The opium epidemic in China ended by China slaughtering anyone even remotely involved in the opium trade. If you're willing to go that scorched earth against drug abuse it can work, but if not you're probably better off just regulating it.
Yeah, I was mostly joking. The PRC's campaign against opium leaned much more on land redistribution to incentivize farmers away from poppies, rehabilitation for addicts, and mass propaganda campaigns then it did violence. Not to say that people weren't arrested and executed, but those were mainly dealers and ringleaders (proffiteers).
Compared against the failed attempts of both the Qing (hobbled by British interference and the collapse of their empire) and the KMT (hobbled by Japanese invasion and the KMT's own hilarious corruption), the PRC's programs were much more focused on incentives rather than violence.
finding a handful of opium peddlers and subjecting them to needlessly torturous and antiquated death penalties like "death by a thousand cuts" might be more brutal, but it is fundamentally less effective than eliminating the opium trade in its entirety through swift and effective revolutionary activity.
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Yeah, I was mostly joking. The PRC's campaign against opium leaned much more on land redistribution to incentivize farmers away from poppies, rehabilitation for addicts, and mass propaganda campaigns then it did violence. Not to say that people weren't arrested and executed, but those were mainly dealers and ringleaders (proffiteers).
Compared against the failed attempts of both the Qing (hobbled by British interference and the collapse of their empire) and the KMT (hobbled by Japanese invasion and the KMT's own hilarious corruption), the PRC's programs were much more focused on incentives rather than violence.
finding a handful of opium peddlers and subjecting them to needlessly torturous and antiquated death penalties like "death by a thousand cuts" might be more brutal, but it is fundamentally less effective than eliminating the opium trade in its entirety through swift and effective revolutionary activity.