Nah, the ‘evil Orientals’ aren’t intentionally flooding the US with opioids like perfidious Albion did to China during both Opium Wars, there is just have a lot of manufacturing there, including production of opioids like fentanyl and its analogues for legitimate medical purposes, which is easy(or at least possible) for criminals(that exist in any country) to divert/steal some of that supply to sell to the other criminals that distribute it to the US market.
This happens anywhere dual use medical drugs/drugs of abuse are made, e.g. in the UK almost all of the ketamine and street benzos come from India, but that doesn’t mean Modhi is doing it purposely as revenge for the Raj.
For it to be equivalent to the Opium Wars the PRC would need to park warships off the coast of the US and force the government to legalise opioids then have their manufacturers sell directly to dealers and users there.
If you want to blame anyone blame cartels who found fentanyl more profitable and easier to smuggle than the black tar heroin previously grown and produced in South America, or the actual source of the problem and the reason cartels exist and are as powerful as they are: the US’s atrocious drug war policies and the politicians that wrote and voted for them.
My quip was tongue-in-cheek, however, you’re not wrong here.
As John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon aide, revealed in a 1994 interview that was published in 2016, the war on drugs itself was designed to target Black people and “hippies”:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Their plan set the country on the misguided, punitive, and counterproductive path it pursues today, as administrations since have carried it forward. Incarceration rates skyrocketed during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, surging from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997, and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump made their own damaging contributions to escalating the drug war.
Fair enough, you should make that clear in future, as I see plenty of people on reddit and elsewhere claim the the current fentanyl driven opioid addiction and overdose crises are caused by direct intervention of the PRC as revenge for the century of humiliation etc, often with racist overtones
Nah, the ‘evil Orientals’ aren’t intentionally flooding the US with opioids like perfidious Albion did to China during both Opium Wars, there is just have a lot of manufacturing there, including production of opioids like fentanyl and its analogues for legitimate medical purposes, which is easy(or at least possible) for criminals(that exist in any country) to divert/steal some of that supply to sell to the other criminals that distribute it to the US market.
This happens anywhere dual use medical drugs/drugs of abuse are made, e.g. in the UK almost all of the ketamine and street benzos come from India, but that doesn’t mean Modhi is doing it purposely as revenge for the Raj.
For it to be equivalent to the Opium Wars the PRC would need to park warships off the coast of the US and force the government to legalise opioids then have their manufacturers sell directly to dealers and users there.
If you want to blame anyone blame cartels who found fentanyl more profitable and easier to smuggle than the black tar heroin previously grown and produced in South America, or the actual source of the problem and the reason cartels exist and are as powerful as they are: the US’s atrocious drug war policies and the politicians that wrote and voted for them.
My quip was tongue-in-cheek, however, you’re not wrong here.
https://www.vera.org/news/fifty-years-ago-today-president-nixon-declared-the-war-on-drugs
If you want to know more about the above poster’s comment read:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/901/The-School-of-the-AmericasMilitary-Training-and
On Orientalism, of course there’s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
Fair enough, you should make that clear in future, as I see plenty of people on reddit and elsewhere claim the the current fentanyl driven opioid addiction and overdose crises are caused by direct intervention of the PRC as revenge for the century of humiliation etc, often with racist overtones
That’s very fair!!