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Defenders of the British Empire’s drug trade often drew parallels between alcohol and opium: like wine and spirits in Europe, went the argument, opium had been used in India for centuries, generally in moderation, so there was no reason why it should not be treated as a source of revenue, just as alcohol was.” This is how Charles Dickens, in an essay on opium, put it: If you were to check or prohibit this drug, a craving would arise for some other stimulus, like as in England, where an intemperate advocacy of temperance often leads to a secret indulgence in something fully as bad as ardent spirits. Similarly, in Java, Dutch colonizers believed that should Holland forbid the Javanese their opium, docile, placid, and harmless opium smokers would soon turn into rowdy, troublesome drunkards”.

An Indian employee of the colonial regime was even more forthright in his testimony to the Royal Commission on Opium of 1893-95:

Cannot we induce the people of England to cat opium instead of annually spending more than two hundred crores of rupees in the consumption of alcoholic liquors? Opium is amazingly cheap, duty included; it prolongs life after a certain age, and it can be asserted with all the force of truth and seriousness that its substitution in place of alcohol… will bring back happiness to thousands of families in Great Britain and Ireland where there is no happiness now… It will greatly benefit England if her people take to opium.

In the same vein, the British medical journal The Lancet commented sarcastically on the reports of the 1895 Royal Commission on Oprum

(Suppose that the natives of India had sent a commission to this country to inquire into the drink question into the sum spent per head by our population on alcohol, and the degradation, misery and crime which are too often the outcome of it all- can there be any reasonable doubt that the evils traceable to alcohol here would appear to such a commission, enormous, and those arising from the abuse of opium, there, in India, altogether insignificant in comparison with them.”

These arguments persuaded many people then, and are still cited sometimes by historians who defend the British Empire’s opium policies. Critics, on the other hand, argued, as they do even now, that the chemical composition of opium was such as to make it far more addictive, and, therefore, more dangerous, than alcohol. In the words of one detractor: “There is no slavery on earth, to be compared with the bondage into which opium casts its victim.

What both these arguments have in common is the assumption that the effects of substances like opium and alcohol will be similar everywhere, irrespective of time and place. However, with both alcohol and opium, the critical factor is not their chemical composition but their social history, that is to say the length, duration and historical circumstances of a population’s exposure to the substance. When alcohol fell on ‘virgin soil, as ‘smoking opium’ did in China and Southeast Asia, it too could have devastating consequences, as it did among Native Americans and indigenous Australians. To this day, alcohol causes 8-10 per cent of Aboriginal deaths. In Western Australia, in the period 1981-1990 hospital admission rates for alcohol caused conditions were 8.6 times greater for Aboriginal men than for non-Aboriginal men, and 12.8 times greater for Aboriginal women than for non-Aboriginal women.”

In Australia, the first British settlers in the late eighteenth century were quick to realize that the indigenous people had not had any prior exposure to alcohol, and they made extensive use of spirits in their dealings with them. It would not be too far-fetched to suggest,” writes the indigenous scholar Marcia Langton, that alcohol was from the very beginning of British settlement a crucially important strategy in dealing with Aboriginal people… [Alcohol was, consciously or unconsciously used by the British as a device for seducing the Aboriginal people to engage economically, politically and socially with the colony

The colonial officials who equated alcohol and opium would surely have known that whether alcohol was socially and administratively manageable or not depended on historical circumstances: for ‘naïve populations its effects could also be deadly, which was why it could sometimes serve as a biopolitical weapon. It is hard to believe that they did not know that opium was having similarly deadly effects in China and Southeast Asia.

Alcohol, however, could not have been weaponized in China and Southeast Asia in the same way that opium was because those regions had been exposed to it for a very long time. This is why alcohol. despite the analogies drawn by colonial officials, never produced revenue on the same scale as opium. Although both substances were managed in much the same way by European colonial regimes. especially in Southeast Asia, where the rights to distribute them were auctioned off annually to concessionaires (or “farmers”), nowhere did alcohol generate the kind of revenues that opium did, nor did it come even remotely close to being a keystone of colonial economies. In Singapore, the annual rent paid to the colonial authorities for the opium farm was four times what was paid for alcohol; in Johor, it was eight times as much. The colonial officials who equated opium and alcohol were being disingenuous; they knew perfectly well that the two substances had completely different properties even as sources of revenue,” In Indonesia, for example, the Dutch colonial regime earned profits of 742 per cent from opium in some years; no other commodity came even close to yielding such an astronomical gain over costs.

While Southeast Asia and China had long been exposed to alcohol, opium was a different matter. Not having had extensive exposure to the drug, they had not developed protocols other than smoking for the consumption of opium. Selling low-grade opium in India, where it had long been consumed in a less addictive form, was, therefore, a completely different matter from selling smoking-grade’ export opium in China and Southeast Asia, where a large part of the appeal of the drug lay precisely in its novelty, in the idea that it was ‘something utterly new in the world, possessing an attraction that nothing else is capable of encompassing.

Excerpted from Pages 259 to 262 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh