Please. You Drive.

I set up a must-do call at 8:30. Then I was told I’d need to do a meeting at the school for my older one at 8:15AM.  Fortunately, it was quick and walking back out to the car I was able to fiddle and get my headset plugged into the phone, the bridge link located in my outlook app pasted into zoom and the bridge up and running before anyone else arrived.  “Yes.  Please. You drive.”

I’ve written before about the eerie similarities between China’s broad adoption of opium during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the civilization had lost its way, and was floundering in the face of a new, overwhelming external challenge, and the opioid addiction that is plaguing the United States.  People are out of work, don’t know what to do and are anesthetizing themselves.  Many Americans, as must have been the case with many Chinese, are lost. 

Reading the Pomfret book, "The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom" I was intrigued to find that there was a second chapter, toward the end of China’s opium crisis.  As the public discourse shifted to resoundingly condemn the sale of  the drug in China by foreign powers, Western powers, certainly England and America, found an alternative substance that was socially acceptable, equally addictive and native to North America, to push in China, as the opium trade waned. 

The British American Tobacco (BAT) made a concerted effort in the early part of the last century to promote tobacco use among the Chinese, first in the cities, and then in the inland areas. With cigarette rolling machines they were able to mass produce the leaf so that it could be easily distributed and consumed.  A local firm, Nanyang competed hard against BAT.  Their tactics were bare-knuckled: BAT would buy up a warehouse of Nanyang smokes and let them rot in the warehouse and then distribute them later to disappoint users.  I’m not sure I ever properly considered tobacco as a commercial follow-up to decline of opium commerce.  Industrialists needed something else addictive to sell. 

Monday, 01/15/17