How to sell a drug a country has banned

Transcribed from the audio; small errors are possible.

So you want to sell a drug a country has banned? Don't grow it. Don't carry it. Don't smoke it. Own the paperwork. Let the paperwork do the rest. Step one. Pick a customer who has banned it. The law: dealers beheaded. Helpers strangled. Ignore it. Two hundred chests a year in 1729. About forty thousand by 1838. A ban is just demand with paperwork. Step two. Get your own country hooked first. On tea. Tea pays millions a year into your Treasury. Nobody gives that up. So you need something to sell back. Step three. Own the farm. Make poppy a Company monopoly. Farmers get an advance and a quota. Pay them three rupees a seer. Auction it for fifty-four. Step four. Keep your hands clean. Don't ship it. Auction it in Calcutta. Let private traders carry it. Call the profit revenue. For fifty years, about one rupee in seven. Step five. Hire a respectable firm. Canton, 1832. Jardine, Matheson and Company. Its own archive says: heavily involved in the opium trade. Respectable is a letterhead. Step six. Abolish your own monopoly. 1834. The China trade is open. British traders in Canton: sixty-six. By 1837, a hundred fifty-eight. Competition. Wonderful thing. Step seven. Expect an honest official. Commissioner Lin writes to your Queen. What has become of that conscience heaven gave all men? He thinks opium is banned in England. It isn't. The letter likely never reaches her. Step eight. Hand your stock to the Crown. March 1839. Britain's man in Canton: Surrender your opium to me, for Her Majesty's Government. Twenty thousand, two hundred and eighty-three chests. Your loss is now the Crown's problem. Step nine. Lobby the Foreign Secretary. Jardine sails home. Meets Palmerston. Supplies a plan. Historians still argue how much it mattered. Palmerston later thanks him. Then Jardine takes a seat in Parliament. Step ten. Survive the vote. Parliament never votes on the war. It votes on whether ministers failed to police the opium trade. Two hundred seventy-one to two hundred sixty-two. Nobody was negligent. Carry on. Step eleven. Send the invoice. Treaty of Nanking, 1842. Hong Kong, in perpetuity. Five ports. Twenty-one million dollars. The word opium appears once. Six million, for the opium. As a ransom for the lives. Step twelve. Collect. August 1843. The Commons pays the opium holders one point two eight million pounds. About sixty-four a chest. Out of China's ransom. The loss goes full circle. Step thirteen. Outlive the drug. By 1872 the firm is basically out of opium. In 2025 it reports thirty-four billion dollars in revenue. Listed in London. Nobody remembers the chests. Last step. Remember the man who wrote the letter. He was wrong about England. Opium was sold over the counter there. Who paid for the war itself? Article six. Twelve million dollars. China did.