The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton

Refutation of the fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade

"Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" -John Milton

"The American war against the Chinese in the United States was a terrible tragedy— regardless of how often this drama continues to be enacted on the stage of history. Although “we” did not succeed in beating “them” down, at least “we” took away something that “they” treasured and that made life better for “them.” Envious persecutors must be thankful for small victories no less than for large. " --Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers¹³

Important Points

1. "The poppy is indigenous to China... and has been used in China for various purposes for thousands of years."


2. "[Opium] is not only harmless but beneficial to the system, unless when practised to an inordinate extent, which is wholly exceptional; whilst spirit drinking ruins the health, degrades the character, incites its victims to acts of violence, and destroys the prospects of everyone who indulges to excess in the practice."


3. Opium smoking and opium eating are two different things, despite the attempt of opium opponents to confuse the two.


4. Chinese officials were never driven by public health motives in their opium policies.


5. Much anti-opium sentiment in UK was aroused by a BIG LIE passed on by an American missionary, who declared that there were two million deaths from opium every year in China, which was an utter falsehood, as regular opium use was more often associated with longevity than with premature death.


6. "All these anti-opium articles, speeches, and resolutions are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts."
   

"I had daily intercourse with the people from whom the best and most trustworthy information on the subject of opium and opium smoking could be obtained, and my experience is that opium smoking, as practised by the Chinese, is perfectly innocuous. This is a fact so patent that it forces itself upon the attention of every intelligent resident in China who has given ordinary attention to the subject. The whole question at issue is involved in this one point, for if I show you that opium smoking in China is as harmless, if, indeed, not more so, as beer drinking in England, as I promise you I shall do most conclusively, then cadit quæstio, there is nothing further in dispute; the Indo-Chinese opium trade will then stand out—as I say it does—free from objection upon moral, political, and social grounds, and the occupation of the Anti-Opium agitators, like Othello's, will be gone." -- William H. Brereton," The Truth about Opium"

"The strong craving that characterizes opiate addiction has inspired many critics of the drugs to suggest that narcotics destroy the will and moral sense, turning normal people into fiends and degenerates. Actually, cravings for opiates are no different from cravings for alcohol among alcoholics, and they are less strong than cravings for cigarettes, a more addictive drug." --Andrew Weil in "From Chocolate to morphine ¹⁴ : Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs"¹⁵

Quotes and Questions

May 24, 2025

1. The book contains lectures delivered in February 1882 at St. James Hall, which were attended by the secretary of the Anti-Opium Society, Rev. Mr. Storrs Turner. Turner corresponded with Brereton at the event but, as Brereton reports, "he never attempted to controvert my case." Explain the similarity between this "refusal to engage" on the issues and the roaring silence with which the Drug War Philosopher has been greeted when he attempts to discuss drug-related issues with bamboozled Americans. (Hint: Like Brereton, Brian never receives rebuttals or explanations from the brainwashed Americans with whom he attempts to discuss drug-related issues; no one ever attempts to controvert Brian's case, either, merely to ignore it.)
   



2. The Committee of Exeter Hall refused to allow Brereton to give his lectures in their venue. Discuss what Brereton calls "this act of intolerance" in light of Instagram's recent banning of two drug-related sites (Psychedelic Passage¹⁶ and The Divine Assembly¹⁷) which committed the sin of preaching harm prevention ¹⁸ and the informed religious use of psychoactive mushrooms.


3. "I have daily had in my office Chinese of all classes, seeing them, speaking to them, interrogating them upon different subjects, and I have never found amongst them any of these miserable victims to opium smoking. On the contrary, more acute, knowing, and intelligent people than these very opium smokers I have rarely met with."



4. Brereton quotes Dr. Ayres as follows: "My opinion of it is that it [opium smoking] may become a habit, but that that habit is not necessarily an increasing one. Nine out of twelve men smoke a certain number of pipes a day, just as a tobacco smoker would, or as a wine or beer drinker might drink his two or three glasses a day, without desiring more. I think the excessive opium smoker is in a greater minority than the excessive spirit drinker or tobacco smoker. In my experience, the habit does no physical harm in moderation.... I do not wish to defend the practice of opium smoking, but in the face of the rash opinions and exaggerated statements in respect of this vice, it is only right to record that no China resident believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted, debilitated opium smoker met with in print, nor have I found many Europeans who believe they ever get the better of their opium-smoking compradores in matters of business."
   



