The First and Second Opium Wars represented the future War on Drugs in many ways. They represented how the political establishment wanted to exploit drugs in trying to dominate markets in an imperialist fashion. Both wars were about the same British Empire who used wars, colonialism, slavery, and other abhorrent tactics in spreading their influence in the global among numerous continents. The First Opium War lasted from March 18, 1839 to August 29, 1842. In that war, about 18,000 Chinese soldiers and 69 British troops died. After that war, the British Empire won trade rights, access to five treaty ports, and Hong Kong. The Second Opium War was fought from October 23, 1856, to October 18, 1860, and was also known as the Arrow War or the Second Anglo-Chinese War, (although France joined in). Approximately 2,900 Western troops were killed or wounded, while China had from 12,000 to 30,000 killed or wounded. Britain won southern Kowloon and Western powers got extraterritorial rights and trade privileges. China's Summer Palaces were looted and burned. These wars existed by a long history.
By the 1700's, European nations like Britain, the Netherlands, and France wanted to expand their Asian trade networks by linking with the powerful Qing Empire in China. China was the eastern endpoint of the Silk Road. The Silk Road helped people to trade many goods and services for centuries. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) wanted to control the Silk Road trade system. China limited them to the port of Canton. They didn't want to teach them Chinese, and they wanted penalties for any European who wanted to leave Canton and enter the rest of China. European consumers wanted Chinese silks, porcelain, and tea. China didn't want any European manufactured goods. The Qing government wanted payment in cash like silver. Britain also a trade deficit with China. It didn't have domestic silver supply. So, the British East India Company dealt with opium from British India. Opium was mostly grown in Bengal. Payment in opium was illegal in China. The Qing government was concerned about many Chinese people addicted to opium. So, the British continued to smuggle opium in China causing a high number of young men in China being addicted to opium. The British smuggling was evil. So, in 1839, China's Daoguang Emperor appointed a new governor of Canton. He was Lin Zexu. He caught 13 British smugglers inside their warehouses. They surrendered. By April of 1839, Governor Lin confiscated goods like 42,000 opium pipes and 20,000 150-pound chests of opium, with a total street value of some £2 million. He ordered the chests placed into trenches, covered with lime, and then drenched in sea water to destroy the opium. Outraged, British traders immediately began to petition the British home government for help.
More tensions rose up. On July 7, 1839, there was the Kowloon incident. This was when drunk British and American sailors rioted in the village of Chien-sha-tsui in Kowloon killing a Chinese man. They vandalized the Buddhist temple. Qing officials wanted the criminals to be placed in trial. The British refused citing China's legal system. The crime was on Chinese soil and had a Chinese victim. The British claimed that the sailors were entitled to extraterritorial rights which is nonsense. The 6 sailors were tried in British court at Canton. They were convicted, but they were freed as soon as they returned to Brian. So, the Qing leaders banned any foreign merchants to trade in China unless they agree under pain of death to abide by Chinese law. Qing leaders outlawed the opium trade. They wanted people to submit to Chinese legal jurisdiction. The British Superintendent of Trade in China, Charles Elliot, responded by suspending all British trade with China and ordering British ships to withdraw. The war started with 2 British ships argued over opium smuggling. Quaker ship owners opposed it, but the British person Charles Elliot supported it. The Royal Saxon ship was fired on by the Royal Navy fleet. The Chinese ships wanted to protect Royal Saxon, but the British Navy sank many Chinese ships. The Chinese lost that war. The British seized Canton, Chusan, and other areas. The Qing government fought for peace and the Treaty of Nanking existed. China lost much of their sovereignty to the British, and China had economic problems. The Qing government was even forced to pay reparations to the British in 21 million silver dollars. The 2nd Opium War came when Qing Chinese leaders didn't want to support the unfair treaty and the unequal treaties imposed on them from France and America. The British wanted the opening of all China's ports to foreign traders, a 0% tariff rate on British imports, and the legalization of Britain's trade in opium from Burma and India into China.
