Experience of legalization of opiosmoking in Vladivostok at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

The article is devoted to one episode from the history of the
long struggle against opioid smoking and secret Chinese dens in the Russian Far East in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. Representatives of the authorities and society proposed various ways to solve the problem, but the fight against opioid smoking was not effective. Some representatives of the regional administration and the public saw one of the ways to solve the problem of brothels in the legalization of opiocules and gambling houses. Supporters of the idea of legalizing opioid smoking considered it a panacea for bribery of local police, merging it with organized Chinese crime and a way to get rid
of dens. Military Governor of the Primorsky Krai and Chief
of Police of Vladivostok were not the pioneers, proposing in
1907 to legalize opiokurilnye (opium smokehouses), but they were the only authorities in the pre-revolutionary period who implemented such a method of fighting secret dens in practice, albeit for a short time.