Case Study: The Worst Chinese Addiction

Essay #2 The Worst Chinese Addiction Opium is a drug that, when smoked, can become extremely addictive. The Chinese people suffered immensely because of this terrible drug. Opium became, at the time, the single biggest problem for China as a nation, and somewhat surprisingly, Britain played a role in this epidemic. The British East India Company grew opium in their colonies in India. The British would drink opium in bottles, kind of like medicine; they would even give it to their children to go to sleep. Consuming opium like this is not as addictive as inhaling it. The Chinese would smoke opium which caused many people in China to become addicted. Fathers of certain families would sell their children to have enough money to satisfy their opium needs. This addiction in China became so bad that the Chinese imperial government prohibited the drug except for medicinal use. That is how bad the addiction really was. The British saw this as an opportunity to make a …show more content…
He took swift action against the British and confiscated an enormous amount of opium. Lin washed millions of dollars’ worth of opium into the sea. The British saw this as destruction of crown property. This however was exactly what the British wanted; they didn’t care about the loss of opium as much as they were happy to have an excuse to go to war with China. The reason they wanted to go to war with China is because China was an extreme trade center in the world. China has a lot of resources such as silver, spices, and aluminum. The British, of course, wanted to control this region. The Chinese wanted to keep their isolation from the rising of the western civilizations, so they shut down all trading except for one commodity, silver. The British wanted to re-open all of the trading. As you can see, opium was not even the real cause of the Opium war; it was the greed of the British caused many Chinese lives to be