5. "The old gentleman I have referred to, like many others of his countrymen, will settle himself down of an evening, when the business of the day is over, and enjoy his opium pipe for two or three hours at a stretch, yet, notwithstanding this terrible excess, as the Anti-Opium people would say, he continues strong and well. Nay, more, he has two sons of middle age, healthy, active men, who indulge in the pipe quite as regularly as their aged father. I have known many others like these men, but have never seen or heard of any weakness or decay arising from the practice."



6. "I do not believe there is a British firm, or a firm of any other nationality, in China, which would not, if the opportunity presented itself, become to-morrow "opium merchants," as Mr. Turner expresses it, if they thought the trade would prove a source of profit, because they hold, with me, that the opium traffic is a perfectly proper and legitimate one, quite as much so as traffic in tobacco, wine, or beer; and a thousand times less objectionable than the trade in ardent spirits.



7. "Opium smoking is, in fact, a luxury in which, every Chinaman who can afford it indulges more or less, just as English people who have sufficient means drink tea, wine, and beer, or smoke tobacco. The effects of opium smoking are no more injurious than are those articles, in daily use in England, nor is its use more enslaving. On the contrary, from my own observation, I feel persuaded that those who habitually drink wine or spirits are far more liable to abuse and become enslaved to the habit than the smoker of opium."



8. "He [Sir Wilfrid Lawson] and his Anti-Opium friends would, if they could, prohibit the cultivation and exportation of opium in India, why do not he and his fellow teetotallers call upon the country to prohibit the manufacture of alcoholic liquors?" ... "Sir Wilfrid and his followers very well know that if they advocated the abolition of the duties on spirits, wine, and beer, they would be simply scoffed at by the public as fools and visionaries, and that, on the other hand, if they required all our distilleries and breweries and all public-houses to be closed, they would be treated as downright lunatics."



9. "The foreign merchants in China, as a body, have no interest in the Indo-China opium trade. They would not care if the trade were to be suppressed to-morrow, and therefore they take[Pg 22] no active part in opposing the Anti-Opium Society. The general public also take little or no interest in the matter, and it is really only those who are actuated by a sense of duty, or who, like myself, have followed the question, and who, from practical acquaintance and a thorough research into all its bearings, take more than ordinary interest in the subject, who think of refuting the monstrous misrepresentations of the anti-opium people. Therefore it is that the other side have had practically the whole field to themselves."



10. The Missionaries of Peking claimed that British merchants were losing business thanks to the opium trade, to which Brereton responds: "The persons who ought to know whether foreign manufactures or foreign trade have fallen off owing to the opium traffic, are the foreign merchants resident in China, whose especial duty it is to look after those interests, yet these gentlemen, strange to say, have made no complaint of the kind."



11. "When a Chinaman's day's work is over, and he feels fatigued or weary, he will, if he can afford it, take a whiff or two of the opium pipe, seldom more. If a friend drops in he will offer him a pipe, just as we would invite a friend to have a glass of sherry or a cigar. This use of the opium pipe does good rather than harm. Those who indulge in it take their meals and sleep none the worse. The use of the pipe, indeed, wiles them from spirit drinking and other vicious habits. "



12. Dr. Oxley writes: "The inordinate use, or rather abuse, of the drug most decidedly does bring on early decrepitude, loss of appetite, and a morbid state of all the secretions; but I have seen a man who had used the drug for fifty years in moderation, without any evil effects; and one man I recollect in Malacca who had so used it was upwards of eighty. Several in the habit of smoking it have assured me that, in moderation, it neither impaired the functions nor shortened life; at the same time fully admitting the deleterious effects of too much." Brereton adds: "There is not a word of this that would not be equally true of the use and abuse of ardent spirit, wine, and, perhaps, even tobacco."



