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Opium in sentence

140 examples of Opium in a sentence

Once can understand the common interests of China and Britain: China is obsessed with an absolute territorial imperative: to restore what it considers to be the one and indivisible Chinese Motherland;Britain is obsessed with trade and commerce with China -- just as it was during the Opium Wars.
In its relationships with smaller countries like Sri Lanka, China is replicating the practices used against it in the European-colonial period, which began with the 1839-1860 Opium Wars and ended with the 1949 communist takeover – a period that China bitterly refers to as its “century of humiliation.”
Like the opium the British exported to China, the easy loans China offers are addictive.
At the London Conference, world leaders should support the counter-narcotics strategy recently approved by the Afghan government, which would reduce economic dependence on opium production, punish traffickers and dealers, and provide sustainable economic alternatives for poppy farmers.
The conference should follow up on a resolution by the European Parliament to consider whether Afghanistan should become one of the countries licensed to produce opium for medical purposes.
In fact, the resolution calls on the participants at a conference of donors, to take place in London at the end of January, “to take into consideration the proposal of licensed production of opium for medical purposes, as already granted to a number of countries.”
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, despite concerted efforts at eradication and crop substitution, Afghanistan produced 87% of the world’s opium in 2005 – roughly 4.1 tons – generating $2.7 billion of illegal revenue, which amounts to roughly 52% of the country’s GDP.
The 2005 Afghanistan Opium Survey, released last November, estimates that the total value of this opium, once turned into heroin and distributed around the world, could reach more than $40 billion.
Moreover, in recent years, factories and laboratories for processing opium into heroin have been sprouting in Afghanistan, producing 420 tons of heroin last year alone.
An increase in production of “medical” opium would address its lack of availability worldwide.
Meanwhile, opium production is surging, and Afghanistan now ranks second in the world in money laundering (after Iran).
The 43% increase in opium production in just the last year both reflects and reinforces the growing strength of these groups, which use drug-trafficking revenues to finance their operations.
Of global annual flows of 430-450 tons of heroin and morphine, about 380 tons are produced with Afghan opium.
Karl Marx famously said that religion is “the opium of the people.”
China is especially keen on combating drug trafficking, as Badakhshan, the Afghan province bordering on Xinjiang, has become the main transit route for Afghan opium.
Hamid Karzai’s government remains weak, and the economy continues to be heavily dependent upon opium production.
Success will also require more funds for reconstruction, development, and alternatives to opium poppy cultivation.
However, following the industrial revolution in northwestern Europe, the colonization of much of Asia, and the Opium Wars in China, their relative positions switched.
At the end of that forum, UN member states adopted a political declaration that mandated the UN Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) "to develop strategies with a view to eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant, and the opium poppy by the year 2008."
The British East India Company deliberately imposed a triangular trade arrangement whereby Britain sold manufactured goods to India in order to buy opium, which it subsequently sold in China to finance the purchase of tea and other products.
By the time Europe and China crossed paths in the Opium Wars of 1839-42, a technologically superior Europe had vast military advantages and so forced China into a series of unilateral, humiliating concessions.
The Chinese remember well the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, when the Middle Kingdom tried and failed to resist the British campaign to force it to open its economy to opium and other imports.
Afghanistan remains the world’s fifth poorest country and its biggest opium producer, with a weak central state that is further debilitated by warlordism and the Taliban insurgency.
Not that drug use has increased fantastically - after all, huge quantities of alcohol, opium and other drugs were consumed back then.
Global markets in cannabis, opium and coca products are basically similar to other global commodities markets, yet global drug control policies operate on the assumption that the drug markets bear more in common with smallpox and other infectious diseases for which there is no demand.
Throughout the developing world, poor peasants involved in producing opium, coca and cannabis are arrested, sometimes beaten, and often extorted by government agents enforcing drug laws.
The same was true of opium in Asia.
Trump urges us to carry on, while Mnuchin suggests that Thunberg numb her soul with the opium of mainstream economics.
Thailand, for example, has phased out opium by creating other economic opportunities for rural farmers.
One of the ironies of this failed mission was that the British were looking to trade in goods other than opium with China.
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