Royal Commission on Opium

The Royal Opium Commission of 1895 was a commission of the British Government set up to investigate the Anglo-Asian opium trade.

History

Throughout the 19th century opium sent to China was one of British India's most valuable exports. In 1797, Lord Cornwallis set up an official state agency that licensed peasant cultivators to grow poppy, process it, and export it to China via Calcutta.
So valuable had this trade become to British India by the 1830s that its threatened closure by the Qing government caused the British government to send ships and troops to attack Canton and other coastal cities in the First Opium War. The British thereby forcibly prevented the Qing government from effectively ending the smuggling of Indian opium and its illegal sale to Chinese consumers. The Qing government's refusal to legalize the sale of Opium was among the factors that led to the Second Opium War.
As opium trafficking soared, the volume of criticism directed at it grew, especially in Britain. Reformers headed by Evangelicals and Quakers organized, petitioned and put forward Parliamentary resolutions aimed at stopping the trade. Finally, in 1893, under Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone's Liberal government, anti-opium pressures prevailed and Parliament approved the appointment of a Royal Commission on Opium.
The Commission was to report on whether India's opium exports to the Far East should be ended and, further, whether poppy growing and consumption of opium in India itself should be prohibited, save for medical purposes. After an extended inquiry the Royal Commission released its report, running to around two thousand pages, in early 1895. The report firmly rejected the claims made by the anti-opiumists in regard to the harm wrought to India by this traffic. Instead, it claimed that opium use in Asia was analogous to alcohol use in Europe, that opium was not harmful to Asians, and that Chinese complaints were based on commercial concerns, not medical evidence. This proved to be an unexpected and devastating blow to the hopes of the anti-opium reformers in Britain. The Commission's conclusions effectively removed the opium question from the British public agenda for another 15 years. One member of the Commission, Henry J. Wilson, published a Minute of Dissent.