Drugs shape the laws and write the very rules they break, they scramble all the codes and raise the stakes of desire and necessity, euphoria and pain, normality, perversion, truth and artifice." (Sadie Plant)

Karl Marx, famous for his slogan “religion is the opium of the people”, recognised that the ever-elusive dragon had set the tone for global capitalism. For Marx, opium had presented the British empire with an opportunity to “make gold for nothing” – a lesson that once learnt was never forgotten. Moreover, it established a new religion for the emerging free market – profit at any cost. During the 19^th century, the opium trade ruined China and paid half the annual revenues of the British crown. While opium was funding Britain’s colonial empire and its massive push towards becoming an industrialised economy, the drug presented countless numbers of its users with ways of coping with the breakneck speeds, filth and traumas of new-fangled industrialisation. Opium also set new scales for advertising, introducing the notion that desire could be turned into a necessity. Buxom lasses with alluring smiles invited Victorians to sample opium tinctures (Laudanum, being a famous example) that were becoming all the rage in Europe.

Opium, which had enjoyed centuries of serene usage in China, had become a cheap and deadly commodity by the latter half of the 18^th century when Portuguese traders started mixing it with tobacco. The British, who desperately wanted tea and silks from China, were keen to seize control of what was becoming an increasingly lucrative market. By the early 19^th century the British East India company (BEI), backed by the Royal Navy, had driven out the Portuguese and set up an international opium monopoly fed by large-scale opium cultivation in India.  The BEI, effectively the world’s first drug cartel, was now selling opium in China in complete disregard of Chinese law. When Chinese authorities tried to crack down on the opium trade, the British first turned to smuggling and then to outright violence.

”With adequate profit, capital is very bold … 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws … 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both.” (Karl Marx)

In 1839, the British began employing aggressive military intervention in forcing the Chinese government to keep its markets open to the opium dragon. 1856 saw the final chapter of the infamous ‘opium wars’ when China was famously forced to cede Hong-Kong to Britain as a free port. Obscene profits continued to be reaped well into the first decades of the 20^th century, by which time the United States of America, seemingly jealous at being left out of the opium profit loop, put her foot down. When the League of Nations (which later became the United Nations) was established in the 1920’s, an attempt to regulate the opium trade was cited as one of the principle reasons.

“The [media] spectacle is a permanent opium war which unleashes a limitless artificiality in the face of which all living desire is disarmed.” (Guy Debord)

The British success in selling ‘junk’ to the Chinese has been rivalled in the 20^th and 21^st centuries by the success of capitalism in selling all manner of commodified junk to just about everyone on the planet. “Opium”, writes Sadie Plant, “formed the mould of monopoly and possession; a graphic demonstration of the ease with which desires could be turned into necessities and demand manipulated to satisfy supply”. Opium, as William Burroughs said, truly is the ultimate emblem of corporate capitalism – the client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

Today, the so-called ‘war on drugs’ is not about doing away with drugs. Rather, it is about controlling their usage.  While the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries are quite literally imposing their drugs on millions of hapless people, other industries are selling caffeine, sugar, tobacco, fast-food and alcohol to billions. First world governments continue to ply a dirty trade, exporting armaments, chemicals and dicey agendas. Their continued role in the illegal drug trade, which holds a ten percent share of the international commodities trade (larger than that of oil, minerals and lubricants together) is, in any event, not beyond suspicion. The global media, meanwhile, monopolises and manipulates tastes, opinions and desires. While we are told to ‘Just Say No’ to drugs, the real message of the free market is ‘Just Say Yes’ to junk culture, overpopulation and environmental destruction.

”Exhausted by the effort of concentrating on the traffic and holding the cars around us in their lanes, I took my hands off the wheel and let the car press on.” (J.G Ballard, Crash)