13. Sir Robert Hart, G.C.M.G., the Inspector-General of Chinese Customs, writes: "So far as we know to-day... native opium was known, produced, and used long before any Europeans began the sale of the foreign drug along the coast."
    



14. "It seems to me that those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine, and scatter it abroad, are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that."



15. In regard to a China-American agreement about the opium trade: "She [America] has no vessels trading between India and China, and never has had any, and, as a matter of fact, no American ships carry one ounce of opium between India or China, or to the port of Hong Kong, or have carried it for many years, if, indeed, any American vessel has ever done so. Nor is there, indeed,[at present the slightest probability that her ships will ever convey opium between India and China. America, in fact, might, with as much self-denial, have undertaken not to carry coals to Newcastle as Indian opium to China."



16. "I am quite sure that out of every thousand people who believe in the anti-opium delusion, you will not find two who have ever set their foot in China, or know anything with respect to the alleged evils they denounce, except from the unreliable sources I have mentioned."



17. "Now the fact is, that in very ancient Chinese works mention is made of the poppy. In the "History of the Later Han Dynasty" (A.D. 25-220), the brilliant colour of the poppy blossom, of the charms of the juice, and the strengthening qualities of the seeds of the plant, formed the themes of Chinese poets as far back as a thousand years, and probably much farther. The poet Yung T'aou, of the T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618-907), celebrates the beauty of the flower."



18. Mr. W. Donald Spence, Her Majesty's Consul at Ichang writes: "Being a winter crop, it does not interfere with rice, the food staple of the people, displacing only subsidiary crops, such as wheat, beans, and the like.... It must be remembered, too, that every single part of the poppy plant has a market value. The capsules, after the juice has been extracted, are sold to druggists, and made into medicine; oil is expressed from the seeds, and largely used for lighting and adulterating edible oils; the oil-cake left in the oil-press is good manure, as are also the leaves; and the stalks are burnt for potash."



19. Mr. E. Colborne Baber, Secretary of the British Legation at Peking, writes: "The ducks, called locally "opium ducks," which frequently supplied us with a meal, do really appear, as affirmed by the natives, to stupefy themselves by feeding on the narcotic vegetable... I am not concerned here with the projects or prospects of the Society for the Abolition of Opium: if, however, they desire to give the strongest impetus to its growth in Yunnan, let them by all means discourage its production in India."



20. "The drinking shops furnish a mere indication of the amount of alcoholic liquors drunk in a town. It is exactly the same with the opium shops. They show the prevalence of the custom throughout the country. If you find two hundred opium shops in Canton, and I am sure there are not fewer there, you may be not less certain that opium is smoked in the great majority of private and business houses in Canton."



21. "Mr. Storrs Turner has told us that the Chinese Government is a paternal one, exercising a fatherly care of its people, and always exhorting them to virtue. Nothing can be more fallacious than this. Theoretically, there is much that is good in the system of government in China, but practically it is quite the reverse. There is little sympathy between the supreme Government and the great body of the people. The Emperor, his family, and immediate suite, are all Tartars, quite another race from the Chinese, differing totally in customs, manners, dress, and social habits. The Governors or Viceroys are pretty much absolute sovereigns within their own provinces. Each has under him a host of officials, commonly known as Mandarins, who are generally the most rapacious and corrupt of men; their salaries, in most cases, are purely nominal, for they are expected to pay themselves, which they well understand how to do."



22. "The Chinese authorities will let a man go on making money for many years, and when they think he has accumulated sufficient wealth for their purpose, they pounce down upon him and demand as much as they think they can extort. That is the reason the Chinese opium dealers are so reticent when inquiries are made concerning opium."



23. I think it is now clear, both from the testimony I have adduced, and from Mr. Turner's own admission, that the poppy is not only indigenous to China, but that it has been cultivated there from time immemorial, and that opium is smoked generally throughout China, the only limit to its use being the means of procuring the drug.



