What parallels might you be able to draw between the "Opioid Crisis" in the United States today and the "Opium Crisis" of early nineteenth-century China?

The scale and intensity of the opium crisis in nineteenth-century China was unparalleled by any other drug trade in history. In 1830, there were an estimated three million Chinese citizens addicted to opium. By 1890, there were fifteen million. What had originated as a medicinal treatment generated greater abuse potential as people began smoking opium recreationally. The practice was prohibited by the Chinese Emperor, who believed that “opium [was] a poison, undermining our good customs and morality.” The country would be forced into war with Britain to preserve their jurisdiction. They would lose this first Opium War, then a second, and by the end of the century, unequal treaties predicated on trade rights would decimate China’s economy, which had until then been the largest in the world.
Chinese antipathy for the nineteenth-century opium trade was personified in a commissioner named Lin Zexu, who so hated exporting useful goods in exchange for the “poison” Britain sent in return that in 1839 he wrote to Queen Victoria in protest. The British were making a great profit from selling opium to Chinese citizens despite an explicit prohibition on the drug. Lin Zexu believed that everyone who sold or smoked opium should receive the death penalty, but he extended the emperor’s magnanimous favor “that for those who voluntarily surrender there are still some circumstances to palliate their crime.” That is to say, if the smugglers would turn over their opium and agree to never again violate the prohibition, they could expect a reprieve (in the US, diversion programs allow many people with substance use disorders to serve time in rehab rather than in prison). Writing clearly of China’s opium regulations, he asked the sovereign to enforce the law among her subjects.
In all likelihood, Queen Victoria never received the letter. The opium trade flourished, and several million Chinese citizens became addicted. Disagreements over prohibition, as well as other diplomatic concerns, led to the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. The first ended in 1842 with the unequal and injurious Treaty of Nanking, which restructured Chinese ports of trade, ceded Hong Kong to the British, and required China to pay reparations for the opium they had (legally) confiscated. The Second Opium War was fought from 1856 to 1860 and ultimately legalized the opium trade, among other trade and duty concessions by the Chinese. The subsequent unscrupulous Western influence on China’s economy devastated the financial system and caused several local industries, such as agriculture and textiles, to crash.
As they had been in China, opioids in the United States were originally prescribed as a medicinal narcotic. Pharmaceutical companies convinced doctors in the 1990s that opioids were safe and had a low addiction potential. Doctors began prescribing them for a wider variety of conditions, from simple surgical procedures to traumatic injuries to daily regimens for pain management. In response to greater availability, patients began developing opioid pain reliever-related substance use disorder in greater numbers, an estimated two million Americans by 2015. In 2016 and 2017, more than 42,000 Americans died from overdosing on opioids. 17,087 of the deaths were attributed to prescribed opioid pain relievers, an overdose rate five times higher than in 1999.
Myriad economic effects have been associated with the addiction epidemic in the United States. Regional variation in opioid prescription rates, when analyzed in combination with unemployment rates, suggest that the opioid crisis has caused many prime-age workers to drop out of the labor force. Industries with greater potential for on-the-job injuries, such as construction, mining, farming, and oil and gas production, have had the highest proportional mortality ratios for drug overdose. In addition to wage loss, the financial impact of the opioid crisis has strained the budgets of federal, state, and local governments, medical providers, law enforcement agencies, social services, and countless families.
As Lin Zexu feared, those who covet profit above health—the British in China, the pharmaceutical companies in the US—spread harm despite a clear understanding of the risks. Whether in nineteenth-century China or twenty-first–century America, the opioid crisis has had profound effects on the economy, safety, and well-being of the state as well as the individual.
https://china.usc.edu/lin-zexu-lintse-hsu-writing-britains-queen-victoria-protest-opium-trade-1839

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/where-have-all-the-workers-gone-an-inquiry-into-the-decline-of-the-u-s-labor-force-participation-rate/

https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html