Seriously? They were here because the British had won the Opium Wars in which the Brits swamped China with opium - Westerners were very aware of opium, were producing it and swamping China with it against the Chinese governments wishes.Occasional_panner said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
"British and American merchants, anxious to address what they perceived as a trade imbalance, determined to import the one product that the Chinese did not themselves have but which an ever-increasing number of them wanted: opium"'
This war with China . . . really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men's minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring? I really do not remember, in any history, of a war undertaken with such combined injustice and baseness. Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority. Thomas Arnold to W. W. Hull, March 18, 1840
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars/opiumwars1.html
Yes, they used and sold opium - millions of them were addicted to it as a result of British actions. And the sale of opiates was not illegal here until into the 20th C from memory. It was widely used as morphine ("laudanum"), a popular addiction of Australian ladies....
