POD 136: Patrick Phillips on the Japanese conspiracy to distribute opium laced cigarettes in China
Added 2025-11-30 05:51:27 +0000 UTCIn this episode I talk with tobacco researcher Patrick Phillips about his new book "Tobacco of the Emperor" which investigates the history of Japanese cigarettes and other tobacco products. We discuss historical claims of etorphine-laced cigarettes, the opium wars, and the curiously under-researched (at least in English?) claim that millions of Chinese people were tricked into opiate addition with opium-laced Golden Bat cigarettes.
Patrick Phillips is a tobacco researcher and militaria collector who served as a combat engineer in the US army. After leaving the army, he attended nursing school and currently works as a registered nurse in Missouri. His book Tobacco of the emperor is a comprehensive analysis of the history of Japanese tobacco.
Global Institute for the Prevention of Aggression
Kenji Doihara: Japanese General and Convicted War Criminal
Kenji Doihara: Beyond the Surface!
How Imperial Japan Created a Vast Drug Empire to Destroy China
The Japanese cigarette brand that was weaponised against Chinese smokers in wartime
Comments
feels like the bobba/milkthea that was/is circulating within the asian party scene
Stefan
2026-01-03 11:42:34 +0000 UTCMonase! The actual chemical name is alpha-ethyltryptamine. It was produced by Upjohn in the 1960s.
gossamer
2025-12-24 03:12:09 +0000 UTCGreat interview, thanks as always. I worked as a wildland firefighter for ~15 years and the discussion about use of nicotine in the military brought me back to long days fighting fire. firefighting is hard work, and at times exciting, but most of the time one is managing boredom. What to do while waiting out endless slow times?: Copenhagen chewing tobacco. I gave it up when I moved on from the fire line, but thinking about in now makes my mouth water. I suspect nicotine use has a similar purpose for most soldiers throughout history.
fieldofhats
2025-12-03 21:09:01 +0000 UTCInteresting!
M
2025-12-02 01:07:52 +0000 UTCI was literally about to type this as well lol and thought of this the second I heard Golden Bat and opium. Would make sense that Pynchon had some knowledge of this given his themes of conspiracy and paranoia.
Knosnothing
2025-12-01 19:38:17 +0000 UTCSleep is vital for longevity!
Sarah
2025-12-01 09:24:07 +0000 UTCWhat highly intelligent, perceptive people have to do to make a living these days, hu? Bryan says he doesn’t fear death, but he seems to fear the imperfection of the human mind, which caused his previous unhappiness. So he is trying to make himself into a kind of robot…. I wonder if he’ll ever have a ‘bad’ trip. If so, that might be a good opportunity for him…. I’m more worried about your nicotine addiction, though, Hamilton. Even if you don’t share Bryan’s neurotic mission to live forever. A vial of original LSD would be amazing to own!
Sarah
2025-12-01 09:23:14 +0000 UTCI wonder if Pynchon was aware of this, golden bat opiate conspiracy is giving golden fang lol
Voice
2025-12-01 06:03:37 +0000 UTCAlso curious how the smoking blend of tobacco and opium 'madak' fits into this story, as from my limited understanding it was partly the Dutch importing tobacco to China in the 16th century i think that led people most likely to start smoking opium on any scale in Chinese territories (previously it was seemingly just used orally), and the (very class and social threat-based) prohibition of Madak was a big factor that increased the popularity of smoking pure opium in the first place. Interesting also that looking on wikipedia apparently Madak was sometimes or initially mixed with hemp (not necessarily psychoactive though there is crossover between cultures with weed-smoking traditions in south-east asia and those with Madak-type opium tobacco mixture smoking histories) as well as tobacco, which echoes the quote in the episode abt americans saying the japanese were putting 'stinkweed' in cigarettes. Maybe the Golden Bat Madak-style cigarettes were a way for Japanese distributors to get around legal or cultural or class-based sanctions against pure opium smoking, in the reverse of how that played out hundreds of years before? Or maybe ppl just didnt have a lot of classic opium pipes laying around anymore to smoke the usual stuff with, as a huge amount were destroyed in the early 20th century, would also be more convenient to smoke Opi cigs as those pipes require a bit of paraphernalia (lamp, rags, dab tool type implements, stuff to heat up and prepare and roll the opium around before it can be smoked properly) and some getting the hang of to use effectively (as any non-methylated enthusiast who's tried to use an oil burner for dmt without experience can probably empathize w), as well as being a procedure much less convenient than something u could casually spark up walking down the street
Jasper
2025-11-30 23:50:30 +0000 UTCGreat episode, copy and pasting from previous comment i left in one of the chats here when someone was asking abt positive heroin stories bc it definitely is a useful source for contextualizing opium wars and history of prohibition in china etc : Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, while i havent read the whole book yet from the excerpts i have read it has some very interesting info on opium as well as morphine and heroin in chinese society mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries, looking at the way the opioid crisis there was largely caused by the british pushing their view of what opioids are in society and how them and their use should be controlled by the state as well as their more obvious economic and physical pushing of opium. Lots of interesting anecdotes about opium and heroin use outside of familiar addiction patterns, which often doesnt seem particularly problematic at all, including stuff like a few puffs of heroin in some years and places being offered like tea to all visitors to the house, even doctors/cops, as well as consumption of sometimes extremely microdosed heroin and other opiate preparations to wean addicts off it (with some level of placebo playing a big role for sure) or just as a kind of semi-magical good luck charm vitality vitamin (like sometimes literally micrograms of heroin per pill)
Jasper
2025-11-30 23:42:46 +0000 UTCThis is an awesomr episode. Around the 12 or 13 minute mark ypu mention a little known serotonin releaser that was briefly prescribed as an antidepressant under the trade name Monaise (?) or something. How do you spell that? I can't find anything about it online and I'm super curious.
