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"For almost all of recorded history, no particular opprobrium was attached to consuming opium as a painkiller, relaxant, work aid, and social lubricant. The Dutch in Indonesia were the first to smoke opium, in the early 1600s, when they began adding a few grains to a recent New World import, tobacco...
Nineteenth-century Europeans swallowed enormous amounts of opium, whereas the Chinese smoked theirs. Since inhaled opium is more addictive than opium taken orally, it was considered much more dangerous in China than in the nations of the West. In England, horticultural organizations awarded prizes for particularly potent domestically grown poppies... and opium was consumed guiltlessly by both high and low, most famously by Samuel Taylor Coleridge ('Kubla Khan'), Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an Opium Eater), and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. The drug could be purchased freely in England until the Pharmacy Act of 1868, other Western nations did not restrict its use until around 1900...
The popular image of an entire Chinese population and its economy ravaged by opium is a misconception. In the first place, the drug was quite expensive and largely the province of the mandarin and merchant elite classes. Second, like alcohol, it was catastrophically addictive in only a small proportion of its users. Even the infamous opium dens did not live up to their seedy reputation, as a disappointed Somerset Maugharn discovered:
And when I was taken to an opium den by a smooth-talking Eurasian, the narrow, winding stairway up which he led me prepared me sufficiently to receive the thrill I expected. I was introduced into a neat enough room, brightly lit, divided into cubicles the raised floor of which, covered with clean matting, formed a convenient couch. In one an elderly gentleman. with a grey head and very beautiful hands, was quietly reading a newspaper, with his long pipe by his side. ... [In another room] four men squatted over a chess-board, and a little further on a man was dandling a baby... . It was a cheerful spot, comfortable, home-like, and cozy. It reminded me somewhat of the little intimate beer-houses ot Berlin where the tired working man could go in the evening and spend a peaceful hour.
Academic research on opium consumption In China bears out Maugham's observation: opium was largely a social drug that harmed only a tiny percentage of users. One modern scholar estimates that although as many as half of men and one-fourth of women were occasional users, and in 1879 only about one Chinese person in a hundred inhaled enough opium to even be at risk of addiction.
The Chinese emperor and the mandarins did express some moral outrage over the debilitation caused by opium, but they were far more concerned about the drug's damage to their balance of trade. China subscribed to European-style mercantilism as faithfully as any seventeenth-century Western monarchy. Before 1800, the tea trade was, at least in the terms of the mercantilist ideology of the day, grossly favorable to the Chinese. The EIC's records pinpoint 1806 as the year when the silver flow reversed. After that date, the value of opium imports exceeded that of tea exports, and Chinese silver began flowing out of the Celestial Kingdom for the first time. After 1818, silver constituted fully one-fifth of the value of Chinese export goods...
For the most part, in mid-eighteenth-century England opium was still a benign nostrum dispensed to colicky babies and swallowed by little old ladies to ease the infirmities of age."
--- A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World / William J. Bernstein
A question that doesn't seem to get asked:
If Opium was really so ruinous, how come China didn't collapse once the Qing were forced to allow its free importation?