The 2nd war started after the Arrow Incident. This took place on October 8, 1856. It was when the smuggling ship called The Arrow was based out of Hong Kong and registered in China. When Chinese officials boarded the ship and arrested its crew of twelve on suspicion of smuggling and piracy, the British protested that the Hong Kong-based ship was outside of China's jurisdiction. Britain demanded that China release the Chinese crew under the extraterritoriality clause of the Treaty of Nanjing. Although the Chinese authorities were well within their rights to board the Arrow, and in fact, the ship's Hong Kong registration had expired, Britain forced them to release the sailors. Even though China complied, the British then destroyed four Chinese coastal forts and sank more than 20 naval junks between October 23 and November 13. Since China was in the throes of the Taiping Rebellion at the time, it did not have much military power to spare to defend its sovereignty from this new British assault. This came after the British took down the Indian Revolt. After a French Catholic missionary was beat to death for preaching Catholicism outside of treaty points, France would join the British in the Second Opium War. The war ended with a Qing dynasty defeat. The Second Opium War finally ended on October 18, 1860, with the Chinese ratification of a revised version of the Treaty of Tianjin. In addition to the provisions listed above, the revised treaty mandated equal treatment for Chinese who converted to Christianity, the legalization of opium trading, and Britain also received parts of coastal Kowloon, on the mainland across from Hong Kong Island. The Qing dynasty ended after the war. This humiliation inspired the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
By the end of the 19th century, drug development move rapidly. Sigmund Freud in 1884 was so extreme that he treated his depression with cocaine. He wrote that he felt euphoria after using cocaine. Also, there was a temperance movement in America back then that encouraged the banning of the usage of alcohol long before Prohibition existed. Ironically in 1885, the Report of the Royal Commission on Opium condemned opium. In 1889, the John Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Maryland, is opened. One of its world-famous founders, Dr. William Stewart Halsted, is a morphine addict. He continues to use morphine in large doses throughout his phenomenally successful surgical career lasting until his death in 1922. In 1898, diacetylmorphine (heroin) was synthesized in Germany.
In 1900, the Senate adopted a resolution (introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge) that forbid the sale by American traders of opium and alcohol to other human beings in Hawaii, Alaska, and other countries. In 1903, the composition of Coca-Cola is changed to use caffeine instead of cocaine. Cocaine was legal in America back then. By the early 20th century, the United States of America becomes more strict in regulating drugs. By 1906, there was the first Pure Food and Drug Act becomes law; until its enactment, it was possible to buy, in stores or by mail order medicines containing morphine, cocaine, or heroin, and without their being so labeled. America bans the importation of smoking opium in 1909. Dr. Hamilton Wright was a leader of early anti-narcotics laws. Back in 1912, a physician warns: “[There is] no energy more destructive of soul, mind, and body, or more subversive of good morals than the cigarette. The fight against the cigarette is a fight for civilization.” [Sinclar, op. cit., p. 180]. This time also saw racists exploiting drug use as an excuse to scapegoat black people. One example is that the racist Dr. Edward H. Williams and Dr. Christopher Kochs believe in the lie that black people collectively were cocaine crazed attacking white women of the South. As early as 1917, the President of the American Medical Association wanted a national prohibition of the use of alcohol. The 19th Amendment is passed in 1919 and it ended by 1933. Prohibition didn't work, because it violated individual freedom, Mafia and other gangs promoted an underground trade of it, and it didn't last long term. Violent crime did drop during that period. In 1932 alone, approximately 45,000 persons receive jail sentences for alcohol offenses. During the first eleven years of the Volstead Act, 17,971 persons are appointed to the Prohibition Bureau. 11,982 are terminated “without prejudice,” and 1,604 are dismissed for bribery, extortion, theft, falsification of records, conspiracy, forgery, and perjury. [Fort, op. cit. p. 69]. As early as 1920, the U.S. Department of Agriculture publishes a pamphlet urging Americans to grow cannabis (marijuana) as a profitable undertaking. The extremist Harry J. Anslinger was the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger harassed Billie Holiday for years. He was paranoid about marijuana. The Marijuana Tax act was created in 1937. Since the enactment of the Harrison Act in 1914, 25,000 physicians have been arraigned on narcotics charges, and 3,000 have served penitentiary sentences. Dr. Albert Hoffman (a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Basle, Switzerland, synthesizes LSD. He reported on the effects of LSD after he took it.
General Chiang Kai-shek in 1941 ordered the suppression of poppy laws. In 1943, Colonel J.M. Phalen, editor of the *Military Surgeon*, declares in an editorial entitled “The Marijuana Bugaboo”: “The smoking of the leaves, flowers, and seeds of Cannibis sativa is no more harmful than the smoking of tobacco. . . . It is hoped that no witch hunt will be instituted in the military service over a problem that does not exist.” [Quoted in ibid. p. 234]. The 1956 Narcotics Control Act of 1956 gave the death penalty to people who are guilty of the sale of heroin to a person under 18 by one over 18 years old. The leaders of the U.S. government hypocritically were claiming to be for drug reform in the 1960's, but they subsidized large corporations to fund cigarettes in America plus overseas (cigarettes are poisons known for causing lung disease, heart disease, and ultimately death). The 1960's saw the Drug Revolution too. The common myth about the Drug Revolution was that it was spontaneous headed by the independent youth alone. The truth is that the establishment, the CIA, and the MI6 had a huge role in the Drug Revolution. John L. Potash's book entitled "Drugs as Weapons Against Us" document how the intelligence community harassed not only drug addicted people (who deserved treatment not mass incarceration). They also harassed and monitored musicians and activities who wanted sincere progressive, revolutionary social change. For example, Paul Robeson's son said that the intelligence community drugged Paul Robeson. We know that MK Ultra was about the CIA experiencing LSD on human beings. Many of these human beings have their lives and their minds ruined. We know that the Vietnam War increased drug addiction of heroin in American society. We know that Tim Leary was a professor who spread LSD nationwide. The problem was that many people used LSD to escape from reality instead of advancing activism to confront Jim Crow apartheid, the Vietnam War, and other evils. As drug usage in America increased, there was government overreach in harshly sentencing people who possessed drugs (and were non-violent).
President Richard Nixon was President in 1969. Nixon was wrong to use the FBI to crush the Black Panthers, to advance the bombing of Hanoi, and being involved in the Watergate scandal. In 1971, President Richard Nixon said that drug abuse is America's Public Enemy Number 1. This started the modern day War on Drugs. With the passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, the federal government took a more active role in drug enforcement and drug abuse prevention. At first, drug treatment was available. Elvis Presley shook Nixon's hands and supported Nixon's War on Drugs. Ironically, Elvis would suffer drug addiction throughout his later years of his life. Before the 1970's, there was a consensus that drug abuse was a social disease only to be solved by treatment programs. After the 1970s, drug abuse was seen by numerous policymakers primarily as a law enforcement problem that could be addressed with aggressive criminal justice policies. The addition of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to the federal law enforcement apparatus in 1973 was a significant step in the direction of a criminal justice approach to drug enforcement. If the federal reforms of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 represented the formal declaration of the War on Drugs, the Drug Enforcement Administration became its foot soldiers. As the 1970's existed, more people went into prison, the police became more militarized, and the problem of drug abuse remained.
Ronald Reagan was he was. Many black folks like me knew that Reagan was a racist, a Bohemian Grove member, a honorary 33rd degree Freemason, and a reactionary extremist. During the 1970's, he said a racist remark to Richard Nixon that black Africans are uncomfortable with shoes. By the time he was President in 1981, Ronald Reagan supported the War on Drugs. He not only had the Just Say No campaign (as advanced by Reagan's wife Nancy Reagan). He supported policies that disproportionately harmed the lives of black Americans. Powdered cocaine was used by mostly rich and white Americans. Crack cocaine was cheaper and used by poorer people. Congress and the Reagan administration responded with the Antidrug Act of 1986, which established a 100:1 ratio for mandatory minimums associated with cocaine. It would take 5,000 grams of powdered cocaine to land you in prison for a minimum 10 years—but only 50 grams of crack. This increased the prison industrial complex to send the poor, black people, other people of color, and other oppressed people into prison for long sentences (even for non-violent offenses). Ronald Reagan used the racist "welfare queen" trope in scapegoating black people too. Reagan's Presidency of Reaganomics allowed tons of the poor to suffer massively. This reality has been proven by Sister Harriet Washington's book called "Medical Apartheid."
Stomp changed everything in gospel music and music in general. Kirk Franklin and God's Property including Cheryl James were not the first people do this style of music. Yet, they were the first people to take it into the next level. It grew into being one of the most successful gospel songs of the 1990's. It charter on Billboard's mainstream R&B airplay list. The new funk/rap gospel style has been shown by younger artists like Lecrae too. Stomp won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Music Video. Then, Revolution came about by Kirk Franklin and the Family too. The songwriters of the song Stomp were Kirk Franklin, George Clinton Jr., Garr Shider, and Walter Morrison. Many older gospel fans didn't like the song because they felt it was too much like the copying the essence of the world. Some Christians felt that Kirk compromised too much, and Kirk Franklin admitted that the criticisms over the song Stomp hurt him. Later, Kirk Franklin and the Family released the song called Revolution. It was shown in 1998. This song was part of the Grammy award (of the Best Contemporary Soul Gospel Album) winning album of The Nu Nation Project (in working with God's Property, Rance Allen, Marvin Winans, John P. Kee, Isaac, and others). The album expanded his influence in gospel culture. It helped to grow many careers. The album of The Nu Nation Project had people like Cystal Lewis, Fred Hammond, and other people. The legacy of both songs is that both songs allowed an opening for more R&B influences to go into gospel music in a higher level. Like always, you have to use discernment to make sure that any music is a force for good and saving people's lives.
