In the burgeoning sub-field of narcotic history in China, Narcotic Culture stands out as a revision of the revisionist literature. Most scholars now concur that the nature and extent of China's narcotic “problem” has been grossly exaggerated over time, and recent scholarship has reinterpreted opiates as key components of social, economic and political developments in the late Qing and Republican eras. But Narcotic Culture goes well beyond this reassessment in an interpretation that relies on a wide range of archival and other primary sources, as well as a methodology that successfully blends history and anthropology. Dikötter, Laamann and Zhou take issue with the “narcophobic discourse” (p. 2) that has characterized the rhetoric of drug use and abuse in China and, even more significant, they dispute the assumption that various attempts to prohibit opium and other narcotics were positive developments that reflected state strength or rising Chinese nationalism. Instead, the authors build a strong case for their contention that it was prohibition that generated a social and economic disaster for many Chinese.

The first half of the book is devoted to debunking what the authors term “the opium myth,” the idea that opium caused more harm than good and was largely responsible for the downfall of Chinese civilization. They establish that opium use was not confined to China, most Chinese opium smokers were not addicts, and many smokers sought the drug's valued medical benefits. They hypothesize that opium abuse in China was largely prevented by a smoking culture that valued decorum and encouraged complex and time consuming rituals. The authors also note that any valid historical examination of narcotics in China must have a global focus and should seek to extricate the drug from the multilayered socio-cultural meanings that have, at various times, transformed a legitimate medicine into a moral problem.