However, as the historian Richard Newman stated in his excellent article ‘Opium Smoking in Late Imperial China’: ‘Opium smoking undoubtedly produced some addicts, and some of those addicts were reduced to a pitiable condition, but it is not their image that should be foremost in the mind; we should also remember the peasants carrying their lumps of poppy juice to market, the boatmen wrapped in their blankets passing around an opium pipe in the twilight, and the Chinese gentleman smoking peaceably at home with his friends. It is not the existence of addiction that requires explanation so much as the fact that, in a society in which opium was cheap and widely available, so many people smoked lightly or not at all. The production and consumption of opium were, for most people, normal rather than deviant activities, and it is the implications of this normality which ought to be explored, both for the sake of China’s history and for the sake of their relevance to modern societies learning to live with drugs.’