Mao's drug lesson for the world

Without opium, there would have been no Hong Kong. The British only acquired it because of the opium wars, and the city's early economic success was built on the opium trade.

That history added an emotional charge to the difficult years leading up to the Hong Kong handover. The emotion was fuelled by Beijing's intense antipathy to opium, and the still-fresh memories of the evil that 18th-century, buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and Hong Kong.

It was the British who fed the Chinese propensity for opium. Historians point out that the Chinese would have found it elsewhere, even grown some of it themselves. But the truth is the Indian-grown opium was the brand the Chinese smokers favoured, and the British East India Company marketed it with commercial elan.

Today, Chinese authorities regard opium as a singularly bad thing. On this issue, mainstream opinion is as black and white as a panda. But, in Hong Kong, there has been a public debate - with shades of grey and layers of complexity - both historically and currently.

It was the communist revolution that erased opium from mainland China. Mao Zedong , with his political apparatus that reached into every hamlet and home, was able to lay the beast low. He used a mixture of carrot and stick. Addicts were not condemned, but offered medical help and rehabilitation. But those who were unco-operative were sent to labour camps or imprisoned. Dealers were summarily executed, often without trial.

China was clean for 40 years, until the demise of Maoism. But gradually, opium has returned. Now China is one of the world's most important opium growers, and its addict population exceeds 800,000. Although Beijing still regularly executes drug traffickers, demand in its freewheeling economic society finds willing suppliers prepared to take the risk. As a Chinese proverb puts it: 'If you open a window, sunlight comes in, but so do mosquitoes.'

Government attitudes in China have not changed. But the market is a match for the government, as it is almost everywhere. The black market grows by the decade, and suppression - unless it is utterly totalitarian - leaves enough loopholes for the determined to wriggle through.