OTTAWA — More than a century and a half ago, China learned a brutal lesson about the strategic power of narcotics.
During the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, British commercial interests, backed ultimately by military power, exploited China’s enormous market for opium. Addiction weakened communities, drained wealth and contributed to political instability. The wars and the unequal treaties that followed became embedded in Chinese historical memory as part of what Beijing still calls its “century of humiliation.”
