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POD 136: [VIDEO] Patrick Phillips on the Japanese conspiracy to distribute opium laced cigarettes in China

🕑 Added 2025-11-30 19:24:22 +0000 UTC

Comments

Stefan

what about the bobba/milkthea, sounds like a similar concept?

Honey-el

The lack of concrete evidence on the opium cigarettes makes me suspect that Kenji Doihara was accused of the conspiracy to give a sense of justice for the Chinese who had been victims of Japan's war crimes. The Japanese emperor Hirohito was never prosecuted on anything - his extreamily loyal underlings took all of the responsibility & punishment for the war. Further, some really horrific war criminals were given immunity in a cover-up, because the U.S. goverment wanted them in the U.S. military's own science programs. So perhaps the real conspiracy was that there was no opium cigarette conspiracy & Kenji Doihara - whose other crimes were probably enough for criminal conviction anyway - was presented as the evil mastermind in that fabricated story, so as to take the public's attention away from how certain war criminals were being helped to escape justice & punishment. Though: if the opium cigarettes would've been such a massive commercial hit as it was claimed to had been, then surely there must exist at least some paper trails of it! It would've been legal sales so there wouldn't even had been that much need to launder money (only when buying the opium). I have no idea how accounting & taxes was practically done in the imperial Japan, or how publicly available such historical records are today, but surely the need to track money existed back then too. It's hard to imagine that a massive influx of new revenue wouldn't show up somewhere in such records.

Royce Zheng

A lot of the history of the state Japanese opium monopoly in Manchuria is covered in this excellent book by the academic Mark Driscoll 'Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945' https://www.dukeupress.edu/absolute-erotic-absolute-grotesque

Matthew Aragón

The intro is fucking hysterical LMAO

Cheminterested

As much as I would love to get a bottle of Bayer heroin, I think I would have a hard time not trying at least a little bit.

Yvonne DePorre

Not a primary reference but this reminds me of a movie I saw in Chengdu while visiting my friend 2011 The Flowers of War - Wikipedia https://share.google/OTKmp9DhKGww6KhuX

david

Etorphine - crazy morphinan opioid! I wonder how they came up with that structure. Mostly fascinating - I did not think there were any extremely potent morphinan opioids. I thought the ultra potent were only in the phenyl-piperidine opioid class. Ex - fentanyl, sufentanyl and I guess carfentanyl is the most potent I have heard of. Carfentanyl is also historically for large animal veterinary use although I don't think it is a currently used product even in that scope. Interesting (per widipedia) there is a specific potent antagonist supplied with the etorphine veterinary drug, stating that naloxone is inadequate for reversal.

Eli Gaultney

so it's basically a race now to see who can buy a pack of cigs off ebay that actually has the opium? what a crazy story. i also struggle to believe those numbers!

Tyler Stark

Daaaaam that was nice

Matt W.

I love Hamilton. I emailed him asking if he wanted to interview me, I was a dark web "drug lord" according to the feds lol. I think it would make for killer content to hear my story.

Helmer

Awesome interview, love to hear it

caesaroftampa

Hamilton should interview ME next.

Edwina Tollstoy

Actually turns out pethidine aka Demoral was the first synthetic opiate they created and seems to have been used to overcome the morphine shortage caused by allied embargo in the 30’s. Methadone was also developed around the same time but was shelved because of sides effects and wasn’t really used as a medicine until the 50’s after the US acquired IG Faben’s documents. Interesting that Demoral is considered more euphoric than morphine while methadone is considered less so. I wonder how the medical community establishes a euphoric effect…it seems highly subjective, though opiate users tend to agree.

Edwina Tollstoy

One interesting thing about Germany in WW2 is they created methadone as a response to a morphine embargo by the allies who reasoned that you can’t fight a successful war without an effective painkiller.

CSN

I'm belt sanding my deck. I have high hopes for us both.

Bobby Foreman

Unless the dose of psilocybin is quite low I could imagine this live stream could turn out to be a mild disaster, but hey at least it might inform somebody about choosing a good setting for a trip lol