The British East India Company took control of Bengal and Bihar, the opium-growing districts of India, and their ships dominate the opium trade out of Calcutta to China.

Then, around the 1820's, they found a new way of making money from the opium, Morphine, and this was the basis of the pharmaceutical industry.

The two big players, E. Merck & Company of Darmstadt, Germany, begins commercial manufacturing of morphine, and Jardine-Matheson & Company of London, who now owned the "bengal conssesesion", the right to buy all the west Indian opium production.

(Sassoon bought the rights to the Shar Valley Opium, Afghanistan, and made another fourtune)

Then, in 1895, The Bayer Company of Elberfeld, Germany, finds that diluting morphine with acetyls produces a drug without the common morphine side effects. Bayer begins production of diacetylmorphine and coins the name "heroin."

Now they didn't need to ship opium to china, and Jardine-Matheson had a complete monopoly on the Bengal opium.

At the same time, however, opium production ramped up in Laos and Burma, and because of the British monopoly, they had to find a new way to ship the product to China.

So they took it overland, from Burma to Hanoi, in what was then, French Indochina. This was of course, the first leg, of what came to be known as the "Ho Chi Minh trail".

Now the French took over the opium trade, it was a short hop from Hanoi to Hongkong, and profits soared.

Seeing the growing trade with China, around 1820?, two Massachusetts families, the Delanos and the Perkins' were drawn into the China trade along with John Jacob Astor, selling furs and ginseng, that they sourced from Daniel Boone.

Eventually the furs ran out, the ginseng was inferior and they had to find another product to sell to china, and that was Turkish opium. By 1818, Americans were, by some estimates, smuggling as much as a third of all the opium consumed in China

As word of the huge profits spread, the leading families with names like Astor, Cabot, Peabody, Brown, Archer, Hathaway, Webster, Delano, Coolidge, Forbes, Russell, Perkins, Bryant, otherwise known as Boston Brahmins, all joined in the opium trade to China.

In 1857, Warren Delano Jr. lost much of his wealth in a financial panic, so, like many other American speculators before him, he returned to the opium trade and quickly rebuilt his fortune. It was at his palatial estate, Algonac, in New York, that Franklin D. Roosevelt's parents were married.

This was during the Civil War, and Delano saw the need for opium as a pain killer for the wounded troops. In the American Civil War, the Union Army used 175,000 lb (80,000 kg) of opium tincture and powder and about 500,000 opium pills. Most likely the South used the same. (it may also transpire the war was constructed to provide a solid soruce of revenue; the families that profited were the same ones in the Senate)

This is how the US military became involved in the drug trafficking business; why use ports and pesky customs duties, when you can use US military bases, instead? Why use your own ships, the famous "Clipper Ships", and crews, when you can just use military ships to move the opium, completely unnoticed? From this point on, the US military will be wholly complicit in the drug trafficking business.

As we saw earlier, the French were also making huge profits from the opium trade, and the aristocrats that fled France to avoid the guillotine moved to Boston; one of those families was the Bouvier Family, Jackie Kennedys family. The French not only smuggled the opium from Hanoi to China, they also set up a huge business shipping opium to the USA, some legal, to Johnson and Johnson, some not so legal.

This trade in opium, became known as "the French Connection", and for about 100 years the Boston families made enormous fortunes.

As time progressed, long range flight became possible, and a US company called PanAm, set up the "clipper class" to China, flying boats from San Francisco, to Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam, Philippines to Indochina and China. Now it only took a couple of weeks to get the opium to the US, and profits boomed.

Then, in 1940, the Japanese occupied French Indochina, and cut the supply of opium from Burma to Hanoi, and FDR suddenly became concerned with Japanese atrocities committed in China. The Japanese, having seen the devestation opium addiction had caused, and thinking it was Brittish opium, burned it all.

The Japanese, being noble, and thinking they were allies to the US, informed the US of their impending invasion of British territories in the east, and, in what can only be described as the most audacious act of treachery ever seen, the US decided to use this as the basis of the false flag attack on Pearl Harbor.

FDR wanted his opium back….