The Opium Debate
Diana Ahmad in The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West (University of Nevada Press, 2007) argues that in addition to the traditional explanations for the Chinese Exclusion Act, (economic, political and more recently, prostitution) smoking opium was part of the reason many Anglo-Americans pushed for Chinese exclusion. Ahmad also distinguishes smoking-opium and medicinal-opium as two separate entities, claiming that it was the smoking variety that offended the moral character of Anglo-Americans. Ahmed mainly uses primary sources in the form of newspaper articles from western states such as Montana, California, Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada published between 1864 and 1920. These states had large Chinese