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Opium, once used for ritual purposes, is a substance which dulls pain and offers access to an artificial world, and has long been idealized by artists and markets. Baudelaire, Picasso, and Dickens were all inspired to create by the blue clouds of smoke. Known as either a sacred drug or the worst of poisons, opium rapidly became popular in Great Britain and a source of commerce with Imperial China. This illustrated work presents the history and quasi-religious rites of opium's use.

Congressman Porters resolution of January 28, 1924,1 authorizing an appropriation for American participation in two international conferences on the opium and narcotic drug traffic to be held in the latter part of this year is the most recent step in the long history of mankind's fight against his own desire for narcotics. This fight has progressed by three stages.

Building the «Opium Evil» Consensus. The International Opium Commission of Shanghai Global narcotics control in the twentieth century developed based on the consensus that the use of drugs for non-medical purposes was morally despicable and therefore needed to be prohibited. This premise was first agreed upon by the International Opium Commission of Shanghai in 1909 and resulted from negotiations between delegations from China, the U.S. and the British Empire. Their differing perspectives on opium and on the opium trade shaped their positions of negotiation: all had to some extent experienced domestic opium problems but their economic interest in the opium trade did not align. Open negotiation and institutionalized international cooperation boosted moral arguments against what was conceived as the «opium evil». Under these conditions the U.S. and China managed to build the foundation for a prohibitive global narcotics regime that fit their purposes.