Given China's known role in fentanyl production and now this revelation about the other end of the trade, could it be they view this as some kind of long-term payback for things that took place some 200 years ago?<p>Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas (2013)<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13689883-smuggler-nation" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13689883-smuggler-nation</a><p>> "Smuggling was also common practice for U.S. merchant ships penetrating the Chinese market for the first time... In the first decade of the nineteenth century, U.S. merchants would also begin to make inroads into the ilicit China opium market, much to the alarm of the British East India Company, which jealously protected its opium-smuggling monopoly. Jacque Downs, the foremost historian of the early U.S.-China opium trade, writes: "The Americans were marvelously ingenious in their exploitation of the commerce. They managed to circumvent both the East India Company's franchise and the Chinese Government's prohibition and carried on a very lucrative, if antisocial and ultimately ruinous trade." Dominated by a handful of players, opium smuggling by American shippers would become increasingly vital to U.S.-China trade relations, with opium sales generating the revenue to buy Chinese goods such as silks and teas. Many of America's most elite merchant families made fortunes in the opium trade: "Girard, Astor, Joseph Peabody of Salem, John Donnell of Baltimore, and the Perkins firm (now allied with Bryant and Sturgis) were among the largest shippers of the drug." "<p>Yes, legalization/decriminalization plus public health education campaigns and a ban on marketing and doctor kickbacks would probably destroy drug profits around the world.