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The Forbidden Game
Brian Inglis
11. The International Anti-drug Campaign
IT HAD NOT NEEDED THE FAILURE OF PROHIBITION TO TEACH THE
Americans that if drugs were to be controlled in domestic use, the need
would arise for international regulation, too. Half a century
before, there had been alarm at the spread of opium smoking introduced
by the Chinese who came to work in California; and also at the
more insidious form of opium consumption indulged in by the growing
numbers of Americans who were persuaded to take tonics or cordials
which had the drug as a prime constituent. After the Americans
took over the Philippines, too, they became concerned about opium
consumption there. Measures to check the traffic proving unsuccessful,
the idea of imposing international control was mooted; and by
a fortunate chance, the opportunity suddenly presented itself
to secure international agreement.
The Shanghai conference
For some years, the improvement in the quality of the opium produced
in China had been reminding the British in India that their hold
on the Chinese market could not last much longer. Indian opium—the
Hong Kong Daily News had warned in the 1880s—was becoming
a drug on the market 'in more senses than one'; the day would
soon come when the native Chinese article would be exported. Exports
from India to China, which had risen decade by decade for so long,
began to fall, the quantity of home produced opium in China surging
rapidly past the quantity imported.
In December 1905 the Conservative Government in Britain, which
had held power for a decade, resigned; and the following spring,
the House of Commons unanimously adopted a resolution 'that this
House reaffirms its conviction that the Indo-Chinese opium traffic
is morally indefensible, and requests His Majesty's Government
to take such steps as may be necessary for bringing it to a speedy
close'. The new Liberal Government, urged on by its back-benchers'
humanitarian zeal, opened negotiations with the Chinese by offering
to reduce opium exports annually, provided they reduced home production,
step by step, and did not import from other countries. If all
went smoothly, in ten years' time the traffic could cease. The
Chinese unhesitatingly accepted. 'It is hereby commanded,' the
imperial edict ran, 'that within a period of ten years the evils
arising from foreign and native opium be equally and completely
eradicated.'
The American Government, alerted by the authorities in the Philippines,
realised that if India and China really did reduce production
there was a chance that the United States' problems could be solved,
too, provided that other countries did not expand production.
Through the prompting of the State Department, an International
Conference was convened in Shanghai in 1909 to study the whole
opium problem. All the major countries with an interest in the
traffic were invited and only one, Turkey, did not send a representative,
owing to her domestic upheavals—a valid enough excuse, as they
were to lead to the victory of the Young Turks, and the deposition
of Abdul the Damned. The representatives of the remaining thirteen
states met, conferred, and agreed in principle that there was
a need for greater effort on the part of their Governments to
control the traffic in opium and its derivatives, particularly
morphine.
The Shanghai Conference had been arranged only for an exchange
of views; but its success prompted President Taft to call for
a Conference of Delegates with plenipotentiary powers. It met
at The Hague in 1911, attended by the representatives of China,
France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands,
Persia, Portugal, Russia, Siam and the U.S.A. And again, a heartening
measure of agreement was reached. In future, it was agreed, the
production and distribution of raw opium should be carefully regulated,
and its export to other countries permitted only to duly authorised
persons, through duly authorised channels. The production, distribution
and consumption of prepared opium—the kind normally used for
smoking—was gradually to be suppressed altogether, so that trade
in it would cease. The production and distribution of opium derivatives
was to be restricted to the amounts required for medical and scientific
purposes. The necessary licensing arrangements, the delegates
agreed, would be introduced by their respective States, when they
ratified the agreement.
Crucial to the success of the whole enterprise, clearly, was the
satisfactory working of the Anglo-Chinese agreement. And it had
far surpassed expectations—as even the sceptical British Consul-General
in China, Sir Alexander Hosie, was compelled to admit. As he had
toured the poppy growing areas of China in the 1880s, he could
make the necessary comparisons; and touring them again in 1910,
he found that poppy cultivation in some provinces had virtually
ceased, and in most others had been greatly reduced. Public opinion,
it appeared, had been roused against opium, in much the same way
as it had been aroused against spirits in Ireland by Father Mathew,
but with the added element of patriotic fervour, opium still being
identified with foreign oppression. And in a country as heavily
populated as China, it was easy to detect and prevent poppy cultivation,
when the will was there. Although the revolution in the central
provinces in 1911, and the subsequent breakdown of the central
Government's authority, meant that the drive finally to eliminate
opium production lost momentum, enough had been accomplished to
show that it might be possible to achieve that purpose, when order
was restored.
In India, too, opium production was being steadily reduced—or
so the authorities claimed. But on a visit to Japan in 1916 the
young American writer Ellen La Motte met a Hindu, who assured
her that the authorities were lying. They had reduced production
only so long as there was no alternative, because the Chinese
market was slipping from their grasp; but they were still deeply
involved in the traffic. At the time, La Motte assumed his allegations
were the product of his nationalist fervour; but in the year which
she spent touring Eastern countries, she came to realise that
they were wholly justified.
As soon as the agreement to reduce exports of Indian opium to
China had been entered into, she discovered, every effort had
been made to evade it. The simplest way had been to send opium
to the International Settlements in the Treaty Ports, which were
not 'China' for export purposes. As a result—a Shanghai missionary
had shown—the number of licensed opium dealers in the International
Settlement there had risen from 87 before the agreement, to 663
in 1914; and the value of opium imports into the Settlements had
nearly trebled. The figures published showing the reduction in
exports of opium to China also concealed the fact that much of
it was finding its way there in a different, derivative, form.
