The Dragon Sleeps: The Smoking Opium Business in the 19th Century American West
9:00 a.m., Friday, Nov. 2, 2007
Cornell Auditorium in Plaster Hall
Admission: free

America’s current “war on drugs” is not the nation’s first. Though only a very small minority of Chinese immigrants in America were actually involved in the opium business, the spread of opium use in Anglo-American communities was deemed a threat to the nation’s entrepreneurial spirit and to its growing importance as a world economic and military power.

Dr. Diana Ahmad is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Rolla. Her book, The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws, examines how the spread of opium-smoking fueled racism and created demands for the removal of the Chinese from American life.