The Presidents from Martin Van Buren to Franklin Pierce changed the whole country. What I see is that the issue of slavery was never going to be resolved without war. The United States of America back then was in its youth, not even 100 years after 1776. It saw controversies, social activists, and new debates arising up. America witnessed the Great Awakening, abolitionists, and various wars. The South refused to immediately free black people. The Southern aristocracy promoted racism, slavery, and the evil status quo. The North, in many cases, went along with the Fugitive Slave Act. While this was going on, we saw tons of abolitionists, black activists, and other freedom fighters fighting to make sure that slavery was abolished. The Presidents during that era capitulated so much to the establishment on many issues, that no long term solutions to slavery existed. Also, American infrastructure grew in the paradox of expanding canals at the expense of indigenous lands being stolen. You can't know about American history without knowing the the slavery against black people and the genocide against Native Americans are key events of American history. Aboltionists, the Whig Party, Democrats, and other political leaders debated issues all throughout the early American country. After the 1850's, the American Civil War existed. During the near future, Presidents before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War will be fully analyzed.
The 2020 Summer Paralymics took place in Tokyo. It lasted from August 24, 2021 to September 5, 2021. They were the 16th Summer Paralympic Games as organized by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). 162 nations participated in the games including the Refugee Paralympic Team and the Russian Paralympic Committee. The games had 4,403 athletes and 539 events in 22 sports. The Games were the second Summer Paralympics hosted by Tokyo since 1964, and the third Paralympics held in Japan overall since the 1998 Winter Paralympics in Nagano. The Games featured 539 medal events in 22 sports, with badminton and taekwondo both making their Paralympic debut to replace football 7-a-side and sailing. China topped the medal table for the fifth consecutive Paralympics, with 96 golds and 207 total medals. Great Britain finished second for the ninth time, with 41 golds and 124 total medals. The United States finished third, with 37 golds, their best finish since the 2008 games, and 104 total medals. The Russian Paralympic Committee finished fourth, with a total of 36 golds and 118 total medals, putting them in third place when ranked by total medals. Many volunteers helped the athletes constantly. The flames from each of the flame lighting festivals hosted in each prefecture were brought together in Tokyo on August 21, 2021 where the Paralympic Flame was officially lit. The last four days of the torch relay started in Tokyo. The locations in which the torch relay goes through were similar to the 2020 Summer Olympics torch relay. Badminton and taekwondo made their Paralympic debut in Tokyo, while classifications were added or realigned in other sports; canoe, shooting, table tennis, track cycling, and wheelchair fencing saw increases in the number of medal events held, while there were reductions in athletics and swimming. Many of the athletes in the 2020 Paralympic Games are Uganda's Ritah Asiimwe, Ellie Simmonds, Jardiel Vieira Soares, and other human beings.
I am related to many members of the Sessoms family who live in the peninsula of Virginia (i.e Hampton and Newport News). Candasee Camilla Sessoms (b. 1994) is my 3rd cousin and her parents are Vernon Sessoms Jr. (b. 1964) and Gloria Lenora Robinson (b. 1966). Vernon Sessoms Jr. is a descendant of my 2nd great grandfather Adam D. (b. 1863). Adam D.'s daughter was Ada D. (1890-1960). Ada's daugther was Mary Clara Roberson Sessmons (1910-2000). Mary's son was Rev. Vernon Augusta Sessoms (1938-2006) and his son is Vernon Sessoms Jr. (b. 1964). Many days ago, I had a message on my 24 and me DNA account from my 2nd cousin named Robert Anthony Brown from San Diego, California. He was born on November 27, 1978. His parents are Sedrick Anthony Sr. (b. 1950) and Maria M. Sarmiento (b. 1950). Her mother is a Filipina American. Robert Brown's grand parents were Viola D. (b. 1930) and James Brown. Viola D.'s parents were Linwood D. (1907-1971) and Bashie Ann Whitmore (1907-1963). Linwood D.'s parents are Carl D. (1866-1968) and Lizzie Trice (1885-1950). So, both Robert Brown and I share the same ancestors of Carl D. and Lizzie Trice. Carl D. was my great grandfather.
By Timothy
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