Board of Trade returns disclosed that exports of British morphine
to the Eastern countries had been rising rapidly; from five and
a half tons in 1911 to fourteen tons in 1914.
Although the acreage under poppy cultivation in India had fallen
following the agreement with China, Ellen La Motte was able to
show that the fall had stopped by the time war broke out, and
output had begun to rise again. Such confidence did the British
Government have that the market, so far from continuing to contract—as
the Hague Convention envisaged—would remain buoyant, that a
loan made to Persia was guaranteed from the Persian opium revenue.
Although the Persian delegate had signed the Hague Convention,
La Motte recalled, his Government did not ratify it: 'no wonder!'
The League of Nations
By the time the first of La Motte's exposures of the duplicity
of the British Government's opium policy appeared, however—in
1920—the League of Nations had been established; and one of
its functions was to take over the supervision of international
agreements such as the Hague Convention. At the League's first
meeting, an advisory committee on opium and other drugs was set
up, with two functions; to collect and analyse information on
the drug traffic, and to try to persuade member States to keep
the regulations laid down to control it. The information collected,
when analysed, revealed that La Motte's strictures had been justified.
The Hague Convention was revealed as no more than a string of
aspirations.
The contracting nations, for example, had pledged themselves to
control the output of raw and prepared opium; but they had been
careful not to say how, or when. They had promised to manufacture
no more opium derivatives than were required for scientific and
medical purposes; but they had not settled how much was required.
And even when specific pledges had been made—for example, to
end the trade in prepared opium—there had been nothing to stop
merchants in the countries which had previously imported it ordering,
instead, the equivalent amount of raw opium, and processing it
themselves.
Britain, as the chief opium producer, was the chief beneficiary;
but firms in many countries shared in the profits, particularly
in Switzerland, already providing a haven for those who were evading
their own country's fiscal laws. The Dutch merchants were also
well placed. Although their Government had been host to the Hague
Conference, and had been nominally in charge of securing adherence
to the Convention until the League took over, it had neglected
to make any regulation requiring returns from Dutch companies
of their output of morphine or cocaine. There was consequently
no legal means of telling whether they were conforming to the
Hague code. Nor would the figures, had they been supplied, necessarily
have been reliable. The Hague Convention, in requesting that relevant
statistics should be furnished, had neglected to make any provision
to ensure that the statistics would be accurate. At their fifth
session, the members of the Opium Committee of the League were
presented with, among other documents, two sets of figures; one
from the British, purporting to be the amounts of morphine exported
from Britain to Japan between 1916 and 1920; the other from the
Japanese, purporting to be the amounts of morphine imported from
Britain in the same period.
| Year | British exports of morphine to
Japan lb. | Japanese imports of morphine from Britain lb. |
| 1916 | 7,257 | 37,898 |
| 1917 | 1,825 | 41,509 |
| 1918 | 0 | 7,749 |
| 1919 | 0 | 4,716 |
| 1920 | 1 | 11,741 |
No satisfactory explanation could be found for the discrepancies—or
for the one pound of morphine exported in 1920; but at least they
alerted the League to the futility of relying on information provided
by interested parties.
The British blandly used such evidence to justify their policy
of keeping opium a government monopoly. British governments, the
implication was, could not lie, nor could they cheat. In reply
to La Motte and others who accused them of exploiting the drug
for revenue, they reverted to the old excuse that, on the contrary,
they were keeping the duty high to discourage consumption. She
had shown that in the Straits Settlements, in the first decade
of the century, opium duties had sometimes provided the bulk of
the revenue—a fact which, as it had been reported to Parliament
by a commission of enquiry, the Government could not easily dispute.
But—the League's Opium Committee was told—this was precisely
why the Colonial Government had acquired monopoly powers in 1910—for
the purpose of 'gradual and effective suppression'. The Government
had implemented that policy by drastically reducing the number
of licensed opium dens, which had fallen from 500 in 1909 to 200
in 1922, and by putting up the price. It was only later that the
statistics, when they were published, revealed that so far from
the suppression policy being effective, the State monopoly had
actually contrived to sell more opium, in spite of the reduction
in the number of licensed dens. Coupled with the higher price,
this had meant a most gratifying increase of revenue; in 1918
opium still accounted for sixty per cent of the Straits Settlements'
entire income.
In India, too, the Government was doing its best to recoup some
of the losses following the agreement with China by encouraging
the sale of opium under licence; when in 1921 the young Gandhi
called for a campaign against 'that other oppressor'—as he described
the drug—his followers were arrested on charges of 'undermining
the revenue'. So little concerned were the British about the views
of the League of Nations that after a Commission under Lord Inchcape
had investigated India's finances in 1923, its report, while recognising
that it might be necessary to reduce opium production again if
prices fell, went on to warn against diminishing the area cultivated,
because of the need to safeguard 'this most important source of
income'.
