The ‘bad’ pasts of ‘good’ norms: explaining the opium ban through the postcolonial lens

The global proscription of the opium trade and its non-medical consumption took almost a century to evolve. Within International Relations, opium’s ban is explained as part of the normative order that culminated in the global anti-drugs prohibition regime of the 1900s. The conventional view presents the history of opium’s ban as a ‘bad’ imperial and local practice discontinued through the activism of ‘good’ transnational actors. However, seen through the postcolonial lens, this simplistic narrative is upended. By centering hierarchical power relations, the postcolonial lens demands a reflective interrogation into ‘global’ standards to expose parochial subjectivities that are otherwise couched in the universalistic language of modernity, rationality and progress. Though the ban on opium challenged an imperial practice, this article shows that it did so with the help of discourses that were themselves imperialistic. An analysis of the underlying evangelical, racial and scientific discourses illustrate how it was in the context of a specific worldview that opium came to be vilified. It also explains how the anti-opium views of the newly decolonized countries like India and China were suffused with the ethical visions of the anti-colonial and nation-building movements. A granular interrogation into opium’s history is necessary as we try and work our way toward a more nuanced and textured understanding of the international normative order while eschewing a one-dimensional, unproblematic, and simplified understanding of norms in IR.