Did the prevalence of opium addiction rise to the level of an epidemic among the average Chinese of the time? Was a large percentage of the population addicted to opium, or was opium's significant status in trade just a product of the upper or upper-middle class Chinese spending large amounts of money on opium? Were there homeless opiate addicts begging and sleeping on the street, or was opium smoked primarily in parlors and aristocratic circles? Do we have any accounts of any significant governmental or cultural figures using opium for recreation or becoming desperate addicts?
I was reading about the first opium war and I know the government of China made opium illegal with death penalties and other extreme punishments, but heroin is illegal in the US and look at how that turned out. Opiates are a special class of drugs in that an opiate addict, deprived of their opium, will do desperate, illogical, immoral, crazy things to get more opium. So I wondered: were the conditions such that everyone or nearly everyone on all levels of society and status would have used opium at least recreationally or socially, or at least be familiar with it the way the average American is now familiar with marijuana?
What was the character of the opiate use in China in that period? Were there lots of lower class addicts running around, stealing and begging to feed their habits, the way modern American heroin addicts do? Or did opium's importance in trade come about because the average aristocratic man or woman enjoyed going to the opium parlor and smoking a few pipes at night?
There's no heroin shortage in supply terms in the US right now, but addicts still end up selling all their possessions just to get enough money to feed a daily heroin addiction. I'd imagine that, if anything, opium would have been more expensive during that period than heroin is now, and a serious addict might have to spend, say, 2 weeks worth of their income on 1 day's worth of opium, for instance. So was there a precipitant rise in crime from the lower classes trying to get enough money to feed their addictions? Or was that not the nature of Chinese opium use at that time?