The 1925 Convention
By this time, public opinion in the United States had been roused;
and in February 1923 a Resolution was put before the House of
Representatives in Washington by Stephen Porter, Chairman of the
Foreign Affairs Committee, arguing that the crucial factor was
overproduction of opium. At the very most, the world needed 125
tons of opium for medical and scientific purposes—less than
one-tenth of what was currently being produced. All the evidence,
he said, went to show that in such circumstances, 'habit-forming
narcotic drugs, by reason of their extraordinary nature, will
overcome all barriers, even the bars of prisons'—and he quoted
Sir John Jordan, by this time a member of the League of Nations
Opium Committee, 'Whatever and wherever opium is produced it will
reach the consumer.' To try to control the traffic by even the
most drastic of laws was futile; the only hope for effective control
was to get the producing nations to cut production. Both Houses
of Congress unanimously agreed to ask the President to request
the producer nations to accept the necessary regulations. In the
autumn, the Assembly of the League called a fresh conference,
with delegates from interested member countries (and from the
United States, though she was not a member) with plenipotentiary
powers, to see what could be done to improve upon the Hague Convention.
To Ellen La Motte, who came to Geneva from America to report on
its deliberations, it was a heartening experience. Here were delegates
from most of the great nations of the world coming together to
grapple with one of the greatest of man-made evils; and the most
impressive feature of all, she felt, was the integrity and dedication
of the representatives of the countries which had suffered most.
'One fact emerged clearly', she wrote in her first report to the
Nation magazine. 'The whole Orient is anxious to put down
opium.' But some of the European nations were equally anxious
to keep it up. Britain, as the European country which controlled
the major source of opium, would be the key; 'if Britain yields,
the rest will collapse'.
At the first meeting, the British delegates showed themselves
apparently ready and anxious to yield. They raised no objection
to the proposal, backed by the Americans and the Chinese, that
opium production and distribution should in future be limited
by international agreement. The only question—the British delegates
suggested—was how? The answer, the Americans replied, was simple.
An estimate should be made of the quantity of opium and its derivatives
required for medical and scientific purposes, and production limited
to that amount by international agreement. Again, the British
agreed, merely stipulating that the term 'legitimate' should be
added to 'medical and scientific'
It seemed reasonable; but as the Americans soon realised; it effectively
sabotaged their proposal. One by one the delegates of the colonial
powers rose to explain what uses for opium, in their own colonies,
they would consider 'legitimate'. The Dutch pointed out that allowance
must be made for custom; smoking opium might be evil, but it had
been eaten from time immemorial in the Dutch East Indies. The
French found it difficult to understand why it should be considered
any better to eat opium than to smoke it; if consumption was going
to be permitted at all, there was no reason to suppress it simply
because of the way it was taken (in French Indo-China, opium was
usually smoked). The British agreed. What mattered was not how
the drug was taken, but for what purpose; they could not regard
the use of opium as a 'family drug' as illegitimate (in India,
opium was licensed for sale as a family drug). Each delegate assured
the Americans of his country's willingness to accept their proposal,
so long as it was understood that each country had the right to
decide what form of consumption was legitimate in its own colonies,
and how much could be produced to cater for it. The Americans,
disillusioned, quit the Conference, the British explaining that
it was all the Washington Government's fault, for giving them
firm instructions which left no room for compromise. But La Motte
was sure that the instructions which the British delegates had
received had been just as firm—'make it as difficult as you
like for a person to buy a grain of heroin, but don't hamper an
"authorised person" from buying a ton, from time to
time, as he pleases'. The British, though, had been careful not
to reveal their policy.
The British had certainly behaved as if 'don't touch production'
had been their brief. When the Chinese urged them to introduce
restrictions in their own colonial territories, they fell back
on the argument they had adopted a century before: what would
be the use? Some other country would simply move in on the market,
and keep the colonies supplied by smuggling. The British delegates
scarcely bothered to conceal which 'other country' they assumed
would do the smuggling: China. For a hundred years they had argued
that they could do nothing to prevent opium from British colonies
being smuggled into China. Now, with exasperating logic, they
were claiming they would be able to do nothing to prevent Chinese
opium from being smuggled into British colonies. Following the
American example, the Chinese delegation departed.
The colonial powers, however, were careful to avoid giving the
impression that they were blocking reform. An impressive-looking
list of proposals for control of the opium traffic was adopted
before the Conference adjourned.
Coca and Indian hemp were added to the list of substances which
were to be restricted. The contracting countries were to 'undertake'
to enforce the regulations—rather than, as the Hague agreement
had put it, to 'use their best endeavours' to enforce them. A
permanent Central Narcotics Board was to be established, to which
the contracting countries would be required to make returns of
all imports and exports of the listed drugs, and also to show,
separately, the estimated amounts required for medical and scientific
purposes. When there was evidence of excessive production or importation,
the country concerned could be asked to give an explanation. An
international accounting agency, with powers to investigate, was
also to be set up; and the contracting parties agreed to accept
compulsory arbitration in any dispute arising out of the new Convention
which could not be settled by other means. Considering the difficulties
which the Conference had faced, not least through the withdrawal
of the Americans and Chinese, its achievements appeared very creditable,
on paper.
