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Book Review: Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann, & Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 256 pp. Cloth: $35.00 (US), ISBN 0—226—14905—6

Narcotic Culture offers a revisionist and provocative study of a topic that has drawn considerable scholarly attention since the late 1990s. Readers can easily recognize the strong desires by the authors to readdress or question the dominant ‘opium myth’ that, according to them, is too condemnatory of both opium use and the roles played by the British (and other) colonialists/imperialists in making it an epidemic, while neglecting the benign effects of moderate opium consumption, the agency of smokers in using it, and opium’s positive social roles in modern China. Drawing on Dikotter’s research on prisons in modern China, the second half of the book provides a detailed description on how the detoxification process was carried out, often in prisons or prison-like rehabilitation hospitals. I see similar value in this book’s discussion on the spread of semi-synthetic opiates, mainly morphine and heroin. What makes the study insightful is that the authors relate their discussion to both modern international narcotics production and trafficking, and China’s domestic anti-opium discourse and prohibition actions. As they point out, morphine and heroin were consumed in large quantities in the form of various so-called ‘opium habit breaking pills.’ By situating the needle injection of morphine and heroin within the perspective of the Chinese practice of acupuncture, the authors shed new light on the question of why the use of syringes and needles, mid-nineteenth century medical inventions of relatively novelty, was quickly embraced by Chinese drug users. These discussions make a valuable contribution to the exploration of narcotic culture in China by exploring areas that have not been well studied. Yet, when the authors affirm that the shift of consumption patterns from opium smoking to morphine and heroin was mainly caused by the prohibition policies adopted in the republican era, their arguments become less convincing. First, the use of morphine and heroin never reached the nationwide prevalence that opium use did. As the authors themselves acknowledge, ‘opium remained important’ (p. 170) in the first decades of the twentieth century. Second, the authors may have over-estimated the effectiveness of China’s opium prohibition policies in the same period. In fact, with the exception of certain short periods (i.e. 1906–1911 and 1935–1937), prohibition was ineffectively implemented by different regimes, and opium was widely available to smokers. Finally, heroine and morphine use was subject to much harsher punishments than opium use under the prohibition scheme implemented in the republican era. Thus more evidence is needed to demonstrate that the spread of morphine and heroin was a direct result of prohibition. An apparently causal relationship may, indeed, overly simplify a complex situation with multiple factors. The spread of semi-synthetic drugs can be seen as another successful case of market penetration by new drugs driven by their affordability and availability, made possible by both international and domestic conditions at the time. The ‘opium myth’ that the authors set to readdress proves more durable than they might imagine; many arguments they raise are hard to substantiate with the Transcultural Psychiatry 45(3)