24. Pereira: "Opium is undoubtedly the most important and valuable remedy of the whole Materia Medica. For other medicines we have one or more substitutes, but for opium none,—at least in the large majority of cases in which its peculiar and beneficial influence is required. Its good effects are not, as is the case with some valuable medicines, remote and contingent, but they are immediate, direct, and obvious, and its operation is not attended with pain or discomfort. Furthermore it is applied, and with the greatest success, to the relief of maladies of everyday occurrence, some of which are attended with acute human suffering."



25. The Anti-Opium Society and their followers allege that dram-drinking is not only less baneful than opium-smoking, but they say that the latter practice so injures the constitution, and has such extraordinary attractions for those who indulge in it, that it is impossible to get rid of the habit, and that, in effect, whilst drunkards can be reformed, opium smokers cannot. This is absolutely untrue. The reverse is much nearer the mark.



26. Dr. Pereira, in his celebrated Materia Medica, states that out of one hundred and ten cases occurring in male patients admitted into the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in 1840, no fewer than thirty-one were ascribed to intemperance, while thirty-four were referred to combined causes of which intemperance was stated to be one; and yet Mr. Turner and his disciples say that spirit drinking is a lesser vice than opium smoking!



27. You will find that those acts of violence, those unfortunate cases that make one shudder to read, happening daily in this country—kicking wives, sometimes to death, beating and otherwise ill-using helpless children, violently attacking unoffending people in the streets—all are the results, more or less, of spirit drinking. Even the missionaries admit that opium smoking does not produce any of these evils.



28. When opium and opium smoking are better understood—and I believe the subject is now but imperfectly known by most medical men in this country—I feel convinced that the faculty will largely prescribe opium smoking, not merely as a substitute for dram drinking, but as a curative agency, that in many cases will be found invaluable.



29. "Now alcohol, as I have before mentioned, effects an organic change in the system, which opium, if smoked, or even if eaten does not; and when spirits are indulged in to a very considerable extent, the disease produced is absolutely incurable, because it is impossible for any medical skill to give a man new tissues, new blood, a new stomach, or a new liver, where the whole substance and material of all has undergone a complete and ruinous change. Now, the case as regards opium is totally different, because, no matter how much one may indulge in opium, whether in eating or smoking, the effects produced are always curable."



30. "Insanity and acts of violence do not result from opium smoking, whilst they are unquestionably produced by spirit drinking."



31. Mr. William Brend, M.R.C.S. writes: "There is no organic disease traceable to the use of opium, either directly or indirectly, and whether used in moderate quantities or even in great excess. In other words, there is no special disease associated with opium. Functional disorder, more or less, may be, and no doubt is, induced by the improper or unnecessary use of opium; but this is only what may be said of any other cause of deranged health, such as gluttony, bad air, mental anxiety...."



32. Mr. William Brend, M.R.C.S. writes: "I have said that if alcohol be taken in excess for a certain length of time, depending to some extent upon the susceptibility of the individual, organic change, that is disease, is inevitable; but the saddest part of it is that it is real disease, not merely functional disorder; so that if those who have yielded to that excess can be persuaded to abandon alcohol entirely the mischief induced must remain. The progress of further evil may be staved off, but the system can never again be restored to perfect health. The demon has taken a grip which can never be entirely unloosed. Herein there is the second great difference between the use of opium and of alcohol in excess.... If what I have said of opium eating be true, common sense will draw the inference that opium smoking must be comparatively innocuous, for used in this way, a very small quantity indeed of the active constituents find their entrance into the system."



33. "The latter [The members of the Anti-Opium Society] talk of the importation of Indian opium into China as the origin of the custom of smoking the drug, or, at the least, that it has made the natives smoke more than they otherwise would have done. There is no truth in such representations."



34. Dr. Ayres: "I have conducted my observations with much interest, as the effects of opium eating are well known to me by many years' experience in India, and I have been surprised to find the opium smoker differs so much from the opium eater. I am inclined to the belief that in the popular mind the two have got confused together. Opium smoking bears no comparison with opium eating. The latter is a terrible vice, most difficult to cure, and showing rapidly very marked constitutional effects in the consumer."



