese owned cargo ship, the Arrow, registered in Hong Kong and flying a British flag and arrested crew members suspected of piracy. A reasonable action against suspected criminals on a Chinese ship in Chinese waters. But Harry Parks, the 28 year old British Consul in Canton burning with entitlement only a young colonel official can muster, seized on it as a provocation because the ship carried British registration. They literally arrested like only the people suspected of piracy. But he took it as a threat. The registration by the way that they were sailing under was expired. Parkus ignored the detail just because the expired paperwork of a suspected pirate ship was more useful as a reason for war than a reason for restraint. Second was the execution of Father Auguste Chapdelaine, a French Catholic missionary arrested, tortured and killed in the interior province of Guang Chi for preaching Christianity where missionaries had no legal right to operate. France joined the British campaign and cited the priest's death as moral justification. A war launched over the boat with expired paperwork and a missionary operating illegally. Two pretexts were pretty thin and transparent at the time. But the real reason didn't need a pretext. The opium trade wanted more access, they wanted more and more access and now missionaries want more access because in certain provinces of China it was illegal to do that. The Empire wanted both. And so it said okay, well, we're just going to make you do it, then. You don't want to change your laws for us? Okay, we're going to make you do it. The campaign that followed was more brutal than the first war. British and French forces bombarded Canton in late 1857, occupied the city, captured the governor General Yi Ming Chen, who was shipped to Calcutta as a prisoner, and died there in 1859, never setting foot on Chinese soil again. The Allies sailed north, took the Taku forts guarding Beijing, and advanced on the capital. The Treaty of Tinsen, signed June 1858 at the Haigwang Temple in Changjin, should haunt anyone who is ever told that Western missionaries brought the gospel to China through love, sacrifice, and personal persuasion, which is what I was taught growing up. I didn't learn a lot about China growing up. That wasn't a large part of any world history we ever did. But one of the big things was this big focus on Western missionaries bringing Christianity to China. Red is one package, because that's how it's written in this treaty. Written, signed, and enforced. It opened 11 more ports on top of the five, five forced open at Nanking. So what this did is, yeah, it's going to bring Western missionaries quotation marks. It also is opening almost a dozen more ports to drug trade. It established permanent foreign embassies in Beijing for the first time in history. It opened the Yangtze, the main artery of Chinese commerce, to foreign warships and merchant vessels. It imposed new indemnities. Four million tales of silver to Britain, two million to France. And it legalized the opium trade completely, dropping the last legal fiction that British officials had claimed their government was not complicit in the largest drug operation in human history. They just dropped the pretense at that point. They're like, yeah, we're going to fully legalize opium and exploit you guys. But in the same document. So same treaty signed on the same day, same seal, same ink. Christian missionaries were granted legal right to travel, live, and preach anywhere in China, their bodies and property protected by the Chinese government under threat of diplomatic and military consequences if anything happened to them. So they're like, you don't get to decide your religion. You don't get to decide what happens in your country. Oh, by the way, we are fully legalizing our opium trade. Same document, drug legalization and missionary access. And it's amazing to me because we see this now, but, like, how does someone do enough mental gymnastics to justify that? Like, the people that are organizing this treaty is signing are like, well, this is what they did like, it's just, it's just business, right? The drug trade is just, it's just business. And, and it's these people's faults really, that they're addicted, they should have more self control. And, and it, it's fine that we do this because we're bringing Christianity to savages. Sound familiar? Sound familiar? Same language over and over and over. And it doesn't matter if it's in Africa or if it's in China or if it's Native Americans. Same language, same excuse. It's got nothing to do with faith and everything to do with money and white entitlement. So yeah. The British Empire wrote drug legalization and missionary access in one document that was signed at gunpoint by the way, and handed it to a nation that had just invaded. For the second time in 20 years. Protestant missionaries in China grew from 50 in 1860 to 2500 by 1900, a 50 fold increase in 40 years. Purchased not by spiritual power of the Christian message, but coerced by the Royal Navy, the villages and towns that received these missionaries did not experience them