By Count Friedrich von Olsen
For the past decade or more, the United States has been gripped by what is called the opioid crisis. Opioids are a class of painkillers derived from opium, and they include opium, of course, as well as morphine and heroin. In the last several decades, even more refined versions of these drugs and synthetic analogs have been derived, many far more powerful than what was available previously. These include hydrocodone, oxycodone, oxycontin, percoset, hydromorphone, dilaudid and fentanyl…
The way all opioids work is they erect a temporary barrier between a person’s nerve endings and brain. Thus, they prevent any pain signal from finding its way to the place where it needs to get – one’s cerebral cortex – in order for that pain to register. The trouble, of course, is if one continues to use these painkillers, in time all of that person’s sensory equipment becomes highly sensitized. Each opiate dose lasts for only so long, and when the painkillers are no longer being ingested, any sensation at all – the air on one’s skin, the dust beneath a fingernail, the rub of clothes, the snugness of a belt, the brightness of a light, any sound, an itch, a scratch, practically every sensation – gets magnified and is interpreted as pain. The only way to interrupt those pain signals is to take another opioid dose. At that point, the person is addicted…
Synthetic opioids are generally much stronger than heroin. More and more U.S. citizens are being killed by fentanyl, as a few grains of fentanyl can be a lethal dose. And drug dealers, who are pretty unscrupulous types to begin with, have begun to substitute fentanyl for heroin with little or no regard for the consequences. Their customers, the addicts, accustomed to using much more than a few grains of heroin when they medicate themselves, can very easily, when they are using fentanyl, overdose…
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who has become the point man of sorts in the effort to bring this sordid trend under control, recently lamented that over 20,000 Americans were killed by fentanyl in 2016, and the number is rising at a dramatic rate…
All of these opiates, natural derivatives and synthetics, have legitimate medical applications and can be effective in allowing medical procedures that can be painful to take place. Prescribed in the right way, opiates can alleviate pain for patients who have been injured or have painful conditions, and painkillers can in some way reduce trauma and stress and in that way aid in recovery, although the risk of addiction always looms. American pharmaceutical companies produce morphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, oxycontin, percoset, hydromorphone, dilaudid and fentanyl. There are sensible regulations for these domestically produced opioids intended to ensure that they are used properly and in a medical context, though, of course, that is no guarantee that they will not be abused or that some selfish and irresponsible people chasing a profit or desperate addicts will not find a way around those regulations. Nevertheless, the supply of opioids fueling the ongoing crisis comes, for the most part, from foreign producers of these drugs…
In particular, according to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, China has become the most prolific purveyor of this human misery. Unlike in the United States, there is no governance on the quantity of fentanyl that Chinese manufacturers can produce, and with the superabundant supply available to them together with the internet which allows them to effectively market and distribute to those seeking it, Chinese gangsters are targeting Americans with absolute ruthlessness. Recently, Ron Rosenstein said, “Chinese fentanyl traffickers have been using the Internet to sell fentanyl and fentanyl analogues to drug traffickers and individual customers in the United States. These cases reflect a new and disturbing facet of the opioid crisis in America. The Center for Disease Control estimates that fentanyl and fentanyl analogues are coming into the country in numerous ways, including shipments from factories in China directly to U.S. customers who purchased it on the Internet.”
Americans are understandably upset at what the Chinese, or some Chinese, are doing to our country. On top of the fierce economic competition between the United States and China – which boast the top two economies the world over – this nasty business heightens American distrust of the Chinese, and in a particularly ironic capitalistic context, goes well toward fulfilling the expectation which was birthed during the early 1950s of an ugly showdown pitting the United States together with its Western Allies against what was then referred to as the “Red Menace” or “Yellow Peril,” e.g. Communist China…
But before we get carried away with ourselves and our outrage, let us consider history. Our 32nd President was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the son of James Roosevelt and his wife, Sara Ann Delano Roosevelt. His maternal grandfather was Warren Delano, Jr…
Warren Delano, Jr. was a shipping magnate of sorts, working as the senior foreign official for Russell and Company, which was owned by Samuel Russell. In 1833, as a relatively young man, Warren Delano had first sailed to China, where over the next ten years he amassed a considerable fortune, officially dealing in tea, silks and porcelain, what in our day we refer to as “China,” you know, the plates we eat from and the cups we use for drinking tea. At that time, the Chinese emperor was considered by himself and his people to be the Son of Heaven, and China was thought by the Chinese and their emperor to be a celestial empire. Foreigners were deemed barbarians and the emperor would not allow them to enter into his kingdom proper, nor would he permit them to exchange any of their goods for those commodities which were the Chinese national product. Whatever Westerners had to trade was not needed by the Chinese people, the Son of Heaven believed. The emperor was amenable only to accepting gold or silver for the silk, tea and dinnerware his people provided to the foreigners. He did not want their goods in exchange and he did not want their currency, which he considered worthless. To be permitted to buy Chinese goods, the foreigners had to pay for that trading privilege, again only in silver or in gold. They were not permitted open access to China, but instead limited to landing, just four months of the year, in a very circumscribed area on the south coast of China, near the port city of Canton. The barbarians were not permitted entrance into the City of Canton, and allowed only to set up their warehouses outside Canton’s walls…
For Warren Delano and Samuel Russell in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s and into the 1860s, the idea of sending empty ships out on the high seas half of the way around the globe to pick up cargo and then ferry it back to America was as absurd of a concept as a trucking company owner or manager today consenting to dispatching an 18-wheeler from California to deliver a payload to Maine and then have the truck roll back to California empty or unladen. Once that truck offloads in Portland, or Augusta or Bangor, if it had not been arranged to pick up some clothing or several tons of lobsters to be delivered elsewhere, it would be very likely to head over to Buffalo to pick up some finished metal products such as gears or gearboxes, or furniture, or beer from a brewery, air conditioning units or parts, safes, food products or any of a dozen other things that are produced in that city and then deliver them to Cleveland or Indianapolis or Chicago or St. Louis or any of hundreds of places along the way, and then top somewhere else to pick something up that would be delivered to Phoenix or Las Vegas or Los Angeles. In much the same way, if Delano and Russell were going to dispatch their ships to China, they intended to carry something there and deliver it, no matter what the Son of Heaven said. They took a leaf out of the British mariners’ book. The English were runners of opium they picked up in India into China. On Russell’s behalf, Warren Delano arranged to pick up Turkish opium from an Arabian port and then ferry it to China. After an incident in which the Chinese emperors agents raided one of the Russell and Company’s warehouses and seized all the opium there, Delano switched to a different means of inserting the contraband into China. As the Russell and Company ships would come into Chinese territorial waters they would head to a prearranged spot off off the coast just beyond the horizon from the shore. Then at night so-called “scrambling crabs,” e.g., long boats manned by oarsmen who were members of a Chinese tong – that is a gang – rowed out to the ship and exchanged silver for opium. After taking the opium ashore, the tong and its network would wholesale the drug to opium dens in China or sell it to street addicts…
Warren Delano, Jr., the grandfather of one of the greatest presidents in American history accumulated much of his wealth by fueling the opium crisis in China during the 19th Century, spreading the scourge of drug addiction and its accompanying misery into the lives of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of Chinese families…
Indeed, what goes around will eventually come around, even if it takes something approaching 200 years…