IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/121265.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Resilient drug economy and politicised control: the rise and fall of the administrative bureau of prohibited drugs in China, 1922–1925

Author

Listed:
  • Huang, Yun

Abstract

This paper examines the rise and fall of the Administrative Bureau of Prohibited Drugs in 1920s Shanghai. It identifies the factors associated with the endeavours of the central government to experiment with establishing a Bureau dedicated to regulating refined drugs and the reasons why the Bureau operated for just about two years. It argues that the concerns regarding the widespread of refined drugs and the expected profits of regulating the business pushed the central government to experiment establishing the Bureau. Moreover, this experiment was a tool with which the Beiyang government aimed to centralise its authorities on the issue of drug control. However, the room for manoeuvring the Bureau was limited, mainly because of the resilience of the drug economy and the politicised regulations. Struggling in the narrow space between the colonial powers, the merchant groups, and the local authorities acting under the influence of warlords, the Bureau was doomed to be short-lived. Its history reveals the resilience of both licit and illicit drug economy and the power struggles that resulted from efforts to regulate refined drugs.

Suggested Citation

  • Huang, Yun, 2023. "Resilient drug economy and politicised control: the rise and fall of the administrative bureau of prohibited drugs in China, 1922–1925," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121265, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:121265
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/121265/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    refined drugs; Administrative Bureau of Prohibited Drugs; drug policy; drug history; modern China; 200394/Z/15/Z;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:121265. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.