as spiritual guides bringing comfort and wisdom. They experienced them as another arm of the same foreign invasion that had legalized the drug trade, burned their cultural treasures, killed their people, and placed foreign citizens above Chinese law. What is the gospel worth when it arrives on the same ship as poison? What does it mean to spread the good news to a population you are also deliberately, profitably addicting to a substance that will kill them? Most missionaries were not men selling opium, right? Many genuinely believed in their mission. Some actually opposed the trade openly. But their access, their legal protection, their physical safety and their ability to operate anywhere in China were purchased by a war fought to protect that drug. And none of them openly opposed it. The gospel they treat, they preached was backed by the same guns that enforced the legalization clause. The people they preached knew it. The missionaries believed they were bringing salvation. The people receiving them saw the treaty and saw exactly what it was. And this is also, you know, this is why religious freedom is so, so, so important. And the right of countries to choose right and the right of people to choose. That is why anti missionary riots erupted across China for the rest of the century. And it's a, in large part and reasonably so, a major part of the reason for not necessarily every Chinese person. China does have a pretty large Christian community, but there's a lot of resentment towards Christianity and there should be for participating in this. That is why the anti missionary riots erupted in China for the rest of the century, culminating in the changing massacre of 1870, when Chinese crowds attacked a French Catholic orphanage and killed The French consul, 10 nuns and several other foreigners. Western accounts have always framed the violence as irrational or barbaric. It was neither. It was the community's response to years of abuse, to an institution that had arrived on the same ships as the opium under the same treaties that legalized it. The people of Changin were not attacking Christianity. They were attacking the empire that was wielding Christianity as a weapon of subjugation. In October of 1860, the Qing court refused to ratify the Treaty of Chinsen, and a group of negotiators were captured and killed. During failed talks, British and French forces marched on Beijing. Lord Elgin ordered the destruction of the Yangming One, an old summer palace, 860 acres, 150 years of imperial art and architecture, silks, jades, bronzes, porcelains, like so much history, including astronomical instruments whose loss cannot be measured and they will never be recovered. The looting that preceded the birding was organized with military precision. French General Cousin de Montauban and British General Hope Grant each appointed three commissioners to catalog and divide the most valuable objects between the two nations. Of course they did. The soldiers did not grab what they could carry. In a frenzy, they sorted, selected and distributed the plunder with protocol to ensure that each nation got its fair share of a civilization's stolen heritage. What they could not carry, they smashed. In 2009, the palace's director estimated roughly 1.5 million objects were taken from the Huang Mingyuan alone, now scattered across more than 2,000 museums in 47 countries. Across the whole century of humiliation, an estimated 10 million artifacts were stolen from China, which was a cultural hemorrhage without parallel in human history. Then 3,500 British troops burned it. The fire burned for three days. The smoke was visible for miles, the column of black smoke rising above the capital of a civilization thousands of years old. Captain Charles George Gordon, later famous as Chinese Gordon, who would die at Khartoum, wrote home and said, you can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burned. He knew he was destroying something that was completely irreplaceable. He said so in writing, and he did it anyway. The convention of Peking, October 24, 1860, confirmed every provision of Chancen, added the Kowloon Peninsula to British controlled Hong Kong and closed a conflict in which a Christian empire had burned a civilization's greatest cultural treasure to enforce the sale of narcotics and the preaching of its version of gospel. The palace still stands in ruins. Today it's preserved as A national monument. Every Chinese school child learns what happened there. The pattern should sound familiar to anyone raised in American evangelicalism. A powerful institution claims moral and spiritual authority while its actual conduct serves wealth, power and empire. And it doesn't care who it destroys and the people it destroys or their history as long as those people are quote other. The language of faith covers the machinery of exploitation. The people inside genuinely believe in its mission. Sometimes the people on the receiving end see the machinery. This is Christian nationalism in kind of purest historical form. The cross in one hand, the commodity in the other, and the military standing between them. In the shattered, unstable, opium ravaged south after the first Opium War, a young man named Hong Chuquan encountered the Christian gospel and remade it into something no Western missionary could ever have predicted or controlled. Hong was 30 year old from Guangdong Province who had failed the Imperial Civil Civil Service examination several times and was searching for meaning. He encountered Christian missionary pamphlets distributed in Canton by followers of the American Southern Baptist missionary Issachar Jacox Roberts. What a name. After a series of intense dreams and visions, Hong came to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent by God the Father to establish the heavenly Kingdom on Chinese soil and drive out the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty whom he saw as demons standing between China and its divine destiny. This is what happens when you shatter a society with drugs and then hand them a foreign religion. You don't get orderly Sunday services, you get Hong Chiquan. What followed was the taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864, the deadliest civil war in human history. Conservative estimates so this is conservative. Put the death toll between 20 and 30 million people. The Chinese demographer Kao Chu Tsi 2001 study estimated 70 million. Some scholars put it at about a hundred million. Once you include famine, disease and the collapse. Even at the low estimate, the Taiping Rebellion killed more people than the American Civil War, the Napoleonic wars and and every other armed conflict of the 19th century combined. The standard account treats it as an internal Chinese crisis, a millenarian uprising born of overpopulation, ethnic tension, dynastic decline. It's a pivot in history which conveniently again detaches it from the Opium wars and lets the British Empire off the hook for a catastrophe its drug trade caused. Jonathan Spence Sterling professor of history at Yale and foremost Western scholar of the movement established in God's Chinese sun in 1996 that the rebellion was a direct traceable consequence sequence of the first Opium War. The chain that runs without a break and brief side note here this is definitely the most deadly civil war. And because we don't have crystal clear estimates, it may actually overwhelm World War II as well. First, the military humiliation of the Qing destroyed the government's prestige and showed the Chinese people that the mandate of Heaven could be challenged. If the Manchu government could not protect its own people from a foreign drug empire, the mandate was broken. Second, the opium trades. Devastation of the southern economy, the silver drain, the tax collapse, the mass unemployment, the disintegration of farming communities created the enormous pool of desperate displaced young men Hong could build his army from. They had watched their fathers, uncles and brothers pulled into addiction. Their communities were collapsing. Their government would lose a war to the foreign power that sold the poison. They were looking for an explanation and a savior. And Hong was going to offer them both a theology that named the current rulers as demons. Right? Also. Also be careful. People that are like calling other people demonstrate also big, big red flag there. It promised a new order, gave suffering a cosmic meaning because of course. And violence, you guessed it, a divine mandate. Here we are for the rebrand. To a people broken by opium and abandoned by a humiliated government. It was the only framework and on offer that matched the scale of what they had lived through. Third, the missionary presence. The Treaty of Nanking made possible the same missionaries whose access was literally tied to drugs, supplied the Christian literature Hong absorbed and transformed and would use to his own advantage. Opium broke the Society. Missionaries operating under the drug war treaty supplied the religious framework. A shattered people produced a prophet who believed he was the literal brother of Jesus Christ and tens of millions of people would die. The Taping Kingdom Hong built was radical, violent experiment in remaking Chinese civilization from the ground up. It banned opium completely and imposed the death penalty for its use, stricter than anything the Qing had ever tried. It proposed communal land redistribution. It banned foot binding, which, that's a good thing. Organized female military battalions and open civil service examinations to women. Also good reforms without precedent in Chinese history. Anticipating changes that would not appear elsewhere in Asia for another century. But it was also brutally authoritarian. Hong retreated into this mystical isolation in his Nanjing palace, surrounded by concubines, because of course, every cult leader needs concubines. Have to. You have to have it's money. And concubines probably way younger than they should have been. Cult leaders every time issue, issuing increasingly erratic divine proclamations while his generals fought each other for power. The campaigns produced atrocities on every side. Mass executions, burned cities, deliberate starvation of civilians. At its height, the Heavenly Kingdom controlled much of south and Central China, an area larger than France and Germany combined, and some 30 million people from its capital in Nanjing, which the Taiping renamed Changing the Heavenly Capital. For 11 years, it ran its own government tax system, military examinations, printed its own money, issued its own versions of the Bible. And it was destroyed in 1864 by the combined forces of the Qing dynasty, the British Empire and the French military, the very coalition that had created the conditions for it to begin in the first place. Britain had fought two wars to force opium into China. Now it helped crush the movement opium produced because the Taiping ban on drugs and its hostility to foreign commerce threatened the profits again of those wars that it had protected. So it's always coming back to profit and money. So the irony is pretty clear here. Britain fought a war to protect its drug trade. The drug trade shattered Chinese society. The shattered society produced a revolutionary movement that threatened those British interests again. So Britain then helped crush the movement that its trade created to protect its wealth against the fall of the Nanjing in July of 1864 was a bloodbath. Imperial troops stormed the city after a siege that had reduced civilians to eating bark, leather and weeds. Hong had died weeks earlier, probably from illness worsening by eating wild plants. His teenage son briefly took the title of Heavenly King before being captured and executed. Qing soldiers killed tens of thousands. In the days that follows, bodies clogged the rivers. One of the great urban centers of the Chinese world was left in ruins at low estimates. Okay, so bottom estimate 20 to 30 million people dead at Cal Choosies estimate 70 million. At the high end, 100 million. And if it's above, if it's anywhere in that 85 to 100 million range. And again, the hundred million includes famine, displacement and epidemic. That is, it might actually be out World War II, but not if you include World War II's displacement and civilians. That's just casualties anywhere in that range. The deadliest civil war in history for sure. The deadliest civil war. It did kill more people than the First World War. The gospel separated from the empire that weaponized it might have been received on its own terms, but it never arrived on its own terms. It arrived on a drug boat. 154 years after Lin Tseu destroyed those 20,000 chests at Humen, a small pharmaceutical company in Stamford, Connecticut launched a new painkiller and told doctors, it's safe, don't worry about it. The year was 1996. The company was Purdue Pharma. The drug was OxyContin, time release formulation of Oxycodone, a synthetic opioid derived from the same poppy that had filled those chests on the Chinese coast. Purdue was owned by the Sackler family, one of the wealthiest families in America, whose name hung on art museums and medical schools, cultural institutions from New York to London to Paris. The numbers tell the story the same way the opium trade numbers do. A machine built to do nothing but make money. In 1996, OxyContin's first year, Purdue received a record $44 million in sales, and doctors wrote 316,000 prescriptions. By 2000, sales hit 1.1 billion. By 2001 and 2002, combined, sales approached 3 billion, with more than 14 million prescriptions a year. In six years, prescription rose 44 fold, and revenue increased 68 fold. And again, the engine of that growth was a lie. Purdue told doctors that OxyContin's time release mechanism made it fundamentally different from other opioids, that it delivered pain relief slowly and steadily, and the risk of addiction was less than 1%. Its sales force grew from 318 representatives in 1996 to more than 700 by 2001, targeting primary care physicians with little training in pain management or addictive medicine. They visited offices across the country, especially in rural areas, small towns and working class communities where chronic pain from manual labor, mining injuries and industrial work was widespread. The message was the same. This drug is super safe. It's not going to hook your patients. They're going to be way better than taking anything else. The claim rested on a foundation real thin. It's amazing that the lie lasted this long. A single paragraph in a 1980 letter to the editor of New England Journal of Medicine. Five sentences written by Jane Porter and Herschel Jick, which is again a name. His name is Herschel. James at Boston University Medical center, reported that of 11,882 hospitalized patients who received a narcotic, only four developed documented addiction, concluding that the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction. That letter, it was a letter, not a study, not a trial, was cited more than 600 times in medical literature. A 2017 analysis of the same journal found that 72.2% of those citations misrepresented it, using it as evidence that opioids were broadly safe for outpatient use when the original had studied only hospitalized patients under direct medical