Tacoma’s New Business Plan: Import High-Grade Opium for the Whole North
With the tariff cut, Tacoma entrepreneurs predicted they could supply wealthy opium users from Oregon to the Atlantic—and collect thousands in customs duties.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
TACOMA, Jan. 3.—Special.—Hereafter, provided the customs department succeeds in preventing wholesale smuggling, high grades of Hong Kong opium are to be imported, via Tacoma, as a commercial business to supply the high-class wealthy American and Chinese opium consumers of the United States, especially the Northern states. Since the tariff on opium was reduced from $12 to $6 per pound, several consignments have been imported via San Francisco, and the Tacoma parties now engaging in the business promise to make this the principal port of entry for supplying the opium trade of this country.
They find that the Northern belt of states, from Oregon and Washington to the Atlantic coast, now consume 1,000 pounds per month of high-class opium. This does not include the inferior grades used by poorer Chinese laborers and impoverished opium users. The best grades cost about $3 per pound in China. The importation of forty-one pounds reported in today’s Post-Intelligencer is but the beginning of the business. Inside of three months, it is predicted, at least half of the opium consumption of the Northern belt of states will be supplied through importations at this port. Thus, beginning with a few pounds per month, it is proposed to work up the importations to 1,000 or more per month. At $6 per pound duty, this would result in $6,000 in duties collected at this sub-port per month, with the expectation of still larger revenues.
The gentlemen engaged in the new enterprise propose to conduct it just as any other business is conducted—for the profit there is in it.
“The gentlemen engaged in the new enterprise propose to conduct it just as any other business is conducted—for the profit there is in it.”
In 1895 opium was a legal, tariffed commodity, and Tacoma’s boosters saw it as another port trade to capture. The scheme foreshadows the Pacific Northwest’s long entanglement with drug prohibition, racialized policing, and cross-Pacific commerce.
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