Once the British biggest drug dealers in world

4:03pm Thursday 12th June 2008

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By Jack Straw »

Do you know the story about a great nation which for centuries made millions from the trade in heroin and opium, and when another weaker nation tried to stop this trade and the damage it was causing to its people?

It's a tale worth knowing.

For the weaker nation was China, and the great nation was us - the United Kingdom.

Moreover, it was we, the Dutch and the Portuguese who ensured that opiates moved from being an addiction of just a few in the area of its localised production to an addiction of many across the globe.

I'm not proud of this story, and none of us should be. But the story needs to better known. Not least to give the lie to the disgraceful untruths in a recent leaflet of the BNP circulating in Lancashire.

The leaflet claims that - "Muslims are responsible for the heroin trade", and goes on with a brazen disregard for anything approaching the truth to assert that "Before the Islamic invasion, it was almost impossible to find heroin in our land".

In the nineteenth century, here in England, opium was freely and lawfully available in liquid form as "Laudanum".

It is claimed with a good deal of evidence that Coleridge wrote much of his celebrated poetry high on the stuff. At the time you could probably count the number of those of the Muslim faith here in the UK on one hand.

But our involvement extended far beyond just drinking the stuff from a bottle.

We'd run the trade worldwide - entirely legitimately - from at least the early seventeenth century, but we became dominant in it in the eighteenth century.

The British East India Company was - until 1858 and what we call the "Indian Mutiny" and Indians call the "first War of Independence" effectively the British Government in India with a Royal Charter, and control over its governance.

By 1793 the Company established - and enforced - a monopoly on the opium trade.

Poppy growers in India were forbidden to sell opium to competitors, and began to make big profits from selling it into China.

By 1839 Chinese rulers became alarmed at the extent of the addiction of its people.

All foreign traders were ordered to surrender their opium. Our response was to send warships to enforce the trade.

The "First Opium War" began. We won it, and not only extracted a large indemnity from the Chinese, but they also had to cede Hong Kong to us.

But China tried to stop the trade again in 1856. This time France intervened as too.

The Second Opium War ended just like the First. China had to pay another indemnity, and had to legalise the importation of opium.

For us at the time, this was a no-brainer.

Not only was the trade itself highly profitable, but it brought in millions in taxes too to the British Exchequer.

The trade directly benefited cotton textile areas like East Lancashire.

National and multi-national controls on opium and heroin did not begin until the beginning of the last century.

They are now strong - though self evidently far from effective - and everyone understands the dangers from these drugs. But even in our recent history the role of Western powers has been ambiguous.

There were times during the Cold War, and since, when some western intelligence agencies, for the "greater good", did deals with drug war lords in parts of Asia.

So the BNP claims have no foundation at all If the BNP have to resort to such blatant fabrication they must really be desperate.