supervision. Purdue's marketing team exploited the distortion as a scientific foundation for prescribing powerful opioids to millions of people who would take them home and take them without medical supervision. Sam Quinones, whose dreamland the True tale of America's opioid epidemic from 2015 remains probably the definitive account of the crisis, at least at the community level. Documented what happened in towns where OxyContin arrived. First, the drug worked exactly as British opium had worked in China. It provided immediate, overwhelming relief from physical and emotional pain. It built tolerance. It built dependency. It created patients who had started with a legitimate prescription for a legitimate industry. Industry, what? Legitimate injury that were, within months, physically unable to stop without the same brutal withdrawal that Chinese addicts had endured in the 1830s. The same sweating, v shaking, bone pain, the feeling that death would be preferable to another hour without the drug. When doctors began to restrict prescriptions and regulators tighten the supply, the millions already addicted didn't stop. They couldn't. Most people can't fix addiction on their own. They can't get out of it alone. The demand Purdue had created did not vanish when the prescription pads closed. It migrated right first to heroin, cheaper, more available, and then to fentanyl, the synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, made in clandestine labs, often in Mexico, using precursor chemicals sourced from Chinese suppliers and pressed into counterfeit pills or mixed into heroin in concentrations in concentrations that are so unpredictable that you take anything that has fentanyl in it, you might die. In 2007, Purdue had three of its top executives plead guilty in federal court, admitting, admitted. I am just making up words. Admitting that the company had, quote, with the intent to defraud and mislead, marketed OxyContin as less addictive and less subject to abuse than it actually was. The company paid $600 million in fines. The executive paid 35 million. Combined. Nobody went to prison, not a single person. For a company that extracted billions, this fine was chump change based on what they made. And nobody went to jail, even though they admitted they did it on purpose and they lied. They killed people with this. The Sacklers, who had extracted 10 to 12 billion dollars, kept their fortune. Their names stayed on museum walls. Their philanthropy kept laundering their reputation long after the body count that their wealth sourced just happened and just got forgotten about. Oh, but they're so philanthropic. They're dirtbags. What is what they are? The parallel to the British opium trade, of course, is not just literary. It's a functional equivalent. In the modern era. The East India Company grew opium in India. Purdue made OxyContin in Connecticut. The company sold through intermediaries to maintain deniability. Purdue sold through doctors to maintain the fiction of medical legitimacy. The company's product created mass Dependency in China, Purdue's created it in America. We're still dealing with an opiate crisis. When China tried to stop the flow, British sent warships. When American regulators tried to restrict OxyContin, Purdue deployed lobbyists, lawyers and marketing executives. The company never counted the Chinese dead. Purdue never counted the American dead. Both wrap the operation in language of civilization and progress and betterment. And if you get addicted, well, you're just, you're just lazy. You're just broken. Something's wrong with you. They're, they're a mess. They're just not disciplined. No, they were intentionally poisoned. And it is a disease. Addiction is a disease. The American opioid crisis has now killed more than 450,000 people since the late 90s. More than the population of Minneapolis, more than the combined death toll of every American military conflict since the end of Vietnam. Vietnam. There are finally signs that things are changing. In 2024, synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, killed 48, 422Americans. But that was down from 76,282 the year before. In the 12 months ending January 2026, roughly 69,147Americans died from all drug overdoses combined, a 13.2% decline, which is great. Fatal overdoses among Americans under 35 fell 46% from 31,000 in 2021 to 16, 690 in 2024. 