Replies

“Growing and selling opium was entirely legal. In 1840, and for decades afterwards, growing, selling and using opium was entirely legal in places like Turkey, Persia and (British) India. In India it was not only legal but in the 1830s and 1840s opium from the British East India Company’s Bengal opium monopoly was quite normally auctioned in Calcutta and shipped to many places, for instance to the Dutch in the East Indies. Opium was legal in Britain itself, which imported some 200,000 pounds of it from India in that same year. It continued in normal use, especially in the form of laudanum, and was used by many distinguished British and European people, including Prime Minister Gladstone in Britain and Prince Bismarck in Germany, was openly sold to the families of wounded soldiers during World War I and traces of laudanum could be found in British over-the-counter cold medicines as late as the 1950s.”

https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/uploads/files/Working-Papers-Archives/CES_WP136.pdf

“By 1860, and much more so by 1900, the Chinese were growing at home many times as much opium as the British, or anyone else, could import. What is more, they kept on doing it, in increasing quantities and virtually throughout all the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century.”