How Queen Victoria Once Ran World's Biggest Drug Racket

Go back just over 150 years, and you find the person at the front and centre of one of the world's biggest drug empires wasn't a cartel or street thugs in South America but a queen.

According to author Sam Kelly, Queen Victoria presided over a drug empire so vast that it “made Escobar and El Chapo look like low-level street dealers.” In his book, ‘Human History On Drugs: An Utterly Scandalous but Entirely Truthful Look at History Under the Influence,' Kelly says that the 19th-century British monarch effectively ran one of the largest narcotics operations in history, backed by the full power of the British Empire. The proceeds of the empire's drug trade were so immense that they “were funding the entire country.”

Queen Victoria herself was a “huge fan of drugs,” Kelly says. The queen regularly used a range of pharmaceuticals, including her favourite opium, which she consumed by drinking it in the form of laudanum, a blend of opium and alcohol. “Queen Victoria drank a big swig of laudanum every morning,” Kelly writes.

She also enjoyed cocaine, legal at the time. It provided a “powerful blast of self-confidence.” Her doctor prescribed cannabis to ease menstrual discomfort, while chloroform was used during childbirth.

But Victoria's drug use was not limited to personal indulgence; it extended across continents. Upon ascending the throne in 1837, she inherited what Kelly calls a “king-size problem,” which was Britain's dependency on Chinese tea. With tea imports draining British silver reserves, the empire sought a commodity to reverse the trade flow. The answer was opium, cultivated in British-controlled India and sold in massive quantities to China.

The demand for the highly addictive drug turned the tide of trade overnight. “China was forced to return all the silver the British had spent on tea, plus a great deal more. Now it was China, not Britain, that was racking up ruinous trade deficits,” Kelly writes. Soon, opium sales accounted for 15% to 20% of the British Empire's annual revenue.

China's top official, Lin Zexu, tried to halt the opium trade, urging Queen Victoria to end Britain's export of “poisonous drugs” in return for tea and silk. The queen ignored him. In 1839, Lin seized and destroyed 2.5 million pounds of British opium in the South China Sea, prompting Victoria to strike back. The First Opium War followed, ending with China's defeat and a treaty that ceded Hong Kong, opened new ports and granted British citizens immunity from Chinese law.

Kelly says, the queen had shown to the world “that China could be defeated, and fairly easily.” For Queen Victoria, it was a triumph of empire and profit.

And yet, there was one limit to her trade. Believing cocaine to be “a safe, healthy energy booster,” Victoria refused to export it to China. “She was happy to sell them all the opium in the world,” Kelly writes, adding, “but they'd better not touch her cocaine.”

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