The vast majority of that revenue was gained through the regulated export of processed opium from Calcutta or Bombay to China and to Southeast Asia.

[5] Later, in 1893, under Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone's Liberal government, anti-opium pressures again prevailed and Parliament approved the appointment of a Royal Commission on Opium.

[6][7] The terms of reference for the Royal Commission initially proposed by Alfred Webb, a Quaker MP, assumed the question of whether the drug should be prohibited at all was already settled.

[8] The final terms of reference given to the Commission by Parliament was: Resolved, That having strong objections urged on moral grounds to the system by which the Indian opium revenue is raised, this House presses on the Government of India to continue their policy of greatly diminishing the cultivation of the poppy and the production and sale of opium, and desires that an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying Her Majesty to appoint a Royal Commission to report as to— 1.

The effect on the finances of India of the prohibition of the sale and export of opium, taking into consideration (a) the amount of compensation payable; (b) the cost of the necessary preventive measures; (c) the loss of revenue.

Whether any change short of total prohibition should be made in the system at present followed for regulating and restricting the opium traffic and for raising a revenue therefrom.

Joseph Pease and John Ellis denounced the Commission's final report to Parliament in 1895 as being the product of "misleading circulars, prescribed questions, suggestions in a particular direction, examination and filtration of evidence, and withholding of certain witnesses" in an "inversion of the ordinary rule to which we were accustomed in this country when it was desired to elicit the truth.

"[23] Indian political elites generally welcomed the report as defense against the financial losses and social instability that they feared a total ban on non-medical opium sales would bring to India.

[24] Public opinion among nationalists had long been mixed on the opium question with national finances and humanitarianism competing but generally supported the Raj against British reformers in the wake of the Royal Commission's report.