Nothing is said about the corner shop owner who sells more cans of super-strength lager before midday than newspapers. But tell the police that somebody down the road is growing a little cannabis to ease their pain, and the plod will be round kicking the door through quicker than you can pull a Rizla from the packet.
Around 9,000 people are serving time in UK prisons for drug offences in any given year. Thousands more receive criminal records that restrict their employment and travel opportunities for life. Yet drug dealing has always been legal in this country – you just need the right permissions from the right people. It’s by this method that ordinary people are excluded from the trade, concentrating profits into the hands of the already rich and powerful.
The 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act was Britain’s first major foray into prohibition as we know it today. The act prevented the unregulated production, sale, import, export or possession of morphine, opium and cocaine.
The Act came about after a tabloid panic that seems familiar today, but at the time had the nation clutching its pearls when young stage performer Billie Carleton died of an overdose at the Savoy in London.
Freshly minted, tabloids such as the Express and the Daily Mail had a field day whipping up faux-outrage over Carleton’s death, adamant that young white English girls were being corrupted by Black and Chinese immigrants who peddled dangerous drugs in dark Soho nightclubs and opium dens.
But the Act also opened doors for business-minded chemists, doctors and others involved in the pharmaceutical industry who wanted to secure the lucrative trade in opium and cocaine for themselves; once drugs became illegal, only professionals with a license issued by the government could trade in them, and that meant they were the only people who could profit from the trade.
This opportunity wasn’t new. For centuries, British merchants and the Crown were history’s most successful drug dealers, forcing opium on China and addicting millions of their own citizens while building an empire on substances that created mass addiction and death. And it all started with tobacco.
Tobacco
A ‘custome lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black and stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless’ wrote King James I in his treatise A Counterblaste to Tobacco.
By 1606, when King James wrote those words, there were already 7,000 tobacco outlets in London. The drug had arrived from the American colonies barely forty years earlier, spreading faster than the plague.
King James loathed tobacco. But he didn’t ban it. Instead, he raised the import tax 40-fold and created a lucrative revenue stream for the Crown that continues to this day.
The Crown also banned cultivation in England, forcing all production to the American colonies. It banned foreign imports and routed all trade through London. The Navigation Acts locked the tobacco trade into British hands. The merchants of Bristol and London grew rich. The Virginia Company’s shareholders – aristocrats, MPs, and wealthy investors – collected dividends while enslaved and indentured workers died in the tobacco fields.
The myth that smoking could be good for health persisted for centuries – peddled by merchants, then by corporations, then by marketing campaigns featuring doctors and film stars. British American Tobacco, founded in 1902, still brings in billions annually. The Wills, Player, and Imperial families built dynasties. The Crown still collects its cut: £8.8 billion in tobacco duties last year.
All of this profit comes at a cost to the rest of us; smoking kills around 76,000 people in the UK annually. But those deaths have never threatened the profits of licensed dealers.
Sugar
Sugar isn’t a drug in the conventional sense. But it is addictive, it fuelled mass exploitation, and it made certain British families obscenely wealthy, so it belongs in this story.
By the 18th century, 80-90% of the sugar consumed in Europe was produced in the Caribbean, harvested by enslaved Africans on plantations owned by British merchants. The Transatlantic Triangle Trade – goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, sugar to Britain – was the most profitable system of human exploitation the world had ever seen.
The Drax family were among the earliest and most successful sugar planters. Their 617-acre Barbados plantation, where an estimated 180,000 enslaved people worked over two centuries, is still owned by the family today. Richard Drax, the former Conservative MP for Dorset, inherited it. It’s valued at around $150,000 per acre.
The Lascelles family built Harewood House – now a tourist attraction – on sugar profits. The Gladstones received £106,769 in compensation when slavery was abolished in 1833. Not compensation for the enslaved, of course. Compensation for the loss of their “property.”
Sugar refineries in Bristol, Liverpool, and London kick-started the industrial revolution. The Crown taxed every pound. And while the link between sugar and poor health was known as early as the 16th century, no one with power seemed troubled.
The enslaved workers who produced the sugar also discovered what to do with the waste product. That discovery created another fortune.
Rum
For every two pounds of sugar refined, a pound of molasses was left over. Plantation owners considered it worthless until enslaved workers discovered it could be fermented and distilled into rum.
By the 1650s, rum had become part of daily life for the English, especially in the Navy. From 1655, sailors received a daily rum ration. Half a pint by the 1700s. The tradition continued for 305 years, creating a captive market of hundreds of thousands of men who developed a taste for spirits they would carry into civilian life.
Like tobacco and sugar, rum was heavily taxed by the Crown and was a great earner. In 1781, the Crown collected £326,000 in tax duties for its coffers; by 1815, that figure had exploded to £3,000,000, roughly equivalent to a whopping £240,000,000 today.
The rum trade created dynasties. The Longs of Jamaica. The Beckfords, who built Fonthill Abbey. Diageo, which today owns Captain Morgan amongst other brands, traces its lineage directly to these Caribbean fortunes.
The human cost was visible early. Hogarth’s Gin Lane depicted spirit-fuelled devastation in 1751. By the 19th century, working-class families were spending 16-17% of their income on alcohol. The government eventually introduced restrictions – the Gin Act, the Beer House Act, Sunday closing laws – but never threatened the profits of the licensed trade.
Today, 20% of UK hospital beds are occupied by someone who uses alcohol harmfully. Seventy per cent of peak-time A&E admissions are alcohol-related. The descendants of Caribbean plantation owners long ago diversified into respectable industries. The drinking culture they cultivated and the damage it causes remain, but nothing has had such a devastating impact on global health as the commercialisation of Opium.
Opium
Opium, the dried latex of the poppy, containing morphine and codeine, has been used as a painkiller for thousands of years. British traders turned it into a weapon of economic warfare.
The problem was tea. Victorians consumed it obsessively. Five to ten cups per day by 1900. But China, which produced the tea, wanted payment in silver. Britain had nothing else that the Chinese needed. The trade deficit was bleeding the empire dry.
The solution was opium, grown in British-controlled Bengal and forced onto the Chinese market. The British East India Company and private traders like Jardine, Matheson & Co. flooded China with the drug. When the Chinese government objected, Britain went to war. Twice.
The human cost was catastrophic. Millions of Chinese became addicted. The economy collapsed as silver flowed out to pay for opium. Chinese Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu wrote directly to Queen Victoria in 1839: “Why do you bring your poison to our country?” He then seized 1,400 tonnes of British opium.
Opium smokers in China circa 1880 – Photo by Lai Afong
Britain’s response was to send gunboats. The Opium Wars – fought with French, Russian, and American support – ended quickly; underfunding and addiction within its own ranks had hollowed out the Chinese military. Britain imposed brutal reparations, forcing China to pay for the privilege of being invaded. Hong Kong was seized. A 5,000-year-old civilisation was brought to its knees so that British merchants could balance their tea accounts.
The men who orchestrated this became fantastically wealthy. William Jardine and James Matheson founded Jardine Matheson, which diversified into shipping, property, and finance. The Keswick family still holds a controlling stake. The Sassoons, “the Rothschilds of the East,” built their fortune on opium before pivoting to banking and textiles.
Back home, just eight years after the Second Opium War ended, Parliament decided that the unregulated sale of opium was too dangerous for British citizens. The 1868 Pharmacy Act restricted sales to licensed professionals. The same drug that Britain had forced on China at gunpoint was now deemed too risky for ordinary Britons to buy freely.
The legacy continues. Opioids, synthetic descendants of opium, have killed nearly a million Americans since 1999. Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, was found liable for fuelling the epidemic through aggressive marketing that downplayed addiction risks. The Sacklers made billions. The pattern established by Jardine and Matheson – profit from addiction, evade consequences – has proved durable.
In opium, as with tobacco, sugar, and rum, the same truth holds: profit came first, even if it meant addicting millions or destroying nations. The only thing that changed was who was allowed to get rich.
Jardine Matheson, the trading company that made its fortune shipping opium to China, is today worth over $18 billion. The Keswick family still holds a controlling stake. The Drax plantation still grows sugar in Barbados. British American Tobacco posted profits of £9.5 billion in 2023. Diageo posted profits of £4.4 billion in 2023.
These are the licensed dealers, with a lineage that traces back to Britain’s early drug-dealing empire. These are the ones with the right permissions from the right people.
Meanwhile, someone caught growing cannabis without a licence faces up to 14 years in prison. Someone caught selling cocaine, a drug that was legally sold by Harrods until 1916, can receive a life sentence.
The corner shop owner selling super-strength lager to alcoholics will face no consequences, inheriting his permission from the state to ensure the families and companies who built their wealth on slavery, addiction, and imperial violence will keep their fortunes. Their descendants sit in the House of Lords, run FTSE 100 firms, and fund the political parties that keep them rich. No one is seizing their assets. No one is kicking their doors through for growing the wrong kind of plant.
Drug dealing has always been legal in Britain, it’s just been a question of who you know.