American observers were not deceived. A former Editor of the New
York Evening Post and Chief of the Washington Bureau of the
Associated Press, John P. Gavit, had been covering the meetings;
and he asked himself, when they were over, what steps the Conference
had taken 'reasonably calculated to limit the manufacture of these
substances or the production of the raw material from which they
are made'. The answer, he felt bound to emphasise, was 'none
whatsoever'. Only two of the decisions, he felt, had held
out any promise: that relevant information would be more carefully
scrutinised and correlated: and that the permanent Central Narcotics
Board was to be composed of men who 'by their technical competence,
impartiality, and disinterestedness will command general confidence'—they
were to be given five-year contracts, further to reduce their
dependence on their own governments. But Gavit was obviously not
the only person to have realised that a strong independent central
board, by publicising the relevant information, would be able
to expose which States were failing in their duty. Switzerland,
whose pharmaceutical industry handled much of the European narcotics
traffic, promptly served notice that if the information she forwarded
to the Board was disclosed to her disadvantage, 'she would forthwith
cease to furnish any'.
The Swiss need not have worried; the central board was never set
up, its place being taken by an advisory committee. Only one of
its members, La Motte reported, was dedicated to controlling the
opium traffic; the representative of China. The rest were dedicated
to preventing control from becoming effective, with the help of
ingenious procedural techniques. One British delegate would insist
upon open sessions, on principle. Another would agree, but put
the reasons why, in practice, this or that particular issue ought
more properly to be discussed in private; a proposition which
would be gratefully accepted by the other colonial powers. At
public sessions of the Opium Advisory Committee, the Chairman
would proceed with remarks like
'Gentlemen, you have read Document 418? I take it there is no
discussion? Good. We will now pass on to Document 419.'
Sometimes, too, the reference would be to a numbered paragraph
in a document which had not been made available to the press As
a result the 'open' sessions were productive mainly of gibberish.
La Motte was, however, able to unearth one news story of interest:
that the British Government was proposing to extend its opium
operations in India. When criticised for over-production there,
the British had long replied that at least the opium was going
up in smoke; it was highly esteemed for that purpose, but no good
for extracting derivatives like morphine. Now, the League heard
that this was incorrect. Indian opium could produce admirable
morphine—and the British had decided to go into morphine production
in India for themselves.
Alexander's travels
La Motte's conviction that the British were pretending to support
the League only to mask their own design—the extraction of the
maximum revenue possible from opium—was soon to be given confirmation.
In 1927 H. G. Alexander was offered a travelling fellowship to
investigate the drug problem in the Far East; and after his return
to England he published an account of what he had found. He made
no secret of his own view, derived from the time when his father
had been Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium
Traffic; this, he claimed, had simply made him more careful to
rely only on sources which could not be regarded as prejudiced
against the traffic, such as the reports of the Indian Revenue,
Customs and Excise Departments. And they revealed that it was
still Government policy to encourage the production not merely
of opium, but also of Indian hemp—even when there were complaints
about the effects. Thus, in the report of the Excise Department
of the United Provinces for the financial year 1926-7, the inhabitants
of the Benares region were criticised as 'most depraved in respect
of the use of intoxicants, although it is the very centre of the
sacred soil of the Hindus'; yet the same report boasted that 'the
downward tendency in the sales of charas has now been arrested',
and disclosed that consideration was being given to a proposal
for the cultivation of more hemp to produce more ganja
and, therefore, more revenue. The sales of hard liquor were also
growing. When any suggestion was made that they ought to be reduced,
the reply would be along the lines given in the Excise Report
for the Bombay Presidency for 1925-6; attempts to curb legal sales
merely increased illicit traffic, so that there was 'no improvement
in temperance, increasing contempt for law and authority, and
demoralisation of the inadequate excise staff'—as well as, of
course, 'loss of revenue'.
So while the British Government was professing to be taking measures
to reduce consumption of opium and hemp drugs, its agents in India
were in fact busy pushing sales in order to increase the colony's
revenue. Alexander did not know what should be done—or could
be done. Control, he admitted, would not be easy, and might require
a different approach in different circumstances; as between town
and country, say. But of one thing he was certain: whatever policies
were adopted, they should not be left to Britain or to any other
colonial power to decide or enforce, or the situation would get
worse: with, in all probability, destructive consequences—for
the colonial powers, as well as for their colonies.
Even in the limited sphere of drug and drink habits, the main
guilt of the West, for which sooner or later, the East will call
us to account, arises from the export of manufactured habitforming
drugs, such as morphine and cocaine, and from the export of spirits.
So long as we go to the East with these things in our hand, Chinese
and Indians and Malays are not likely to have much use for the
programmes of social reform that we carry in the other.
'The Smugglers' Reunion'
In the meantime, Ellen La Motte had been trying to keep the American
public informed about what was going on at 'The Smugglers' Reunion',
as the disillusioned newspaper correspondents in Geneva dubbed
the League's Opium Committee. She had found an ally: the Italian
delegate, Signor Cavazzoni. He was probably simply there to make
mischief for Mussolini's amusement; but he made it entertainingly.
The Opium Committee's only response was to find a new way to make
things more difficult for correspondents; it was agreed to cut
down on the number of their proceedings printed—'to save paper',
they claimed. La Motte was sure it was to enable them to doctor
the records. Events were to show she was right.
At this point the British delegates created a surprise, by proposing
that the League should send a fact-finding mission to the Far
East to investigate the opium situation there. This proposal,
they could claim, showed they had nothing to hide. But as Gavit
had already warned in his Opium, published in 1925, it
was part of the colonial powers' game to keep the general public
under the impression that drug taking was an exotic Oriental vice,
slipping into Western countries through the docks and slums; whereas
in fact the real danger lay not in opium or hashish from the 'depraved'
East, but in the drugs which were coming from the expensively
equipped, skillfully and scientifically conducted pharmaceutical
laboratories of the 'civilised' West—Britain, the United States,
France, Holland, but chiefly from Switzerland and Germany. The
fact-finding mission was being deliberately sent to the wrong
place. And the British had another motive, as one of their delegates
admitted to La Motte: 'what we really want is independent proof
of our inability to carry out our obligations under the Hague
Convention'. The British memorandum on the project emphasised
that in spite of the vigilance of their customs officials in colonies
like Malaya and Hong Kong, smuggling had greatly increased, and
now 'seriously embarrassed the Governments of those territories'.
Smuggled opium or morphine were indeed embarrassing: they reduced
the colonial revenue.
Having proposed the Commission, the British were in a good position
to limit its terms of reference, which they did by insisting that
only the distribution and consumption of opium—not production—should
be studied. Three Commissioners were chosen: a Belgian economist
and two members of the diplomatic corps, from Czechoslovakia and
Sweden. Their qualifications for selection remain obscure. They
held sittings in more than thirty different centres within the
space of seven months, which precluded any possibility of investigation
in depth—though as they were careful to explain, staying longer
would not have helped, as the kind of information they were looking
for was not available. They had hoped to be shown the results
of research; but
in this field little has been done. Even the question of how much
morphine a smoker or an eater of opium absorbs is unsolved. Practically
every question connected with the opium smoking problem needs
scientific study. A few examples of problems requiring investigation
are the actual effects of opium smoking on the individual, the
effect of dross upon the consumer, the relative harmfulness of
smoking and eating, the question of heredity... and the possibility
of finding harmless substitutes.
The Commissioners, however, found no difficulty in collecting
evidence in the form of personal views about opium; and what they
heard surprised them. They had all three come out—they explained
in their report—with the prevailing Western notion of the deleterious
effects of opium on health, expecting to have it confirmed. But
among the witnesses they examined, members of the indigenous races
as well as the Chinese, they had found a widespread opinion that
opium smoking was not harmful, the arguments in its favour 'reaching
sometimes to a superstitious belief in the medicinal value thereof'.
They also repeatedly came in contact with the opinion, based on
personal experience, that opium used in moderation acted as a
useful mental and physical stimulant, the physical stimulus being
particularly valuable where people had to work hard under difficult
climatic conditions. Even those notorious establishments, the
'opium dens'—or 'opium divans', as they were sometimes known—were
far from being the haunts of depravity that Western fancy had
depicted. They were 'often the only available resting places for
the poor, and though they are not attractive, they are scarcely,
even at their worst, more repulsive than the localities where
the corresponding classes of the Western people consume beer or
stronger alcoholic beverages'.
In general, the Commission's report did just what the British
had hoped it would do. It fed doubt into the minds of members
of the League whether opium should be regarded as a social menace;
and it actually conceded that the system of government monopolies
which had been established in British possessions was the best
solution, because it presented the only means by which price and
consumption could be controlled. Their policies, the British could
boast, had been vindicated. But their scheme, as things turned
out, had worked rather too well. It was not opium—the report
went on to argue—that was the real trouble. It was opium's derivatives,
morphine and heroin, 'a far more serious menace to the world'.
It had not taken long before heroin's pretensions to be a non-addictive
drug had been exposed; and experience had shown that it was far
more addictive than cocaine. The timing of the recommendation,
too, was unfortunate for the manufacturing countries, as there
had just been a succession of embarrassing scandals in connection
with the statistics which each member nation was required to send
to the League. Between 1925 and 1926, the returns had revealed,
at least a hundred tons of morphine had disappeared—in other
words, had been diverted from legal into illicit channels.
The countries concerned had manufactured the morphine, and declared
it, as bound by the 1925 Convention to do; the morphine had then
simply vanished. Some idea of what this disappearance involved
could be gauged from the fact that the world requirements of morphine
for medical and scientific purposes were put at less than forty
tons a year.
A search promptly began for a scapegoat, and it was conveniently
provided by Turkey, which had refused to ratify the Convention.
If the Turks were to disclose their figures—the rumour ran—they
might prove revealing. The Turks thereupon disclosed them, and
they were indeed embarrassing; but not to the Turks. They showed
that Turkey had exported more than two tons of morphine and four
tons of heroin to European countries which had ratified the Convention.
Under the Convention, they were required to declare all such imports.
Assuming that Turkey would not disclose the deals, none of the
countries involved had made the required declarations. Those consignments,
too, had slipped into the illicit market.
For still better measure, the Turks threw in the information that
in 1928 a single Alaska factory had manufactured nearly 9,000
lb. of heroin—rather more than two and a half times the world's
estimated medical and scientific needs, that year, and 8,920 lb.
more than the amount which the French had declared, in the production
figures they provided to the League, for the three years 1926-8.
The French Government, protesting its innocence, closed down the
factory. The Turks were apparently expecting this move, as the
chemists who lost their jobs were offered work in new heroin factories
in Turkey,
How had the morphine and heroin been diverted? The 'Naarden Case'
helped to clear up part of the mystery. Naarden, a Dutch firm,
had been ordering huge consignments from other countries, including
over 1,500 kg of heroin from a Swiss firm, and re-exporting them—but
describing them as 'in transit', so that the Dutch Government
would not need to declare them in its returns to the League. But
there were no statistics to reveal the drug's ultimate destination.
The Blanco formula
These scandals attracted hostile publicity. It could no longer
be pretended that the Hague Convention, even as 'strengthened'
by the 1925 reforms, was working satisfactorily. But how could
it be improved? The obvious solution was the one the Americans
and Chinese had urged on the other States at the Geneva Conference;
limitation of production of opium to the amount needed for medical
and scientific purposes. The delegates of the manufacturing countries
now announced that they were prepared to accept limitation, provided
agreement could be reached on how it was introduced.
They were very careful to ensure that agreement would not be reached.
It was accepted that each of the manufacturing nations should
have a production quota; but none of them was prepared to accept
a smaller share of the market than it already enjoyed; and the
idea of simply freezing the share of each, at the level at which
it had been on some agreed date, satisfied nobody, because, it
was claimed, it would destroy freedom of choice for the purchaser
in the future, and infringe national sovereignty.
The apparent deadlock had been broken by a member of the League
Secretariat. A. E. Blanco, son of a Spanish father and a British
mother, had been in the British-run Chinese Customs Service; he
had given much thought to the matter. In future, he proposed,
any country which wished to use a dangerous drug for medical or
scientific purposes should declare in advance what supplies would
be needed, and where it proposed to obtain them. In this way it
would be possible to allocate quotas in advance the world over,
but without freezing the levels or restricting choice; so that
if some manufacturer made a particularly good brand of medical
heroin or morphine, he would be able to benefit the following
year from increased demand.
The Blanco formula was the simple answer to the objections raised
by the manufacturing countries: altogether too simple for their
comfort. The Opium Advisory Committee—the 'Smugglers Reunion'—unable
to think of any objection to the proposal, decided simply to ignore
it. Blanco resigned in disgust, and there the matter would have
ended, had his scheme not been brought to the notice of the influential
American philanthropist, C. K. Crane.
Crane, struck by what he felt was the scheme's beautiful simplicity,
recommended it in a letter to the State Department. It would automatically
disclose the volume of the legitimate drug market in every country,
he pointed out; yet it would leave producers free to compete for
a larger share of the market, thereby minimising the need for
government intervention to apportion quotas. At the same time,
States' rights would not be infringed, as States could each decide
what supply of a drug they needed. Prompted by Crane, the State
Department drew the scheme to the attention of the Advisory Committee.
The committee reacted as before. As the delegates could think
of no valid objection, 'the only thing to do with the Scheme',
the British representative suggested, 'is to bury it'; and on
the motion of the Indian delegate, that 'the matter should simply
be dropped', it was.
Russell Pasha
But it was soon revived, and from an unexpected quarter: Egypt,
then a British Protectorate, suffering from an uneasy sense of
thwarted nationality.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the authorities there
had become increasingly worried by the number of young men who
took to smoking opium or hashish, deserting families, jobs and
society. Various measures had been adopted to control drug-taking.
Hashish had sometimes been subjected to a heavy duty; sometimes
prohibited, with heavy penalties, even death, for anybody caught
with it. The frequent alterations of policy, though, were an indication
of how ineffective the laws were; largely because they rarely
applied to foreigners. The better the law was enforced in Egypt,
the higher rose the price of opium or hashish; and the greater
the profit would be to foreigners who could import the drugs with
impunity and sell them through illicit channels, until the price
came down again.
Malcolm Muggeridge was to describe in his autobiography how, when
he went to teach at a school in Egypt in the 1920s, he observed
that the students at Cairo University often seemed to be 'faraway,
lost in some dream of erotic bliss; a consequence no doubt, in
the case of many of them, of their addiction to hashish, widespread
among the effendi class, and prevalent among the fellahin,
particularly the ones who had moved into the towns' The deleterious
effects of this addiction, Muggeridge recalled; were then universally
taken for granted,
and the Egyptian authorities, following a plan of modernisation
and national revival on the general lines of Kemal Ataturk's in
Turkey, spent a lot of money and effort in an attempt to stamp
it out. Russell Pasha, the head policeman and the last Englishman
to hold the post, was particularly active in trying to prevent
hashish getting into the country, and in reducing indulgence in
it... if anyone had suggested that all this endeavour was misplaced
because hashish did little harm, and was anyway non-addictive,
the suggestion would have been received with incredulity and derision.
And Muggeridge went on to use the recollection as the text for
a sermon denouncing the apologists for cannabis half a century
later; 'I know of no better exemplification of the death wish
in the heart of our way of life than this determination to bring
about the legalisation of hashish, so that it may ravage the West
as it has the Middle and Far East.'
The passage in his autobiography happens also to be an interesting
exemplification of the way in which moral attitudes can colour
memories. 'Russell Pasha'—Thomas Wentworth Russell—did indeed
devote a great deal of time and energy to trying to keep hashish
out of Egypt. Those were his orders, and he carried them out with
intelligence and integrity. But he did not think hashish was a
menace. He divided drugs into two categories 'white', and 'black'.
Hashish—'the vice of the city slums'—was in the white category;
it did 'comparatively little harm', he felt, and could not be
held responsible for the country's addiction problem. It would
be more sensible, he believed, to legalise the white drugs. According
to his friend and biographer Baron d'Erlanger, he announced that
'he was seriously considering some form of government monopoly
whereby hashish would be grown domestically, and its smoking would
be licensed and made to produce revenue for the Egyptian Government,
instead of costing enormous sums for the prohibition and, in addition,
draining the country of the money which was sent abroad to pay
for the foreign grown raw material'.
The idea proved unacceptable to his superiors; Russell had to
continue to try to prevent hashish smuggling into Egypt. But his
main preoccupation was with the black drugs, heroin (which a missionary,
Herbert Hayes, identified as the main threat as early as 1922)
and cocaine (according to a report from the American consul in
Cairo in 1923, fashionable men and women could be seen stopping
their automobiles so that they 'could buy their stuff, and sniff
it on the sidewalk'). It was heroin, though, Russell recalled
in his autobiography, 'which nearly killed Egypt'. D'Erlanger
agreed; by 1929, when Russell was appointed Director of the Egyptian
Central Narcotics Bureau, it had pushed opium, hashish and cocaine
into the background. Heroin not merely provided 'a sensation of
pleasant stupefaction, of happy contented drunkenness, of deadening
comfortable drowsiness', which was what people had originally
taken it for, but also 'a buoyancy of spirits, increased imagination,
temporarily enlarged brain power, and a capacity to think of things
which they would not otherwise have imagined'. But the price was
a disturbing addiction rate. One in four of Egypt's adult male
population, Russell estimated, became a black drug addict.
His first task had been to find how the heroin was coming into
the country; something that had baffled the customs officials.
From the start, according to d'Erlanger, 'a certain unromantic
and sordid aspect was recognised and faced squarely; namely that
the obtaining of reliable information is overwhelmingly a matter
of money'. It was decided to pay informers so liberally that giving
the required information would be more profitable than smuggling.
There was an immediate and gratifying response, revealing where
the heroin was to be found; 'in cases of olives; in tins of powdered
glue, of butter; in barrels of tomato sauce, of oil, and of wine;
in sacks of prunes; in millstones; in stoves with false bottoms:
in carpenters' lasts; in the soles and heels of shoes; and even
by means of tubes concealed in what Mrs. Grundy might have called
'the most intimate recesses of the person' (a method which, d'Erlanger
observed, 'starts quite an amusing line of thought when one remembers
which was the most usual way of taking heroin for its pleasurable
effects').
But as Russell soon realised, the men who were running the traffic
were never caught, because they took good care that the actual
smuggler, who might be caught, did not know who they were. As
soon as they found their consignments were being intercepted,
they switched them into different channels; and any temporary
reduction in the supply of heroin available in Egypt actually
helped them, by raising its price, to afford the increased outlay
in payments to couriers, and in bribes to customs officials And
Russell found, as Commissioner Lin had done, that informers would
realise they could again make more money by assisting the smugglers
than by assisting the police; or, they could have it both ways
by tipping the police off to the occasional consignment, while
helping the bulk of the heroin to go through.
Russell was right; it was 'overwhelmingly a matter of money'.
There was more than enough money in a single small tin labelled
beans, but containing heroin, to persuade many officials to do
no more than wink, as the crate full of tins of beans went through;
and the financial resources of the traffickers stretched much
further than those of the police. For Egypt to try to suppress
heroin on her own, Russell realised, was a futile exercise. It
could only be got rid of through an international agreement. It
was with that objective that he went to Geneva to put Egypt's
case to the League. Largely by the force of his personality, he
finally goaded the delegates into activity.
For all his achievement, though, in alerting public opinion to
the limitations of international control over the drug traffic
Russell did not disguise from himself the limitations of the general
policy which he had been called on to carry out in Egypt. Whenever
by energetic measures he succeeded in limiting for a while the
supply of 'black' drugs, thereby pushing up the price beyond the
means of many Egyptians who ordinarily took them, the enforced
abstinence, he found, did them little good. They turned, instead,
to a mixture of tobacco and henbane—impossible to deal with
effectively by police measures, as tobacco was too well established
to ban, and henbane grew wild. They even started to drink 'stewed'
tea, in the quantities required to intoxicate them, with lamentable
consequences 'to both their pockets and health'. So worried did
the Egyptian authorities become that in the 1930s they closed
the teashops, and smashed the utensils used to make and serve
the tea. The addicts found other ways to get it. 'They are always
searching for a stimulant', an Egyptian landlord told a committee
of enquiry in 1933; and as they could no longer afford the harder
drugs, or hashish, 'they are now finding it in this vile brew,
to the damage of their health'.
The reason people became addicted in this way, the landlord suggested,
would make an interesting subject for social and medical research.
Russell would have agreed. He was a shrewd enough observer to
realise that it was not the drugs, but the disposition to take
them, that mattered. Why, he wondered, were the Egyptians so susceptible?
Might the responsibility lie with the spread of parasite-carried
diseases like bilharzia, following the changes in the level of
the Nile as a result of the construction of the Aswan Dam? Whatever
the cause, a drug or drugs was invariably found to assuage the
craving. Coffee, hashish, opium, heroin... and now, stewed
tea; 'and so it goes on'.
The 1931 Convention
And so it went on; at Geneva, too, though not quite so smoothly
as before for the members of the Opium Advisory Committee. When
Russell arrived in Geneva in 1930 as Egypt's delegate to the Committee,
the scene there was quickly transformed: internally, by his energetic
efforts to find ways round the obstacles they had put up, and
externally by the world-wide publicity his ideas and speeches
attracted. When a meeting of delegates from the manufacturing
countries that autumn failed to reach agreement, because of their
unwillingness to accept quotas, the Blanco formula was revived,
and in the summer of 1931, a modified version of it was at last
accepted. In future, estimates of production and importation were
to be made by each member country, based on medical and scientific
needs and submitted, with explanatory memoranda, five months in
advance. All exports of heroin were to cease; all illicit heroin
seized was to be destroyed or rendered harmless; and all important
cases of illicit trafficking were to be reported to the League.
From the legal point of view, the 1931 Convention was unique;
the first not merely to apply the principles of a controlled economy
to a group of commodities by international agreement, but also
to regulate all phases of the production of dangerous drugs from
the time the raw material entered the factory to the final acceptance
of the finished product by hospital, laboratory, or chemist's
shop. Its impact appeared to be instantaneous; by 1932 the price
of raw opium was down to a quarter of what it had been in 1929.
The Advisory Committee, which for so long had resisted the introduction
of any such controls, now proudly boasted how well they were working.
The figures presented by the manufacturing countries showed that
they had begun to put the scheme into effect even before it had
been formally ratified; the amounts being manufactured had 'closely
approximated to, or even fallen below, the amounts which appear
to be required for legitimate consumption'.
Gradually it became clear, though, that the fall in the price
of opium had little to do with the new Convention. It was the
great slump that had drastically reduced demand; the resulting
surplus of opium and its derivatives had pushed down the price;
and some governments were restricting the production of narcotics
mainly in the hope of keeping the prices from falling further.
When the international drug traffic began to recover, it was seen
that the Convention was of little help in controlling it. The
few countries which had refused to ratify were able to cater for
illicit demand, wherever it was to be found; and modifications
to the Blanco formula reduced its effectiveness. The advance estimates
which countries presented to the League of their drug requirements,
it was agreed, did not have to be precise. Illicit narcotics,
if seized, need not, after all, be destroyed. And there were no
sanctions to employ against governments which failed to fulfill
their pledges.
The collapse of the Convention was described by Ferdinand Tuohy
in his Inside Dope, published in 1934, illustrated by the
'news flashes' which he had collected while writing it; ranging
from the discovery that 251 carrier pigeons were being employed
by the inmates of a U.S. prison to keep them supplied with narcotics,
to the report of the discovery by the French authorities of a
smuggling trick of the kind recorded a century earlier by Commissioner
Lin; a zinc-lined coffin from the Levant had been found to contain
heroin, as well as the corpse, the plan being to allow the committal
service and the burial to proceed, and 'for those in the deal
on this side to act the ghoul later'. In spite of the optimism
generated by Russell Pasha's impact at Geneva, Tuohy claimed,
'the dope stream is experiencing small difficulty in finding new
channels'. And worse would follow. Earlier drugs—he cited hashish—had
at least been 'natural'; it was the alkaloids, the derivatives,
which were disastrous. And now, they were being duplicated by
chemists; one of his 'news flashes' concerned the invention of
a new synthetic drug, far stronger than morphine.
Tuohy's fears were confirmed by S. H. Bailey's more academic survey
of the international campaign against drugs, published in 1936.
The third phase of the campaign, as Bailey described it—the
first had been initiated at The Hague, and the second by the revised
Geneva Convention in 1925—had not, he felt, been operational
long enough to be fairly judged; but already administrative difficulties
were making themselves felt. Any scheme for the limitation of
drugs had to be
grafted on to the diverse legal and administrative roots of more
than sixty independent States with their numerous and widely scattered
protectorates, colonies, and leased or mandated territories. Desirable
international measures may be obstructed by constitutional barriers
in one country, or public sentiment in another. Handsome allowance
has to be made for the variations in the efficiency, experience
and reliability of administrative agencies in different territories.
And by 1936, the chances that these administrative problems would
be solved was small. The League's authority was everywhere crumbling.
The Japanese had defied it by occupying China north of the Great
Wall; and although they could claim that by setting up their Manchukuo
opium monopoly they were only following the British colonial pattern,
as accepted by the League's own fact-finding mission, it seemed
improbable in view of their record that they would use their powers
to reduce production. Visiting Manchukuo for The Times
in 1935 Peter Fleming asked himself the question, 'is the monopoly
a crusade or a racket?'. On the evidence, he decided, it was
clearly a racket. Opium dens had been opened to all, even teenagers;
consumption was increasing; and the monopoly was already making
huge profits—as the Japanese authorities cynically acknowledged,
by imprinting a flowering poppy on their Manchukuo coins.
But even if the Japanese and all other producing countries had
been willing to co-operate, Bailey warned, the effort might be
futile, because of the development of synthetic drugs; 'the infinitely
varied and variable series of narcotic substances which competitive
research continues to discover and the medical profession of the
world to demand'. And it would never be easy to control such enterprises
because they were highly mobile; 'operations can be begun with
little preparation in one centre and, when economic, legal or
administrative conditions become less favourable, transferred
to another'. It was a prophetic statement; but for the time, the
drug manufacturers of illicit drugs hardly needed such assistance.
With Mussolini leaving the League, and Hitler ignoring it, its
authority was further eroded, and even the semblance of international
control of the drug traffic disappeared.
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