Webs of Smoke Book Review

Meyer, Kathryn, and Terry Parssinen. Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the
International Drug Trade (state & Society East Asia). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002.

Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, both have B.A.’s and Ph. D’s and have taught history, collaborated on the book titled Webs Of Smoke; Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade which contains an “About the Authors” section on the last page. Meyer received her degrees from the University of Vermont and Temple University. She has taught East Asian history at Temple University- Japan, Ohio Weslyan University, Lafayette College, and Wright State University. She is an assistant professor of history at Wright State University. She won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1990, which helped support research for this book. Parssinen received his M.A. and Ph. D. from Brandeis University in the History of Ideas program. He has taught at Grimwell College where he received his B.A., and he has also taught at Temple University, the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently a professor of history at the University of Tampa. He also wrote Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society. They are both qualified to write Webs of Smoke because they have received years of education and dedicated much of their time to teaching and researching history. Parssinen has written another history book before, so he knows how to properly research for a history book and how to set it up well. Meyer is obviously qualified if she was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship so she could research for Webs of Smoke. Combining their experiences in history, teaching and writing have contributed to writing a successful book that is well organized and informational without being boring.
The book is set up in a very interesting and easy-to-read manner. It contains multiple small side stories that pull the reader in, though many of these stories are not necessary to understand the overall message of the book which is…?. The names and places can be confusing at times, but the book has pictures of some of the people to help the reader put a name to a face and many maps throughout the book to help identify the places. It is nice to see a picture of the opium in its different states as shown in an excerpt between pages 124 and 125. The pictures show the opium plant, a tool used for retrieving the latex, the British East India processing plants, Shanghai opium dens, and examples of people smoking opium including a poverty-stricken opium smoker (WOS p. 124-125).
The first part of the book contains many dates and events that affected the opium trade, providing a timeline to introduce the reader to what was happening in the world at the time. This is a nice background for the reader, especially if they have not studied Asian History or the history of the opium trade. The opium war occurred 1840-1842 (WOS p. 6). In 1858, China legalized opium which originated the opium trade (WOS p. 10). In the 1880s, British missionaries began to fight the drug trade (WOS p. 20). China prohibited opium in 1905 though Japan refused the restrictions Britain was trying to place (WOS p. 20). The First International Conference on Opium was held in Shanghai in 1909 (WOS p. 20). The Second Opium Conference was in Hague in 1911 (WOS p. 22-23). The Paris Peace Conference was held after the war in 1919; it used cooperative effort to try and control drug trade (WOS p. 23). In 1921, the League of Nations established an advisory committee to try and control trafficking but it was limited because the League had a severe lack of authority (WOS p. 18). By 1925, in order to import opium, one needed a certificate showing they were using it for medicinal purposes only (WOS p. 31). In 1931, the League of Nations Conference dedicated themselves to limiting the production of manufactured drugs (WOS p. 31) and opium trade became illicit in 1936 (WOS p. 33).
The book concludes with discussion on conspiracy. People have said that the drug trade was implemented as a form of genocide to wipe out minorities. The book relates this to modern times by discussing “Dark Alliance” (WOS p. 278) and other contemporary debates about the drug policies here in the United States, the trade and the government agencies, like the CIA, that are involved. The authors argue that drug trade sometimes looks like conspiracy, especially to the victims of the narcotics abuse, but was and is actually the operation of the political economy of the international narcotics traffic that emerges when the narcotic drugs are outlawed.