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'Parasite' actor Lee Sun-kyun found dead amid investigation over drug allegations
(www.koreatimes.co.kr)
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Large imports of opium to China only started in 1822, and while the 'century of humiliation' would begin ~20 years later, society was in no way 'irrecoverable', it wasn't centuries, and it wasn't because of opium.
Opium was yet another weight around the neck of Qing, but it was only a serious issue because the dominant naval power on the globe forced them to accept opium at cannon point and killed them when they refused.
Unless US aircraft carriers start bombing Korea into accepting industrial quantities of heroin, the situation isn't really comparable.
I don't want to downplay the horror of opium, but the Opium War was a war.
The reason the British went to war is because the Qing were making progress getting rid of opium. The British needed their gunships to make sure the opium stuck. It wasn't that opium was such an impossible problem to combat, it's that the British navy beat them in two wars when they tried.