45 states saw a decline, but five states, Alaska, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota and Utah are still rising. And roughly 130Americans still die every day, one every 11 minutes. The DEA sees more than 55 million fentanyl laced counterfeit pills in 2024, down from 80 million the year before. In October of 2024, it indicted eight China based chemical companies and eight of their employers for producing the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl. And that's an important distinction. Distinction, just to know if you're in these conversations, is that the chemicals come from China, but they're not manufacturing it. It was being manufactured by cartels. The supply chain runs from Chinese chemical plants to Mexican labs to American streets. Production in one country, processing in a second, consumption and death in a third sound. Again, it's very similar to what happened in the opioid crisis. But that also means keep note that many of our law enforcement officials and our leaders are also on the take. The communities that it hollowed out look like the communities that in China that were hollowed out by British opium in the 1840s. There's family, shattered children raised by grandparents because Both parents are dead or incapacitated, productive adults consumed by dependency. Local economies collapse as the workforce shrinks, emergency rooms overflowing. Quinones documented the pattern in Portsmouth, Ohio, once a prosperous river town of steel mills and steel mills, steel mills and shoe factories. By the time oxycontin arrived, the factories had closed. The jobs were gone. The pain, physical, economic and spiritual, was already there. The drug arrived as medicine and stayed as the master. Within a decade, Portsmouth had one of the highest overdose rates in the country. The same pattern opium had carved into Chinese towns 170 years earlier. A community already weakened by economic decline, targeted by a product that promised relief, consumed by dependency that it never chose. Manufacturing addiction is a form of violence and a deadly one. The British did not point a gun to every Chinese head. They did something much more efficient. They engineered a dependency that turned its victims into a captive market that would pay any price and accept any humiliation to keep the supply coming. Purdue did the same thing at scale. Created a captive market of millions and extracted billions from the bodies of the addicted. For anyone with the power to stop, it decided stopping was worth a political cost. And one of the things, too, about addiction, bringing up Ohio here, so much of it is environmental, right? Someone who, say, gets injured and gets put on an opiate or maybe turns to a different drug for pain management, someone who just lost their parents as well, and maybe they're going through divorce or they're struggling to keep their job because of this pain, and all of those circumstances converge at once, is probably going to be much more likely to struggle with addiction than someone who has a great support system and someone who maybe experienced all of those things, but spaced out over a decade. So a lot of it, again, I say that to say that so many people that have been caught in these understand that they were targeted by groups a lot of the times who flooded drugs intentionally into those regions. But they were also people in pain who couldn't get help. In February of 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the government of China of waging a reverse opium war on the United States through the export of fentanyl precursor chemicals. Fentanyl, again so powerful that a dose the size of a few grains of salt can kill you, has become the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 49. The name Opium wars. Rubio, of course, replaced the American drug crisis inside a historical frame that most American politicians probably aren't even familiar with, or they just ignored it. Chinese state media answered within hours, citing the original opium wars and pointing out that the nation now accused of enabling American addiction was the same nation that had spent more than 100 years as the target of the most systematic government sponsored narcotics operation in recorded history. One news cycle captured the whole weight of this history and exposed the hypocrisy. The century of humiliation is not a figure of speech in Chinese life. It is foundational to the story of the modern Chinese state. It is taught to every child referenced in every major foreign policy speech, embedded in the institutional memory of every Chinese diplomatic and military organization. The opening Opium wars are its opening chapter. The Treaty of Nanking is a founding document. The burning of the Summer palace is a central image. When American diplomats press Beijing to cooperate on fentanyl precursor enforcement. They are pressing a government whose claim to authority rests in part on the promise that the humiliations of the Opium wars will never be permitted to happen again. This is an active, living, load bearing element of Chinese national identity. And hopefully at least through this, you've kind of recognized, oh, it makes a lot of sense that the Chinese and the Chinese government have, have some bones to pick with certain countries. Makes a lot of sense. I. I'd sure as hell resent them. Right. You destroyed my country, left people ravaged for over a century. Yeah, I'm gonna have a problem with you. When American negotiators press on precursor regulation, they press within a relationship whose deepest memory is a Western power using trade policy as a weapon of national subjugation. The Chinese are going to push back. When Chinese officials delay, deflect or condition cooperation on unrelated concessions, they operate in a culture that treats Western commercial demands as inherently predatory. Right. They're