When Did Opium Become Bad?

I have a great-great grandfather Chinese ancestor who sold opium among many other products at his store in central Queensland in the late 19th Century.
My dad was 1/8th Chinese and he was regularly called “Chinky” at school. His mom was 1/4 Chinese and she did everything she could to hide it.
Growing up in Australia until the 1980s, the only cool thing to be was white.
By contrast, in 2026, it’s rare that I’m called Chinky at shul, and when it happens, it only adds to my social status.
The British social ranking of wealth in the nineteenth century ran roughly: land at the top, then mercantile trade in physical commodities, then finance and stock-jobbing at the bottom. Stock-jobbers were viewed as parasitic, ungentlemanly, smelling of the counting-house and sharp practice. Opium was a commodity like tea, cotton, indigo, or sugar. Traders in it were merchants, and merchants who returned from the East with fortunes bought estates, married into the gentry, and got peerages. The Sassoons, the Jardines, the Mathesons, the Dents, the Keswicks all followed that path. Opium money built country houses and bankrolled political careers. Stock-market money, by contrast, carried the taint of speculation through most of the century.
Trading opium looked more like honorable commerce than buying and selling shares.
Now the harder question: when did the ranking flip?
There is no clean year. Three forces shifted at once.
The first was the anti-opium movement inside Britain. The Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade formed in 1874. Quaker activists, evangelical Anglicans, and a wing of the Liberal Party kept the issue alive for decades. The Royal Commission on Opium of 1893 to 1895 was meant to settle the matter and largely whitewashed the trade, but the moral pressure kept building. The 1906 Liberal landslide brought a government willing to act, and a House of Commons resolution that May condemned the Indo-Chinese opium trade as morally indefensible. The Anglo-Chinese agreement of 1907 began winding it down, and the Hague Opium Convention of 1912 internationalized the framework. By 1913 the official Indian export trade to China had ended.
The second was the rehabilitation of the stock market. The expansion of the joint-stock company after the 1856 and 1862 acts, the rise of the City as the financial capital of the world, and the explosion of investment in railways, colonial bonds, and imperial enterprises pulled finance out of its old disreputable corner. Holding shares became normal gentry behavior by the 1880s and 1890s. Active speculation still carried a whiff of the disreputable, but passive investment in respectable securities did not.
The third was generational. The Sassoons, Rothschilds, and similar families had largely moved out of the original commodity trade by the late Victorian period anyway, into banking, real estate, and gentry life. The men who built the fortunes were not the men who held them by 1900.
If you want a single hinge, the years between 1906 and 1914 are the closest thing. After 1906 the British state itself treated the opium trade as a moral problem to be wound down, and after 1912 it was bound by treaty to suppress it. By the 1920s opium money was something old families played down rather than advertised. The stock market, meanwhile, had become the normal home of upper-class wealth.