Did You Know That There Was A Time When The Biggest Drug Lord In The World Was The Queen Of England

I feel like this is a little known fact. When we talk about drug lords we think Pablo Escobar, El Chapo, Griselda Blanco, Frank Lucas, the Sackler Family, etc. All modern people. That is just recency bias because the absolute queen bee drug kingpin was Queen Victoria. This bitch

Alexander Bassano. Getty Images.

We break it down in the podcast, but back in the glorious Victorian Era of England trade with China was booming. China was sending silk, tea, and porcelain back to England and they required England to pay them in straight up silver because they didn't want to trade in British currency which was smart. After awhile England got tired of seeing all the silver they had stolen from their colonies around the world end up in China's silk purses so they just started selling opium to the Chinese and required their citizens to pay in silver. After a while the entire country was basically addicted to opium. Dens everywhere. Drugs everywhere. Country in trouble. The Emperor of China sent a message to Queen Victoria asking her to stop peddling drugs and she basically told him to fuck off because they were making too much money on drugs. So much money that when China tried to use force to get them to stop selling opium, the Queen sent the navy in, captured Hong Kong officially, and then forced China to pay for all the drug houses they destroyed to the tune of 10 million dollars which I think in today's money is in the billions. Tough break for China, but that is the drug game. Queen Victoria didn't give a fuck about ruining the lives of an entire nation as long as she was getting rich. They had just gotten out of the slave trade 35 years earlier and she knew she had to make up those profit losses somehow. Drugging an entire nation was the answer. 

England doesn't get nearly enough blame for fucking up the entire world and being responsible for the geopolitical issues we are still having today. I mean for fuck sakes, Queen Victoria's grandchildren were solely responsible for both sides of World War I. That war was just one big family squabble. A tiff. One grandson, King George V of England fought his 1st cousin Kaiser Wilhelm who was running Germany. The other side of that war…the Russians. The granddaughter of Queen Victoria was married to Tsar Nicholas II. You'd think since all the principles of the war were related they could've settled it over a Christmas ham instead of, ya know, killing 40 million people. Guess not though. You probably don't care when you're the heirs of Drug Queen.