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Document Details :

Title: Le 'coût social' de l'opium au Vietnam
Subtitle: La problématique des drogues dans le philtre de l'histoire
Author(s): LE FAILLER, Ph.
Journal: Journal Asiatique
Volume: 283    Issue: 1   Date: 1995   
Pages: 239-264
DOI: 10.2143/JA.283.1.556568

Abstract :
This paper is based on a historical study focusing on the shift in Vietnam from the concept of “opium as a trade item" toward that of “opium as an illegal drug". In terms of this conceptual shift, Vietnam was then seen as an example of a country squeezed between China and the West. The paper shows the emergence of the international anti-opium movement and its consequences on Vietnamese social life under the French administration. Was opium smoking a tradition on Vietnam? A new attitude toward drug use and the emergence of the notion of public health and welfare were therefore contradictory to the rigid nature of the colonial power's fiscal policies and to the ambiguities of their humanist discourse.

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