35. "Yet this plant [tobacco], which gives comfort and delight to millions of people, is a deadly poison if taken internally in even a minute quantity in its natural or manufactured state. So it is with opium; the habitual eating of it may be injurious, but the smoking is not only innocuous, but positively beneficial to the system."



36. "Tobacco has no curative properties, but is simply a poison; opium is the most valuable medicine known; where all other sedatives fail its powers are prominent. As an anodyne no other medicine can equal it. "



37. " I fully believe that, when medical men come to study opium and opium smoking more fully, it will become the established opinion of the faculty that opium smoking is not only perfectly harmless, but that it is most beneficial, so that it may ultimately not only put down spirit drinking, but perhaps supersede, to a great extent, tobacco."



38. Don Sinibaldo de Mas: "I have never heard of a single death or of any serious illness having been caused by opium smoking."



39. "Now, supposing that instead of smoking opium these Chinese in Malacca, Java, Borneo, and the Philippines were addicted to the habitual use of spirits, wine, or even beer, instead of opium, can any intelligent being suppose for a moment that they would be the patient, strong, healthy, hard-working people that Don Sinibaldo De Mas found them, and which they still are?"




40. " I think I am not far from the truth in saying that for one excessive opium smoker to be met with in China you will find in this country a hundred cases, at the least, of excessive indulgence in alcohol—the effects of this being incurable, whilst it is quite otherwise as regards excessive indulgence in opium. "



41. "Dr. Thudichum has found opium smoking not only harmless but a valuable curative practice." Brereton quotes Thudichum as follows: "I came to the conviction that here one of the most interesting therapeutical problems had been solved in the most ingenious and at the same time in the most safe manner. I held in my hand a power well-known and used largely by Eastern races, yet its use neglected, ignored, denounced, and despised by the entire Western world."



42. De Quincey writes: "Wine unsettles the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, to the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker; opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive; and, with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health."



43. "There is another fallacy, number ten, which I will dispose[Pg 137] of at the same time. It is that the opposition of the Chinese officials to the introduction of opium into China arose from moral causes. There never was anything more fallacious or more distinctly untrue than that the Chinese Government is, or ever was, anxious to put a stop to the trade upon moral grounds. The sole object of the Government of China in objecting to the importation of Indian opium into the country, as I have stated already, and as everybody except the infatuated votaries of the Anti-Opium Society believes, was to protect the native drug, to prevent bullion from leaving the country, and generally to exclude foreign goods. This Don Sinibaldo de Mas points out in his book written some five and twenty years ago."



44. "I only wish we could turn our drunkards into opium smokers. If the change would only save those wretched wives and their helpless children from ill-treatment by their husbands and fathers, we should have secured one valuable end."



45. Don Sinibaldo de Mas writes: "It is totally wrong to suppose that the Mandarins are anxious to prevent the introduction of opium into the country. Many of these Mandarins smoke it; most of them, if not all, accept presents and close their eyes at opium smuggling."



46. Regarding the Chinese government's desire to curb opium imports as being unrelated to health concerns: "The truth is, and it is so palpable that it really seems to me to require no advocacy whatever, that the Government [of China], as Sir Rutherford Alcock and Don Sinibaldo so strongly put it, does not like to see so much bullion leaving the country."

Author's Follow-up:

May 24, 2025

"I have never known a single instance of an Englishman, or any other foreigner, being an opium smoker, although I have met with many who had smoked a few pipes by way of experiment. All have assured me that the vapour was nauseous, and produced no pleasurable sensations whatever."

"For my own part I must say, that much as I dislike the odour of tobacco, I have a greater aversion still to the effluvium of opium in any form or shape, and I think this is also the case with all Europeans."

"The medical uses of opium have been so well known through all historical times that it is a matter for surprise to find that they are not better appreciated in the present day. In this, as in many other matters, we are in fact only gradually emerging from the condition of those dark times during which, amongst many good things, the knowledge of opium, for example, was lost."

"I came to the conviction that here one of the most interesting therapeutical problems had been solved in the most ingenious and at the same time in the most safe manner. I held in my hand a power well-known and used largely by Eastern races, yet its use neglected, ignored, denounced, and despised by the entire Western world."

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