going to be suspicious. They should be. Because the first Western commercial demand China ever received was at gunpoint and it was a demand to accept poison. When China formally banned fentanyl itself in 2019, under sustained American pressure, Chinese chemical companies simply shifted to producing the precursors sourcers. The structural architecture of the original opium trade has not been dismantled. It's been reversed. The drug now flows east to west, the product synthetic instead of plant based. But the channel carved into the relationship between these nation remains open. Because no Western government has ever formally acknowledged what the original trade was or what it did. And I want to be very clear here. I'm not justifying China manufacturing these precursors right at all, like equally wrong. What I am trying to shed some light on is the nature of addiction. Weaponizing religion to destabilize communities and then using racism and prejudice to blame those communities for that downfall. As well as the justification that empires make for slaughtering people for money, and also why China got beef. And they have reason to. They have reason to be suspicious of any demand we make of them. They have reason to be suspicious of any Western nation, specifically quote, quote nations who claim Christianity. So not at all justifying what they're doing either. And here again, the reckoning kind of circles back to Christianity. The British Empire that manufactured China's addiction did not think of itself as evil. Of course they didn't. That's the part that matters the most for understanding how this moral framework fails. The men who ran the East India Company, the politicians who voted for the war, given the war plan by the drug dealer, the merchants who shipped the opium, the missionaries who followed in its wake, all of them operated inside a moral and religious system that told them they were doing good. They're just spreading civilization. They're opening free markets. They're carrying the gospel. The Christianity of the British Empire was not a side project unrelated to the opium trade. It was the moral infrastructure that made the opium trade possible. The story the empire told itself about why it was allowed to continue the opium trade, why it was allowed to hurt these people. God had chosen Britain to lead the world. British civilization was superior. And because we see we're successful, so God's blessing us, that means God wants us to do it. It. British commercial interests were by definition aligned with divine purpose. Sound familiar? And if the product destroyed millions of lives, well, that was someone else's fault, not ours. That is the logic of Christian nationalism. And it has not changed in 200 years. It's never changed based on what empire it resides in. The politicians who invoke Christ today while stripping health care from the poor, caging children at the border, blocking gun legislation while school children die, and banning books while ignoring the opioid crisis in their own districts are running on the same operating system. The moral framework is identical. And you probably listen to parts of this episode and you're like, well, that sounds familia. That sounds familiar. That sounds familiar. And their moral framework is this. God is on our side. Our civilization is the right one. Often our race is the right one. They often say our economic interests are divine. They're divine purpose. And if people are hurt, they were asking for it. They were in the wrong place or they were sinful, or they just don't count. The Opium War is the historical proof of what that framework produces when it's handed military power, economic resources, and zero accountability. It's a Christian empire that manufactured mass addiction for profit, defended it with force and wrapped the whole thing in religious and moral language. The consequences, as we talked about, cascade to this day in Chinese foreign policy shaped by 180 years of justified mistrust. They have every right to not trust us and to not trust Britain in Indian communities, especially in Bihar, whose poverty traces directly to the mandatory poppy cultivation under the east India trading company in more than 450,000American opioid deaths, whose diplomatic resolution is blocked by the unresolved legacy of the original drug war and the ongoing capacity of Christian moral language to serve as a cover for systems of exploitation. From the missionaries who rode the opium treaties into China to the pharmaceutical executives who cited a five sentence letter as proof that their product would not kill people two centuries separate Lynn Setsu's letter to Queen Victoria and Marco Rubio's accusation of a reverse opium war across that distance. The question at the center has never been answered. Not just by the British government, but now by the American government. Not by the churches whose missionary enterprise was purchased by the drug war. It is the question lynn asked in 1839 and the question Gladstone asked in the Commons. The question every person who has ever deconstructed their faith or who