· 6 min
AI
The Second Opium War
In the 1980s, as Americans were quitting, the US government used trade-sanction threats to force Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand to open their closed markets to American cigarettes. Smoking rose — most among women and the young. When Thailand resisted, a GATT panel ruled it could not keep the imports out. Protesters across Asia called it the Second Opium War, and they were not exaggerating the shape of the thing. A deep-dive from the cigarette history.