WILL BUILDING A WALL KEEP OUT THE DRUGS?
In hindsight: A historical perspective suggests the United States must look inward to address the opioid crisis.
In a prime time television address on January 8, 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump justified the construction of a wall along the U.S. southern border by warning of massive amounts of illegal drugs entering the United States.
“Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs,” the President said, “including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.”
CNN reporters quickly pointed out that although most heroin does enter from “the south,” it travels largely through legal ports of entry that would be unaffected by a new wall. Several journalists also highlighted the subtle differences across each drug’s particular path of travel. Heroin, a natural opiate, largely arrives from Mexico. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, arrives either directly from China or via Canada. Experts now point to fentanyl as the larger social and public health threat, and Trump’s opioid commission stated in November 2017, “we are losing this fight predominately through China.”
That the current crisis relies upon substances from not only Latin America but also China — as well as South and Southeast Asia — underscores an observation made by many historians that the modern history of drugs and the broader history of globalization are basically co-extensive. Media outlets are not wrong to suggest that a border with Mexico will accomplish little in stemming the import of overseas drugs. What is being left unsaid, however, is the more fundamental question: What could actually stop the global movement of opiates and opioids?
That the current opioid crisis relies upon substances from not only Latin America but also China — as well as South and Southeast Asia — underscores an observation made by many historians that the modern history of drugs and the broader history of globalization are basically co-extensive.
In part, the answer to this question demands that we first ask another: what forces are to blame for the opiate crisis? This simple question hovers over all historical accounts of the infamous Chinese addiction to opium in the nineteenth century, but in fact it is a notoriously difficult question that is almost never answered directly. What historical research can help us understand instead is how, throughout the past, opium addiction has been explained and rationalized, embedded within broader political debates.
In comparing twenty-first U.S. to nineteenth-century Chinese experiences, we see a clear parallel in the way suppliers and consumers have understood and explained the root causes of opium addiction. For the opium suppliers — colonial British merchants and and twenty-first century Chinese factories — opiate crises result from “market demand.” For the opium-consuming society in crisis — Qing China and contemporary United States — the culprit is overseas “supply.”
In other words, each side blames the other.
These are simple claims, but historically they have taken the form of more complex economic arguments — is the engine of the global market either the “supply” side of producers or the “demand” side of consumers? — as well as cultural ones — is the crisis the result of outside, alien forces, or is it a reflection of problems at home?
In the nineteenth century, the British parliament dismissed domestic critics of the British-Indian-Chinese opium trade. In its view, the opium trade was driven by Chinese actions, rather than British ones. British parliamentarians pointed to the natural forces of supply and demand, arguing that eventually the trade would reach an agreeable equilibrium before fully poisoning China. They also offered the cultural claim that Asians were simply more accustomed to opium than Europeans were. George Campbell, a prominent member of the colonial Indian bureaucracy, wrote: “as the Aryan races prefer alcohol, so the Turanian [central Asian] consume opium.”¹
For opium suppliers, an opiate crisis results from “market demand.” For the opium-consuming society, the culprit is overseas “supply.” In other words, each side blames the other.
These claims resemble those by Chinese officials today who pin the blame for opioid addiction on Americans themselves. Liu Yuejin, with the Chinese government’s National Narcotics Control Commission, proclaimed that “the U.S. should adopt a comprehensive and balanced strategy to reduce and suppress the huge demand in the country for fentanyl and other similar drugs as soon as possible,” adding, ”when fewer and fewer Americans use fentanyl, there would be no market for it.”
For the opioid -consumers, as well, the most common response has been to scapegoat foreign forces. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese nationalists blamed the opium crisis on western imperialism, ignoring the indispensable roles played by Chinese merchants. Trump, too, is more comfortable blaming foreigners, especially Mexico, serving as justification for his signature campaign promise of a border wall.
But there are exceptions to this sort of self-exculpatory rhetoric. In the early decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of Chinese nationalists and Communists sought to revive a war-torn country by pointing their radical criticism at not only foreign imperialism but especially their own society. For these thinkers, known as the May Fourth generation, opium addiction was a symptom of a deeper social disease, namely China’s feudal and unequal society, fettered by superstitious customs and an undemocratic Confucian ideology. When the Communist Party reunified China in 1949, it sought to realize a “new China” by targeting the vices of gambling, prostitution, foot-binding, slavery, and, yes, opium.
Remarkably, during the three decades of the Mao era, from the 1950s to late seventies, the Communist government was able to stamp out opium consumption in China. This was also the period in which China’s relationship with global markets was highly circumscribed, dramatically impacted by a two decades-long U.S. trade embargo. However, with economic liberalization since the 1980s, opium has re-entered China. In liberalized India, too, the site of the British empire’s original opium factories, colonial-era refineries were given new life in the late 20th century, producing for both local and overseas markets. Thus, when it comes to curbing drug consumption, nothing in the modern era has been as effective as the temporary paralysis of the global market itself.²
If, in the nineteenth century, opium became wildly popular among a Chinese population suffering from social dislocation and poverty, then addressing the crisis in America today will likewise require a more reflexive examination of the country’s fundamental social structures and the specific burdens they place upon the middle classes and the poor. As medical researchers have long argued, the opioid crisis is highly correlated with historical patterns of high unemployment, stagnant wages and poverty, and attendant feelings of social isolation and depression, patterns familiar to historians of late-century deindustrialization and felt in inner city neighborhoods today such as in Kensington, Philadelphia.
There are thus good grounds for skepticism towards any government strategy that attempts to solve the opiate crisis with a wall. In an era of globalization, stemming the supply of drugs will prove virtually impossible with physical barriers. Neither is simply exhorting vulnerable populations to “just say no” a realistic solution; opiate consumption remains a powerful temptation throughout modern history, especially for segments of the population feeling a sense of loss of opportunity, social support, and hope.
Questions of regulation and supply are certainly critical, but any serious response to America’s opioid crisis will need to begin with a historical examination of its own policies, the social patterns they have spawned, and the economic forces, both domestic and global, that have contributed to what has become a full-scale humanitarian crisis.
Andrew B. Liu’s column for the Lepage Center focuses on histories of capitalism in China. He is an Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University.
Notes
- Quoted in Gregory Blue, “Opium for China: The British Connection,” in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (University of California Press, 2000), 37.
- Zhou Yongming, “Nationalism, Identity, and State-Building: The Antidrug Crusade in the People’s Republic, 1949–1952,” in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (University of California Press, 2000), 380–404.