just wants an honest faith ask when the gap between an institutional claim gets a little bit too wide to stand on when people start making these claims. The question that Lynn asked is the question we ask now. By what right, by what right does a Christian empire manufacture mass addiction for profit? It. By what right does a nation that prays on Sunday ship poison on Monday? By what right does a government write drug legalization and missionary access into the same treaty and call it civilized? By what right does a moral and religious tradition that claims to protect the vulnerable become the operating system for an empire that deliberately and systematically and profitably destroys millions of lives? The opium wars were not a clash of civilizations. It was a business model. The product was addiction. The labor was coerced. The prophet was sanctified by a Christian empire that counted every chest of opium and every ounce of silver with meticulous precision and never once counted the cost in human lives. They didn't fucking care. And that business model has been repeated over and over and over and over. Before we end today, I'm going to do our five takeaways. A little bit of a recap here. Number one, separate from the faith, separate the faith from the empire that weaponized it. The gospel and opium arrived on the same ship, but they were never the same thing. Christianity is not Christian nationalism. It doesn't belong to one race or one Nation. And the whole work of deconstruction is learning to tell those things apart, right? I talk a lot about Christian nationalism and I get accused of attacking Christianity. I love true Christians. They're some of my favorite people. I love the work of Christ. I get real pissed when it gets bastardized to justify people's cruelty, their hatred, their bigotry and their lust for money. The tell is always the same, by the way, when someone insists God is on the side of the strong against the weak, they have handed you empire. Not the gospel. Number two, follow the money, not the language. Every atrocity in this story was narrated as civilization, progress, free trade, capitalism, salvation. The way you catch it in real time is to ignore what the institution says about itself and look at who profits and who pays. The East India Company counted chest. They never counted bodies. Purdue counted prescription ass. Ask it of every institution, who is being counted, who is not? Who profits, who pays? Number three. The question is by what right? Is the most powerful question you can ask an institution. It sits at the bottom of every honest deconstruction because we have to deconstruct a lot of things. It's not just religion. Other parts of our world where you have to do it as well. And we have to say, when we say, oh, well, they have the right to do that. By what right? Why challenge your own thoughts? Powerful institutions survive by making that question feel rude or naive or ungrateful. It's none of those things. Keep asking it out loud if you can. Number four, addiction is manufactured, not chosen. So the answer is policy, not shame. From Bihar to Canton to Portsmouth, the people who paid were targeted because they were vulnerable. We see this with the. With the crack cocaine epidemic as well. The lesson of this history is not those people should have said no. They should have done better. It is that treating addiction as a personal failing is exactly what lets manufacturers walk away rich back. Harm reduction, treatment and prosecution of people at the top help the people addicted prosecute the people that funded it. The overdose numbers are finally falling thankfully. And number five, historical memory is leverage. So learn the truth and we tell it and we and we understand the truth with nuance, right? What happened in the Opium wars does not make what China's doing right, but it makes their suspicion understandable. It makes their resentment understandable. It also gives us a template for what's happening in our country right now. And pharmaceutical companies are still getting away with it. China remembers the Opium wars because remembering shapes what it will and will not accept. Most Americans have never been taught this history at all. I learned this history like two years ago, which is exactly why we keep rebuilding its architecture and pipeline and reapplying it and the people at the top keep getting away from it. Learning the truth is not just an academic exercise. It's a preconditioning for changing the society that we want to live in, changing the excuses we allow for the wealthy or the powerful to abuse the poor. I hope you learned so much from this history as much as I did. I encourage you to continue to find nations you don't know much about and learn about their history. Learn about the influence of the most powerful empires and how they destabilize these places and what you were told about those countries and those people and the people that speak that language or eat that food. Very often we have been told a lie that was sold to us by empire who said they had the right. And I'll see you next week on Flipping Tables.