Dylan
2025-11-30 23:41:39 +0000 UTCthinkin about Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent, and he mentions how nicotine 'excites the DNA spirits', & have an old ~1930s book on Lucky Strike and it opens with such a banger. "The English gentleman-adventurers who colonized the Americas in 1607 came in search of gold. They found tobacco." Probably among one of my fav drug book scores https://archive.org/details/storyofluckystri0000royc/mode/2up
Beatrix
2025-11-30 22:58:38 +0000 UTCThere is nothing wrong with researching longevity, but the research aimed specifically at anti-aging and life-extension as opposed to treatment of disease has had a pretty bad track record. Almost the entirety of medicine (save for some things like palliative care) is essentially longevity research, but it's simply classified differently. People get very excited about things like rapamycin or pterostilbene and less excited about things like statins and blood pressure management that truly and reliably reduce mortality and extend human life.
Hamilton Morris
2025-11-30 22:04:05 +0000 UTCJust a comment about the longevity space. While i think many of them are just grifters trying to take people's money, there are a few people in the space who have a real honest approach. Matt Kaeberlein with the Optispan podcast is one that comes to mind. He is pretty dismissive of most of the overhyped interventions that a lot of people get exicted about. I also don't think the idea of longevity research is inherently bad. I don't see a problem trying to learn how we can all live longer healthier lives.
Cheminterested
2025-11-30 21:00:34 +0000 UTCThat's actually the sound of an indri getting arrested, why would you want that?
Hamilton Morris
2025-11-30 18:54:30 +0000 UTCPretty unrelated but I took a trip to Japan and was amazed that they had dihydrocodeine in some of their OTC cold medications. Especially considering how strict they are on bringing certain types of medications into the country. For instance you can't bring Adderall into the country at all, even with a note from your doc that it's medically necessary. (I assume this is related to their past methamphetamine problem?)
JJ Gobbler
2025-11-30 14:18:24 +0000 UTCwould love to get connected w this pharma-ephemera collecting community, pls
Beatrix
2025-11-30 12:38:10 +0000 UTCEvery time you forget to put the intro in a podcast episode, you put innocent indri out of work. Think of the little baby lemurs, wondering where their next meal will come from because Papa Indri lost his job at the factory. Please, remember to add the intro music, for your listeners and for hard working lemurs everywhere.
Ericaceous
2025-11-30 08:09:37 +0000 UTCSlightly OT but... Despite a pragmatic faction arguing that regulating opium would stabilize the economy (controlling outflow of silver, look up Xu Naiji), the Daoguang Emperor ultimately sided with moral hardliners like Lin Zexu to enforce a strict policy of prohibition. Harm reduction vs prohibition. Nothing ever changes. Opium rules and prohibition sucks! 😊
Riki Sharma
2025-11-30 07:57:42 +0000 UTCShoutout to SteveMRE on youtube!
Brad
2025-11-30 07:53:31 +0000 UTCHoly shit I can’t wait for the livestream tomorrow I’m dead
anthonamine
2025-11-30 07:50:28 +0000 UTCBased on the interview, it sounds like most of the evidence for this is coming from the prosecution of the war crimes trial. This seems like somewhat weak evidence to me because it’s kind of biased, no? Plus it was never mentioned in the interview what the evidence exactly was… especially the evidence that the opium was IN the cigarettes. To me it sounds more plausible that this was more of a conventional drug dealing operation than anything. Perhaps it could have been lost in translation somewhere and “a little packet of opium in the cigarette box” became “opium in the cigarettes”?
Thor Correia
2025-11-30 07:19:08 +0000 UTCHello fellow resident of the Leigh Valley!
Learn Moore
2025-11-30 06:53:45 +0000 UTCalso drooling at the thought of hamilton covering gary webb
rayah
2025-11-30 06:07:29 +0000 UTConce again, sleep can wait. hamilton just dropped a new episode!!
rayah
2025-11-30 05:58:53 +0000 UTCListening to the “paying the price for a chem edu” pod when this one comes out. 💪🏽💪🏽 salutations from allentown PA
Devan Ghai
2025-11-30 05:54:14 +0000 UTC
