known for medicinal purposes as a drug to treat dysentery, cholera and other diseases towards the end of the 15th century for China. It was not until the 18th century was there any facts of genuine inhaling of the water vapor (opium smoking) began only after smoking tobacco had spread to China from America in the seventeenth century ("The Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking" 1). During the late 1700s', abundant amounts of opium chests were imported yearly from India, a British colony at that time, to China. As time passed, the demand for opium grew enormously. For example, from 1800 to 1821, the average number of imported chests was about 45 hundred a year, but th
             ...