Highly readable and relevant to our own times on more than one level (see "We all love puns"). Imperial Chinese policies on opium demonstrate the dictum that history does not repeat itself but it does echo. Likewise the matters of east/west politics and of corrupt officials and business interests.
Drug combat proposals were a mixture of:
1. punish all users with birchings, etc.
2. legalize opium; provide education, treatment plans and hospitals
3. punish and replace all government-employee users; let all others die from their addictions (always more peasants born)
4. execute all users
5. shame all users
6. destroy all paraphernalia
7. destroy all domestic suppliers
8. encourage poppy plantations and make opium a home-grown business
It was the 7th one that was actually beginning to work until things went wrong.
One of the peculiar problems of the "trade" was that the smugglers (Chinese) paid the middle-men (Anglos etc) illegally in Chinese silver. Canton's legal trade was conducted in Mexican/South American Spanish silver coins. Because it was illegal to export Chinese silver, and therefore illegal to receive it, Chinese merchants could not accept Chinese silver in payment for their tea and silk etc. Thus Chinese silver poured out and never came back in business dealings.
Ordinary people earned only copper coins, but had to pay their taxes in silver. As silver went away (and the Latin supply fell due to revolutions), inflation was universally ruinous. The "opium problem" for the Chinese government was less moral and more practical - the loss of silver was destroying the economy and emptying the imperial coffers.
When the demand is high and growing exponentially, punishing the users is not the right answer. It's the supply chain and dealers who must be rooted out.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts