4

SHANGHAI AND THE HAGUE

China had lost another catastrophic war, this time to Japan. In 1894–5 the Qing empire confronted its island neighbour over the control of Korea, and it lost. China was forced to relinquish Taiwan and a string of Pacific islands, and to pay a large indemnity. Worse, a scramble by foreign powers for fresh concessions followed. New treaty ports and enclaves opened where foreign residents could operate beyond the reach of Chinese law, and more railways and other economic monopolies were sold off. The defeat, which involved the destruction of China’s modernized fleet, prompted a renewed bout of soul-searching. The court, now run by the formidable Empress Dowager Cixi, wavered over the need for radical reform. In 1900 the empress made the mistake of endorsing the Boxer Rebellion, a movement of militias practising martial arts that for a year attacked resident foreigners, their religious missions and their Chinese employees and friends. After another iron-fisted response from the combined great powers, China hit rock bottom. The Qing understood that they must adapt or die.1

‘There is no prospect of defeating enemies as soldiers have taken to the pipe, while neither workers nor merchants who smoke can expect to prosper,’ wrote the Shanghai daily Shenbao. ‘After opium is eliminated there will be a new China.’² In the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, as more and more Chinese people came to realize that their country required a deep political, economic, military and social transformation, opium began to be singled out. New opium critics arose, including high-level officials, scholars and journalists. The drug, as they saw it, was a source of national weakness and humiliation. Zhang Zhidong, the army reformer, administrator and member of the Grand Council, the de facto government, dedicated a chapter of his book Learn to the denunciation of opium.3 Yan Fu, the first scholar to introduce Darwin and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer to a Chinese readership, felt the same: if China was to be strong again it needed to tackle its opium problem.⁴ Reforms begun after the failed Boxer uprising included the abolition of the Confucian canon as the basis for education and administrative recruitment, the recasting of legal codes and an ambitious programme of political innovation reliant on elected assemblies. Along with these, the government launched a campaign against customs perceived to be holding the country back, including bans on certain interracial marriages, foot binding and opium smoking.⁵

The difficulty with opium was that it could not be stamped out without putting an end to imports. By then, the vast majority of the opium consumed in China was grown domestically, but were this to be eradicated, imports would certainly rise again in substitute. British support had to be tested first. On 21 July 1906 the foreign ministry official Tang Shaoyi approached Lancelot Carnegie, British legation secretary in Beijing, and announced his government’s intention to ‘introduce some regulations with the view of diminishing the consumption of opium’. Carnegie did not even bother to write home for guidance. ‘His Majesty’s Government would meet the Chinese Government half-way if they showed that they were really in earnest,’ he assured Tang.⁶

This stunning change of stance was actually the end point of a hard-fought process. In Britain opposition to the trade had been making its own comeback. It will be recalled that the First Opium War had attracted lively criticism domestically in the 1840s. The Second Opium War, however, had occasioned a parliamentary dissolution followed by an election, which the prime minister, Palmerston, had won by running an explicitly nationalistic, anti-Chinese campaign. For a while, this had doomed agitation against the opium trade. But opposition had revived in 1874 with the foundation of a Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (SSOT).

The SSOT had quickly grown to a position of influence by recruiting philanthropists and MPS to its cause. In 1875 it had received the backing of the wealthy railway family scion and politician Joseph Pease. Within another year, it could count seventeen MPS on its general council. In 1880 Lord Shaftesbury, a high-profile social activist who had been an early campaigner against opium, agreed to serve as its president. The society’s leadership also included a large bloc of religious figures, especially Quakers and Baptists though also a few Anglicans: it could tap into the growing network of the Protestant missions in China, collecting testimonies and producing statements on the drug’s deleterious physical and social effects. The SSOT published books and pamphlets denouncing the trade. It organized mass rallies and printed a periodical entitled The Friend of China (masthead: ‘Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people’). It recruited figures such as the missionary Frederick Storrs Turner and the former ambassador in Beijing Sir Rutherford Alcock to speak on public tours. Most directly, it sought to force a change in government behaviour by submitting resolutions against the trade in the House of Commons.7

In 1875 the SSOT proposed: ‘This House is of the opinion that the Imperial policy regulating the Opium traffic between India and China should be carefully considered by Her Majesty’s Government with a view to the gradual withdrawal of the Government of India from the cultivation and manufacture of Opium.’⁸ This lost by 94 to 57 votes. During its long career, the SSOT would bring seven motions against the opium trade.⁹ In 1889 the Commons were asked to agree that ‘the traffic in that drug [is] repugnant to the true interests of that country,’ and that the government should initiate talks with China to extinguish it. This was opposed by 165 to 88.¹⁰ In 1891 Joseph Pease called ‘the system by which the Indian Opium Revenue is raised . . . morally indefensible’. Pease overtly attacked the government for not just allowing but participating in the trade at every step from cultivation to manufacturing.¹¹ For once, this drew more than a perfunctory response. The Scottish MP and doctor Robert Farquharson objected: ‘Some time ago I heard of the case of an old woman living in a low district who died at the age of 90, and who had been in the habit of taking some 200 or 300 ounces of opium per diem (laughter) of course I mean grains. Yet she carried on a laborious life, and died in the full odour of sanctity at the age of 90 years.’ More convincingly, Farquharson rebutted the SSOT’S numbers for opium addicts, opposing statistics from the Chinese Maritime Customs service.¹² This time, nevertheless, the resolution actually passed, by 160 to 130 votes. To no avail. An amendment was immediately voted that Britain should compensate the Indian government for the fiscal loss, burying the decree.13

Success beckoned again in 1893. The great Gladstone was prime minister. Like Shaftesbury, he had been a youthful opponent of the First Opium War. Though Pease and his supporters were unlikely to know this, Gladstone’s sister Helen had been a lifelong laudanum addict. This time the SSOT attacked Indian opium cultivation while asking that the government examine fiscal retrenchment measures that would enable the colony to make up for its losses.¹⁴ Gladstone replied in person. ‘So far as I have been able to hear the speech of the Mover . . . I sympathise wholly with the general tone of his remarks, which, I think, tended to elevate and purify the atmosphere of this House.’ But the prime minister was worried about the ability of the Indian administration to stamp out opium. He also pointed out that, while he was proud of having opposed the Opium Wars, conditions had changed, with China now a major poppy cultivator: ‘We have ceased that operation of forcing the trade upon China. We have left that matter to China herself.’¹⁵ In attacking opium’s cultivation in India instead of the trade, the SSOT had made a tactical mistake: its motion contained the request that the government set up a Royal Commission to look for substitute revenues. The house agreed to appoint a commission, but to a different purpose: ‘to report as to . . . whether the growth of the poppy and manufacture and sale of opium in British India should be prohibited except for medical purposes’. There was no opium epidemic in India . . .

The SSOT was not the only lobby group to militate against opium. There was also a Christian Union for the Severance of the Connection of the British Empire with the Opium Traffic, formed in 1888 and endowed with a journal named National Righteousness, and a Women’s Anti-opium Urgency League, established in 1891.¹⁶ These were not without opponents. The naturalist and Indian official George Birdwood defended opium in The Times, the deputy surgeon general of the Bombay Presidency William Moore published a pamphlet around the same time entitled The Other Side of the Opium Question, and the Hong Kong solicitor William Henry Brereton printed another, named The Truth about Opium – though none of them was a disinterested party.¹⁷ The debate, however, died with the publication of the Royal Commission report. Having safely avoided China and confined itself to India, where there prevailed a long culture of controlled opium consumption, the commission was able to recommend that nothing should be undertaken. The SSOT’S claims about opium were not grounded in serious medical evidence, it wrote, and India was an example of the ‘temperate’ use of opium, comparable to that of alcohol in England. The British authorities could not ‘deal experimentally’ with their innumerable Indian subjects, and the financial arguments were strongly against prohibition.18 The SSOT published a rebuttal, and in 1895 Pease intervened again in the Commons to condemn the report, but this met yet another defeat.¹⁹

Matters might have remained there had it not been for the return of another Liberal government with a large parliamentary majority in 1906. Sir Edward Grey was now Foreign Secretary and John Morley Secretary of State for India. Morley had supported the society’s efforts since becoming an MP in 1883, and both men had been associated with anti-opium factions in the 1890s. So had a good number of the MPS now belonging to the majority.²⁰ Pease was dead, but on 30 May 1906 the long-time anti-opium activist Theodore Taylor introduced the motion that: ‘This House reaffirms its conviction that the Indo-Chinese opium trade was morally indefensible and requested His Majesty’s Government to take such steps as might be necessary for bringing it to a speedy close.’²¹ In a moving speech, Taylor went through the long history of British bullying and Chinese resistance, even quoting Lin Zexu’s 1840 letter to Queen Victoria. The doctor and MP Vickerman Rutherford spoke next, incidentally showing that the debate had internalized the modern medical discourse on opiates: ‘Opium was after all a narcotic poison . . . The outstanding scientific fact about this drug was the terrible craving that was rapidly developed in those who indulged in its use.’²² Then Morley took the floor. As befitted his post, he was circumspect. Morley first confirmed that what was being discussed was the China trade, not opium in India, perhaps drawing the lessons from the last great debate. The opium revenue, he explained, was now £3 million, or 7 per cent of the budget. He warned that the matter would need to be managed carefully on the Indian side. Yet he could not hide his pride: ‘In that great task, in that civilising mission of the regeneration of the East, whatever our attempts might give us, or might fail in giving us, do not let us fall behind,’ he concluded.²³ Thirty years of efforts had paid off. The motion passed without a division.

Though the British and Chinese anti-opium movements ran separate campaigns, there was always a degree of cross-fertilization. Educated Chinese people, some of whom now travelled outside the country, were horrified by their stupefied image abroad. As they understood it, they were called ‘the sick men of Asia’ because opium had made them physically weak. At a time when it looked as though China was in danger of being carved up and colonized, threatening its very existence, social Darwinism segued into tropes about a national body weakened by drugs. Evolutionary theory seemed to imply that each individual was as a cell in the body of society; if one cell was weak or sick, it affected the whole entity. After the war of 1894–5 these activists also held up the example of Japan. A contemporary text wrote: ‘People who smoke opium have weak endurance and cannot bestir or cheer themselves up. Their degraded minds make them able to contemplate only short-term matters, destroying their willpower . . . The Japanese prohibited opium severely, and as a result, their national power has grown. A large number of Chinese citizens smoke opium, and China’s power has consequently decreased.’24

Prominent anti-opium reformers included Yuan Shikai, provincial governor and future president of the republic, and Tang Shaoyi, the diplomat who approached Carnegie in 1906 and a future prime minister. The SSOT interviewed these figures, aiming to prove that the Chinese were sincere in their desire to stamp out opium, and that they only awaited a signal from Britain. In 1894 a delegation visited the Qing foreign affairs council, where it collected encouragements. ‘Your Society has long been known to me and many of my countrymen, and I am sure that all – save victims to the Opium habit and those who have not a spark of right feeling – would unite with me in expressing a sense of gratitude for the philanthropic motives and efforts of the Society in behalf of China,’ they were told by a high-level official. The Chinese government remained opposed to opium, these officials said, but its treaties committed it to keep the trade going. China was ready to eradicate opium domestically if Britain moved to end the trade.²⁵

Also active was China’s small Christian community. A Shanghai congregation, for example, met in 1890 to call for new drug-prohibition policies, passing resolutions for the diffusion of anti-opium material and asking that its members militate against the sale of hack cures.²⁶ The Shanghai clergyman Yen Yungking, educated in the United States and ordained by the American Protestant Episcopal Missionary Society, journeyed to Britain on a speaking tour in 1894. Yen visited 52 cities and addressed 112 meetings, of which 49 were on opium. He testified before the Royal Commission and was considered a star of the anti-opium movement.27 News and information also flowed back into Britain and the United States thanks to the movement of missionaries to and from the country. Church publications, eager for stories from China, were willing to print pieces about opium and their correspondents’ good works. The missions also made use of medical testimonies, many missionaries having been educated as doctors, and of periodicals such as the Chinese Recorder, published at the Presbyterian Mission in Shanghai from 1868.²⁸

All this was rewarded with official action in 1906. On 20 September, having received the right assurances from Britain, Beijing issued a new edict prohibiting opium. This time, suppression was to follow a carefully elaborated plan. A ban on cultivation was to be phased in over ten years, beginning in 1908. Acreage dedicated to the poppy was to be registered and reduced by a set percentage each year. Violators would forfeit their land, while anyone who achieved a faster reduction was to be rewarded. Shops would operate under strict controls and dens and other outlets cease to sell opium altogether. Opium smokers were to register in person, and the amount they were allowed to buy would gradually taper. The plan had two more facets. The first was a treatment programme involving the production of cures for addicts, to be provided for free to the poor. The second was a propaganda campaign that enlisted both the magistracy and civil society, encouraging citizens to associate, disseminate information on the ban, and urge everyone to participate.²⁹

In parallel, the Chinese government approached Britain on the subject of the Indian trade. In November 1906 it proposed entering into a bilateral agreement to reduce Indian opium exports to China in equal instalments over ten years.³⁰ An agreement was signed in 1907, coming into force in January 1908. Reductions were to match the pace of domestic eradication, sloping down to zero by 1917. The parties would take stock of the situation after three years, and if China could show it was upholding the domestic side of the bargain, Indian export reductions would continue. By 1912 the Patna factory had closed. The agreement was duly renewed in 1911, and the last consignment of Indian opium actually left in February 1913, four years ahead of schedule.³¹ Through a system of import permits which China imposed unilaterally, from 1909 it was able to enforce matching reductions in deliveries from the other two main opium exporters: Turkey and Persia.32

The matter might have ended there had another power not taken notice. Between the Commons vote of May and the Chinese approach of November 1906, Edward Grey received another proposal, this time from the American ambassador. The idea was to set up a ‘Joint Commission or a Joint Investigation of the Opium Trade and the Opium Habit in the Far East’, putting together the USA, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan and China.³³ The news from Beijing had not only made an impression in Britain but had inspired another international actor keen to establish itself as a friend of China.

Notwithstanding the involvement of American firms such as Russell & Co. prior to the First Opium War and, more discreetly, of a few others afterwards, the opium trade had never been popular in the USA. The American press had roundly condemned the war. The Christian Examiner, for example, had lambasted Britain for introducing the drug into the ‘great nation’ of China, and such publications as Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine and the American Farmer had done likewise.³⁴ A writer for the Boston Recorder had asked: ‘When has a Christian and civilized nation been engaged in a more disgraceful enterprise!’³⁵ Nor had the war been popular in political circles. Senator John Calhoun had publicly charged the British with waging a war to ‘force a poisonous drug down the throats of an entire nation’. Congressman John Quincy Adams, when he attempted to blame the conflict on Chinese arrogance rather than opium, had only attracted obloquy.³⁶

In the middle of the hostilities, the American government had dispatched a squadron of two warships to the region. Its commodore carried instructions to ‘impress upon the Chinese and their authorities that one great object of your visit is to prevent and punish the smuggling of opium into China.’³⁷ The result was the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia, granting the USA the same privileges as Britain except that the American government accepted that any of its citizens who dealt in opium would be fully liable to Chinese laws. In 1880, likewise, as part of a new commercial treaty, the United States and China had agreed to prohibit their nationals from bringing opium into each other’s ports.³⁸

Beyond their aversion to opium, American governments had long been hostile to imperialist encroachment on China. Achieving America’s manifest destiny involved opposing European colonial practices, from which the USA was meant to distance itself and which it was even expected to combat. From 1862, when the United States opened an embassy in Beijing, its representatives had been active in formulating the vision of a special national stake in helping China reform and secure itself against foreign aggression. This found application, in the 1900s, in the articulation of an ‘open-door’ policy in China to demarcate itself from and to forestall European and Japanese intrusion. The idea was that free markets and American capital would transform China, while American friendship would help curb great-power belligerence. The alternative, that the United States should partake in annexations, had briefly been considered, but had publicly been ruled out by President McKinley.39

Cooperation on opium offered an obvious avenue for furthering the Sino-American relationship. The American initiative of 1906 was all the more timely because for a while the two countries had been at odds over immigration. Throughout the 1880s and ’90s a movement had been building support in the United States for keeping Chinese immigrants out, a policy named ‘exclusion’. Legislation introduced in 1882 had suspended the admittance of Chinese workers for ten years and introduced a system of certificates for residents. This had been renewed in 1892, and in 1902 exclusion had been extended to Hawaii and the Philippines. There were 90,000 Chinese people in the USA at the time, and the policy was unambiguously racist. Predictably, the Chinese authorities were unhappy with it. They made their dissatisfaction clear by refusing to roll over an immigration treaty in 1904 and letting run a popular boycott of American goods in 1905.⁴⁰

A second motive for action was that the USA had acquired its own population of opium smokers as it took over the Philippines, after its victory in the Spanish–American war of 1898. The next year, the American administration terminated the opium-farm system that had been instituted by the Spanish and ordered all dens to be shut down. The governor, William Taft, imposed an import duty on the drug. As it had been under the Spanish, opium remained forbidden to Filipinos, being effectively reserved to the 70,000 or so residents of Chinese origin in the archipelago. In 1903, though, a change was discussed: the colony’s governing body proposed setting up an opium monopoly, as was being done in many places in the region. The idea was that it would help defray the costs for young locals to be educated in American-run schools.⁴¹

At this stage, the evangelical lobbies made their presence known. The Methodist Bishop of Manila, Homer Stuntz, mobilized the Protestant missionary network in China, which in turn enlisted its extensive anti-opium associations back home. Stuntz scored a coup when he convinced the Presbyterian minister and agitator Wilbur Crafts to take up his cause. Crafts was a lifelong activist who opposed alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, narcotics, divorce, close dancing and so on. His crusades against the spread of alcohol and opium among the ‘native races’ betrayed a strong belief in America’s moral responsibility to the rest of the world.42 He ran an International Reform Bureau with considerable clout and reach. The bureau arranged for 2,000 petitions against the proposed monopoly to be printed on telegraphic blanks and sent to persons of influence. Crafts channelled thousands of letters from businessmen, church groups, women’s clubs, Christian Endeavour chapters, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and so on to President Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root, the Secretary of War.⁴³

As Roosevelt knew, the International Reform Bureau was quite able to get its way: it had just run successful campaigns against the supply of alcohol to soldiers and the medical inspection of prostitutes in the Philippines. The president, in the lead-up to the 1904 election, was not about to alienate a reform/missionary coalition that claimed 30 million supporters. He asked for a report from Root, who had the bill postponed. Crafts and his allies upped their protests, with more petitions and complaints arriving from churches, educational institutions and temperance societies urging prohibition pure and simple. Roosevelt decided to instruct the Philippine authorities, who remained doubtful and were counting on their opium revenues, to set up a committee to study the various regulatory systems available.⁴⁴

On this committee was appointed one of the big beasts of the long war on drugs, alongside Lin Zexu and a few figures yet to appear in this book: Bishop Charles Brent. Brent was at once a deeply spiritual and an energetic figure. Born in Ontario, Canada, he had spent several years in a monastery in Boston before taking over an abandoned church among the city’s slums, where he had preached and performed social work. In the Philippines Brent had once volunteered to act as emissary to a group of Muslim ‘pirates’ based on one of the islands, which he approached on a small craft named the Peril. As one of them threatened to massacre his crew, the bishop pulled out a pocket knife and laughed that this was his only weapon, showing that he was also capable of courage – though perhaps on this occasion his bravery was overshadowed by that of the two ladies who accompanied him, one of whom, in a copycat gesture, pulled out a hat pin.45 Brent served as Episcopal bishop in Manila from 1901, and he acted as the ‘moral conscience’ for the commission that had responsibility, under the War Department, for managing the American colony.⁴⁶ He had the further advantage that he was not associated with the evangelical wing of his church, helping to make him look like a neutral party.

Bishop Brent was nevertheless no partisan of opium. In 1903 he had urged Taft not to fall in line with the rest of the discreditable East. ‘We would be educating men in vice in order that we might educate their children intellectually,’ wrote Brent.⁴⁷ The Opium Committee of which he formed part – also including Edward Carter, an army surgeon, and José Albert, a Filipino doctor – performed its job earnestly. The committee set out on its travels in August 1903 and went through Japan, Taiwan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Burma and Java, collecting information on opium legislation and conducting meetings with officials and other parties, returning to Manila in the following year.⁴⁸ For all this thoroughness, though, it was sometimes ready to take the anti-opiumists’ views at face value, for example that ‘a man who uses habitually even a small quantity of opium becomes as thoroughly dependent on the drug as if he used to excess, and that he is as miserable, useless, and hopeless when deprived of his usual dose of opium as he would be in such cases were he a user of considerable quantities of the drug.’⁴⁹ Of the various models it surveyed, it was most impressed by the Japanese system of opium management in Taiwan, combining a government monopoly with centralized manufacturing and the issue of permits to registered users. The committee recommended the adoption of a similar system for the Philippines, though it also thought this should be replaced, when practicable, with absolute prohibition.⁵⁰

These recommendations actually won out in even stricter form. The continued pressure from Stuntz, Crafts and their friends had borne fruit. In 1905 Congress accepted the principle of issuing permits to smokers, but as a short phase-in for full prohibition. Adult smokers of Chinese but not Filipino origin were allowed to keep receiving opium for three years. From March 1908 the drug would be banned outright save for medical use.⁵¹

Prohibition was satisfactory to Brent, who saw it as a victory of virtue over vice. Anti-opiumism was in the air anyway, the context one of public ferment and mutual emulation between the USA, Britain and China. Beyond the Philippines, Crafts had set his sights on the opium trade. International Reform Bureau branches now opened in Canada, Japan, China, Australia and Britain. Levering the ‘open-door’ policy, Crafts persuaded chambers of commerce in New York, Pittsburgh and other locations to write to the president to the effect that ‘the pauperizing of more than one hundred millions [sic] of people by opium’ was ‘one of the largest of the obstacles to the development of that largest market in the world’.52 He also pestered Grey. In January 1906, for example, Crafts wrote to the British Foreign Secretary to ask that Britain allow China to ‘take the same course which Japan has wisely taken’, enclosing the Philippine Opium Committee report for information.⁵³ The report enjoyed wide circulation besides, including in China.⁵⁴ Both Theodore Taylor and John Morley cited it when they spoke in the House of Commons that year.⁵⁵ Crafts was, moreover, far from alone: the anti-opium Commons resolution passed amid the year-long badgering of key politicians by domestic associations – by an association named the Christian Union for the Severance of the Connection of the British Empire with the Opium Traffic, for example – or by such personalities as the Archbishop of Canterbury.⁵⁶

It was in this context that Brent had been inspired to write, in July 1906, to Roosevelt to propose calling an international conference on opium. The idea was to repeat the Philippine exercise, but with applicability to the whole region, and indeed the world. The conference, exploratory at first, would if successful lead to an end to opium smoking, or any opium abuse. The project, from a foreign-policy perspective, offered the twin benefits of setting American policy as an example for others to follow and of establishing a new field of cooperation with China. Roosevelt was enthusiastic.⁵⁷

Grey reacted to the American invitation that November by consulting the India Office. There was some hesitation due to fears this might derail negotiations on the Anglo-Chinese reduction agreement, which remained in process in 1907. The response was nevertheless positive, providing the project covered domestic Chinese opium as well as the trade.⁵⁸ The American State Department proceeded to issue the invitations, and the main colonial powers all agreed to attend. They were to be joined by China, Persia, Thailand and, as late additions, Italy and Austria–Hungary. On 1 February 1909 the delegates of these thirteen countries met at the Palace Hotel in Shanghai.59

Even though the Shanghai conference was no more than an informal gathering without the power to produce a treaty – indeed for this reason it was not even called a conference, but only a commission – it stands out as probably the single most important moment in the long war on drugs.

Multi-lateral organizations and agreements possess normative power often well exceeding what coercive strength they can mobilize. The need for a commonality of rules in international trade, the desire to form part of the community of nations and be seen to do so, and the authority of internationally sanctioned technical and scientific standards have all, in the twentieth century, guaranteed the influence of such initially informal gatherings. The resolutions of the Shanghai International Opium Commission would come to form the basis, through the League and the United Nations, of the world’s drug regime as it exists today. As well as acquiring direct power via trade and cross-border policing, they would inspire drug laws throughout the world. The Shanghai commission and its successor gathering, the Hague conference, would set the tone on drug control for the next hundred years and counting.

The commission, having assembled, was off to an inauspicious start. The Shanghai governor, Tuan Fang, welcomed the guests by putting forward China’s opium prohibition edict and its successes.⁶⁰ The delegations had beforehand been asked to arrive with reports detailing their respective legal frameworks and the levels of opiate use in their home countries and colonies. China had come up with incredibly high estimates for the period before the edict. The British consul Alexander Hosie disputed these. Hosie observed that the Chinese statistics for 1906 were only based on scattered observations for 1907–8, upped by a set percentage to account for success in the eradication programme. He also thought that estimated average use per smoker was too low, leading to an overstatement of the extent of China’s addict population.⁶¹ A spat ensued. France, which seemed to have different priorities, moved that French should be adopted as the commission’s official language.⁶²

Yet the confrontation properly began when the American delegation took the stand. The commission had established Bishop Brent as its president. Alongside him sat two other Americans: Charles Tenney, a consular official in Beijing who, having gone to China as a missionary, had learned Mandarin Chinese and risen to become president of the Tianjin university, and Hamilton Wright. Wright was a doctor with a speciality in tropical medicine, especially beriberi, the plague and malaria. He had worked in laboratories in Germany and Britain before returning to the United States in 1903, where he performed research at Johns Hopkins University. He was passionately engaged on the side of prohibition. To Brent’s moral figure, he would play the role of the scientist with an edge.63

The American team had mapped out its game in advance, drafting a number of mock resolutions ahead of the conference. Procedural matters over, Wright introduced these at the first session of substance, on 23 February 1909. They came as a bombshell. Wright’s opening shot was to propose no less than the complete prohibition of all opiates, except as confined to medical practice: ‘Be it Resolved, therefore, that in the judgment of the International Opium Commission a uniform effort should be made by the countries represented at once or in the near future to confine the use of opium, its alkaloids, derivatives and preparations to legitimate medical practice in their respective territories.’⁶⁴ At one stroke, the use of opiates as intoxicants or as self-medication were to be ruled out. This was the Philippine model writ large, or rather, the as yet unproven, newly adopted Chinese model. It was a model at odds with practice not just throughout the region, but in Europe and the United States themselves, with their loose regulation of opiate manufacturing and distribution and their complete absence of sanctions on non-medical use.

If this were not enough, Wright moved as his next proposal to dismantle the opium monopolies that prevailed throughout Southeast Asia: ‘No Government should, as a matter of principle or necessity, continue to depend upon the production of opium, its alkaloids, derivatives and preparations for an essential part of its revenue’ and ‘no system for the manufacture, distribution or use of smoking opium should continue to exist.’ As a supporting, practical measure, Wright also proposed to clamp down on the trade, suggesting that ‘all countries which continue to produce opium, its alkaloids, and derivatives and preparations . . . prevent at ports of departure the shipment of opium, its alkaloids [etc.] to any country which prohibits the entry of opium.’⁶⁵

The British delegate, Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, flabbergasted, immediately moved that each resolution be discussed as it was brought forward, rather than all of them at once. He added: ‘It is . . . with extreme regret that we find ourselves unable to give the conveners of the Commission our entire support in all the proposals which they put forward. Misunderstanding and misapprehension, we believe, can only result from a vote in favour of prohibition in the unqualified form in which it is presented in these resolutions.’ Restriction to medical use, Clementi Smith understood, equalled drug prohibition. ‘We object to the construction in the first place because it unquestionably puts an erroneous construction on some of [the country] reports, when it lays down in its preamble that they recognize that the use of opium should be confined to medical practice.’66

Clementi Smith contrasted the United States and China with India, where the opium habit ‘had been known for centuries’ and yet consumption remained subdued, as the reports showed, proving ‘that the system of regulation built up in India is in fact, in a large measure, an efficient instrument in the prevention of abuse’. Opium was ‘one of the main household remedies’ in India, and there were strong, practical objections to the possibility of enforcement there or anywhere. Faced with this barrage, Wright proposed changing his wording to read ‘medical practice or Government Regulation’. The German delegate Walther Rössler offered to add the caveat ‘as far as practicable’. British opposition, Clementi Smith insisted, was a matter of principle. ‘To put it perfectly plainly, and to be entirely frank, the British Delegation is not able to accept the view that opium should be confined simply and solely to medical uses.’⁶⁷

Clementi Smith found that, by contrast, he could back the Wright resolution promising controls over the export of opiates to countries that prohibited them, namely China. This was what Britain already did under the Anglo-Chinese Agreement of 1907. Neither did any of the other delegates object. With a couple of minor changes of wording, this was approved.⁶⁸ The clause found its way among the nine resolutions eventually adopted by the commission, taking its place among a short list that also mentioned the dangers of morphine, the closure of opium dens in China’s international settlements and the regulation of anti-opium remedies.⁶⁹ Trade was an important tool around which the powers first assembled in Shanghai and later at the League of Nations would elaborate the architecture of drug control, and this modest, original idea would have a significant practical future.

The first Wright resolution, however, had not been voted down, but merely sent into committee. This committee hammered out a compromise text, producing a modified draft that was again put to the delegates on 24 February. In session, Wright and his colleagues wore down their opposition. The Shanghai commission was about being seen to stand on the moral high ground, and the proposal could not be thrown out entirely. The delegates eventually accepted the idea ‘that the Commission finds that the use of opium in any form otherwise than for medical purposes is held by almost every participating country to be a matter for prohibition or for careful regulation’.70 In qualified wording, the prohibition of drug use except under medical control had found its way onto the list after all.

Its importance was not just in what the principle aspired to, but in what it excluded. To embrace Wright’s philosophy was also to rule out alternative formulas. Prohibition in its strictest formulation – the Chinese and the American formulations, at least as implemented in the Philippines – prevailed, and to the detriment of other policy orientations. The ideas that intoxicants were something to be managed rather than combated, that their non-medical use might be acceptable under certain circumstances, or that addiction might more easily and usefully be treated than stamped out all died in Shanghai.

When Clementi Smith lauded the Indian culture of opiate use over the Chinese, this was of course self-serving. India’s opium culture had benefited the colonizer. His speech made a valid point nonetheless. India’s per capita opium consumption was far lower than China’s, or indeed than that of Britain itself. Too little was known as to why opiates were prone to spread like wildfire within one culture and at one point in time, such as nineteenth-century China, and not in another place or period. British imperialism was partly responsible for China’s problem, admittedly, but then India also lay under the imperial boot. India’s light regulation of the drug had arguably worked better than either the drastic, pre-Opium War Qing policies or the complete tolerance that had been forced on China afterwards.

The French delegate likewise defended his country’s Indochina policy: ‘It must not be imagined that a growing revenue derived from opium means any relaxation of the policy of regulation. On the contrary the result would be reduced consumption. In such countries as Java, and French Indo-China, the fact that the tax on opium is regularly increased practically takes the drug out of reach of the native population.’71 France had anticipated the Shanghai conference with restrictive measures. In 1907 it had closed down the opium dens in Tonkin and Annam. Existing dens remained tolerated in Cochinchina and Cambodia, but it was forbidden to open new ones. This protected the most vulnerable: poor smokers unable to invest in the smoking equipment that the dens provided. In parallel, the colonial government had tasked a commission with studying how opium consumption could be reduced and the fiscal shortfall made up. This had ushered in public education measures and a ban on the sale of dross, alongside the rise in prices.⁷² In similar vein, the Dutch spokesman proposed a plan by which, alongside intrusive restrictions on domestic operations, ‘henceforth the wholesale trade in opium be allowed only between the Governments of opium-producing and opium-consuming countries and be forbidden to any private persons’.⁷³ (Wright, his free-market reflexes suddenly awakened, was horrified.) The Dutch genuinely believed, based on experience with the Opiumregie, that prohibition was counterproductive, and that it only created opportunities for smuggling and brought misery to addicts.⁷⁴

None of this was given a serious hearing. The colonialists, whether British, French or Dutch, were on the back foot. The legacy of the Opium Wars and the cynicism of the old farm systems worked against them. China, the aggrieved party, and the USA, the righteous party, prevailed over the guilty parties that were the imperialists. Those who defended other options were discredited, therefore prohibition pure and simple prevailed. This dynamic determined, inescapably, the direction drug regulation took in Shanghai and, through the commission’s standard-setting, beyond it.

Wright’s second proposal, his attack on the monopolies, was temporarily deflected. This, though, was only after Japan pointed out that its Taiwanese scheme aimed at an eventual nil consumption.⁷⁵ There also, the final wording was merely modified. The argument was ignored that prohibiting drug use was impractical and dangerously difficult to police. Warnings that bans led to smuggling and its host of associated evils, once raised by Qing mandarins and now made by the British and the Dutch, were brushed off. While it was recognized that the opium monopolies would continue to operate for the foreseeable future, the commission recommended ‘that each Delegation concerned move its own Government to take measures for the gradual suppression of the practice of Opium smoking’.76 The end aspiration was the same: to forbid rather than to tax, with all the latent implications in terms of policing, incarceration and crime.

As the delegates filed out of the Palace Hotel, they congratulated themselves on a job well done. Perhaps not all of them understood the significance of what they had just agreed. Overnight, prohibition in its strictest expression had become the guiding principle of an international system in the making. The long war on drugs had received its most vital boost since the original Qing edicts of 1813.

On 12 October 1915 the British doctor Sir William Collins delivered a lecture on the subject of ‘the ethics and law of drug and alcohol addiction’.⁷⁷ Collins discussed John Stuart Mill, liberty and the appropriateness of state intervention, defending, in Victorian fashion, the sanctity of individual choice. He did not like social reformers, especially the then popular medical reformers who were the eugenists. ‘If a mere majority . . . is arbitrarily to decide what they may consider to be socially right in opinion and action and to enforce it against whatever they are pleased to deem anti-social in thought or deed, then the days of Liberty will verily be numbered . . . We might live in a benevolent despotism, a community of well-conducted and well-cared-for slaves, a menagerie of well-regulated animals, but it would be despotism and slavery all the same.’

At the same time, Collins argued, the question was whether addiction left the drug user with any ability to exercise his or her freedom in the first place. ‘Alcohol and drug addiction are to be regarded as examples of the surrender of self-control in favour of self-indulgence,’ he thought. What this came down to was Mill’s principle that one should not be allowed to surrender one’s own liberty voluntarily – Mill’s point having been made in regard to slavery. (‘The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free.’) State intervention, therefore, was not tyranny if it protected the user from surrendering his or her freedom to the drug. ‘It is the restraint of liberty to secure a larger and truer liberty. It is the limitation of self-will in the interests of free-will and self-control.’ Collins praised the principle that drugs ‘should be restricted to medical and legitimate purposes only’, and he agreed that ‘not only national but international control of the traffic in these noxious agents is required in order to be successful.’

Doctors, as a collective, were not calling for the punishment or criminalization of the drug user. If addiction is a disease, the drug user belongs in hospital, not prison. The British Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety and its American cousin, the Association for the Cure of Inebriety, actually hoped to rescue addicts and drunks from incarceration. In Britain, under a seventeenth-century Act that remained on the statute books, public drunkenness was an offence, and disorderly drunks or people found publicly intoxicated and unable to make it home were routinely jailed.78 (The number of those sanctioned on this charge was high: 23,000 in 1876.⁷⁹) The Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety pushed for the alternative: to commit inebriates, who included not just habitual drunkards but inebriates in opium, morphine, ether, chloral and cocaine, to treatment facilities. It had successfully pressed for the legislation contained in the Inebriates Act of 1888, which provided for the detention of drunkards in government-licensed retreats. In 1908 an administrative ruling extended inebriety to drug-taking, though confinement remained voluntary, expensive and in practice rare.⁸⁰

Doctors, however, were divided. They could not quite agree on the moving cause of addiction, whose very nature remained ambiguous, or on the question of the patient’s free will and legal responsibility. Many of them continued to treat drug use as a mere vice. They also differed on the issue of compulsory versus voluntary commitment. This created the irony that the disease theory of addiction, itself the keystone to the notion that drug use should be confined to the medical sphere, was left to be recuperated by others when it came to action.

Among these were investigative journalists, with their nose for scandal and taste for juicy anecdotes. An example was the series of Harper’s Weekly articles published by Samuel Hopkins Adams under the title The Great American Fraud. ‘Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines,’ began Adams. ‘In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.’⁸¹ The role of the press as pressure group in another country, France, has already been noted.

Britain, and even more so the USA, also had to contend with powerful temperance movements. In the USA an anti-saloon league had from 1895 been harassing state legislatures to pass laws allowing local governments to abolish saloons. Its campaign was phenomenally successful, and by the 1910s vast swathes of America, especially rural, had become saloon-free. The league followed up with a national drive for alcohol prohibition that would culminate in the Volstead Act of 1919.82 Temperance was a bugbear of the societies for the cure of inebriety because it emphasized sin and vice, and therefore established the drunkard or addict as a guilty party, not a patient deserving of care. Its chosen cause moreover easily shifted from alcohol to drugs: Wilbur Crafts’s role in promoting the unforgiving Philippine opium regime was the best illustration.

Governments were meanwhile increasingly prepared to set down norms for public hygiene. In the USA the American Pure Food and Drug Act, passed in 1906, enforced the accurate labelling of food and drugs and forbade misbranding or adulteration, creating the Food and Drug Administration. In Britain the 1911 National Insurance Act established compulsory health insurance for workers for the first time. Legislators, in Europe as in the USA, were increasingly primed to accept that public health was part of their remit, and it had become at least conceivable that this remit should include drug control.⁸³

After Shanghai, the only questions became when and how such controls might be enacted: answers were provided at The Hague in 1911–12. Less than eight months after the dissolution of the Shanghai commission, in September 1909, the American State Department began to solicit the participants for a follow-up, this time with the aim of coming up with a legally binding agreement. Wright drafted the invitations. He was able to persuade the new Secretary of State, Philander Knox, to take up the idea by once again pointing out the advantages to American prestige in China.⁸⁴ Up for discussion would be the control of the production, manufacture and distribution of opium, national drug regulations, governmental oversight of imports and exports, and reciprocal search rights on vessels suspected of smuggling. Among the American proposals was also the creation of an international commission for supervising the future agreement.

Faced with this ambitious agenda, the Shanghai powers were at first reluctant to participate. The British did not reply for a year. The Foreign Office was infuriated by a report Wright had published on the Shanghai commission aggrandizing the American role and portraying Britain as obstructionist.85 The British nevertheless eventually consented conditionally, with among other dilutive counter-proposals that cocaine also be discussed. Eventually the principal states concerned agreed to meet in The Hague in December 1911.⁸⁶

In spite of this unpromising start, the Hague discussions were friendly and uncontroversial, congratulatory in tone, even, compared to Shanghai. Brent was once again appointed to the president’s chair. The French and Dutch delegates paraded recent measures taken in Indochina and Indonesia to reduce the scope of opium smoking, and the head of the Chinese delegation reported favourably on the progress of eradication in his country. The Persian representative, Mirza Mahmoud Khan, announced a new law aiming to eliminate opium smoking within eight years, on the Philippine model. Even a typically less-than-gracious aside by Wright on malaria failed to spoil the mood. (‘They all know now that opium was not a specific cure for malaria, yet in certain parts of England and America laudanum was still regarded as a cure for certain ills, and often its use was attended by serious results, and that the conclusions reached by the Royal Opium Commission in 1896 on this subject are held by the medical profession to be entirely erroneous.’⁸⁷)

As a first measure, the assembled powers soon agreed to ‘prevent the export of raw opium to countries which shall have prohibited its entry’.⁸⁸ The Hague Opium Conference continued likewise along the lines of the agenda set two years before, with cocaine added to the list and with the aim of making binding resolutions. Another significant step was taken with an agreement to pursue ‘the gradual and effective suppression of the manufacture of, internal trade in, and use of [smoking] opium, with due regard to the varying circumstances of each country concerned’.⁸⁹ The pious wish that the Southeast Asian opium monopolies should tend towards extinguishing consumption had acquired treaty sanction.

Friendly emulation, however, encouraged the delegates to do more than simply bestow legality on the various clauses agreed on in Shanghai. The conference reiterated the principle that the manufacture, sale and use of opiates, and now cocaine, should be restricted to ‘medical and legitimate purposes’.⁹⁰ Expanding on this principle, however, the conference now took it upon itself to make the user, rather than just the manufacturer or seller, penally responsible. It was Clementi Smith himself who introduced the idea that ‘each participating Government undertakes to examine the possibility of introducing legislation to prohibit the unlawful possession of morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts.’91 For the first time, someone had mentioned possession explicitly and proposed to make it illegal.

That it was the British delegate who came up with the proposal may be found surprising, in light of the ideas he had professed in Shanghai. But Clementi Smith was a colonial administrator with long experience gained in India and Hong Kong.⁹² That he should defend the opium user, as he had done in Shanghai, was nothing unexpected. It was by the same token equally natural that he should oppose the ‘unlawful possession’ of intoxicants, which in the colonies meant smuggled goods, something that it was the administrator’s vocation to fight. Clementi Smith, besides, had more reason to be familiar with Chinese than with European norms when it came to drugs – and the new Qing prohibition edict, with its punishment of unauthorzed use, looked by the time of The Hague conference to be succeeding. Meanwhile with Britain in the lead, none of the other colonial powers were likely to oppose the point, and neither, of course, was the prohibitionist camp. The treaty read, in final form: ‘The contracting Powers shall examine the possibility of enacting laws or regulations making it a penal offence to be in illegal possession of raw opium, prepared opium, morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts.’⁹³

The criminalization of the drug user was a far from inevitable feature of The Hague Opium Convention. The conference might just as well have confined itself to conferring legality on the Shanghai norms. Ostensibly the new norms fitted with the double influence, in evidence in Shanghai, of colonial and late Qing practices – as Clementi Smith’s conspicuous role confirmed. But they also owed to Western ideas as better embodied by Wright. Medicine served as an alibi. It provided the scientific patina to a programme originally made topical by the anti-opium edict passed in China and the American desire to cooperate with it. Addiction, loosely interpreted, provided the excuse that drug users were by nature unfree. User criminalization internalized medical findings (that addicts were sick) while at the same time discarding their logical upshot (that they should not be criminalized but treated). By this sleight of hand, what already applied in the Far East, or part of it, was made valid everywhere else.

One final piece of obfuscation emerged from the conference, or rather its immediate aftermath: the resurrection of the idea, once an important Qing tenet, of supply suppression. The notion arose, or rather re-emerged, during the follow-on sessions arranged to ensure ratification.

The treaty, The Hague Opium Convention, concluded with legally innovative clauses concerning its entry into force. The aim was also to broaden membership beyond the original list of twelve signatories. A protocol was drafted for adhesion by newcomers. The Dutch government was tasked with collecting these adhesions and ratifications, and it was agreed that the convention would go into effect three months after all had been duly obtained. This was a slower process than anticipated, however, and another meeting was accordingly called in The Hague, convening in July 1913. Twenty-four states had now signed, but not necessarily ratified, the convention, and a number of key states remained outsiders, including Austria–Hungary, Turkey and Peru – the first a great power and the other two significant producers of opium and coca respectively.94

At issue was whether the participating powers might put the convention into force even though the states on this second list remained non-signatories. Germany, followed willy-nilly by a few others, declined to do so. It was agreed to urge non-signatories again and that, should these efforts prove unsuccessful by the end of the year, yet another conference would be convoked. This third and final Hague opium conference convened in June 1914. The countries represented now also included Guatemala, Montenegro, Romania, Sweden, Uruguay and Venezuela, but key states continued to be missing. Britain announced that it was ready to ratify anyway, and so did the Netherlands, Argentina, Chile and Ecuador.

Germany, however, reiterated its opposition. The reason was simple: the convention would remain ineffective if outsiders were able to take advantage and pick up the slack created by it. ‘An international Convention regulating the production and sale of opium, morphine, and cocaine, cannot achieve the desired result as long as it will be possible for citizens of non-signatory states to produce these drugs and circulate them without restraint . . . As long as a flourishing drug trade is capable of developing in these countries [Turkey, Greece, and Serbia, who had refused to sign], the Imperial Government will expect these states also, to accede to the Convention.’⁹⁵ Faced with this obduracy, Charles Denby, one of the American representatives, read out a report vaunting anti-drug measures in the USA and the Philippines. The problem was that there was some smuggling. ‘It is fairly to be presumed that with a worldwide control of the traffic under the terms of the Convention which is under consideration even this small extent of smuggling could be stopped. The laws of the United States as to the Philippines leave little to be desired in control of the opium and drug traffic, but to make those laws perfectly effective, the United States Government does depend on the cooperation of the other powers.’ Denby urged the existing signatories to put the convention into effect whether or not others had done so.96

The German delegate had raised the valid point that an incomplete system of drug suppression was likely to prove leaky and ineffective. Denby’s answer was to strike farther and harder. Senator Joe Biden explained of the war on drugs in 1994: ‘The drug war overseas has always been an important element of U.S. counter-narcotics policy. America must be ready to look beyond its border for opportunities to combat the drug trade. Fighting the drug war overseas – where the most dangerous drugs used in the U.S., cocaine, heroin, originate – is the first line in defense in combating the scourge of drugs.’⁹⁷ The panacea of supply suppression would prove as powerful as it was tenacious, influencing international action for decades to come.

Notwithstanding its difficult ratification process, The Hague Opium Convention promptly set the ball rolling on anti-narcotics legislation in a number of national jurisdictions.

In the USA Wright led the assault. The ring was tightening around the drug user even before the passage of the keystone in federal drug legislation: the 1914 Harrison Act. Cocaine and morphine users were already liable to find themselves on the wrong side of state or local laws if simply by association with public disorder. States and cities were reinforcing control over the main outlets – pharmacies and druggists – and clamping down on infringement. In New Orleans, for example, drug arrests for 1911 totalled seventy, but reached 316 in 1914, the first year of the city’s Poisonous Drug Act.⁹⁸ The drug industry, smarting from the bad publicity, was voluntarily abandoning cocaine. By 1914 nearly all of the coca and cocaine products were gone, including dozens of wines, tonics and snuffs. There only remained the increasingly suspect catarrh cures, still on sale because their manufacturers depended on them for economic survival.⁹⁹

The USA possessed no national anti-drug legislation, except for the new Philippine regime, to show for itself as its delegation made its way to Shanghai. The State Department agreed that a gesture was in order. At its behest, Congress passed an Act forbidding the importation of smoking opium on 9 February 1909. This was in the middle of the conference, and Wright was able to announce the measure with a flourish.100

The next step was the passage of federal legislation. Wright drew from the data-collection exercise performed ahead of the conference to publish panic-inducing estimates of American opiate addiction. ‘Of all the nations of the world . . . the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita,’ he announced, rather incredibly, in the New York Times Magazine in 1911. Americans, he said, consumed more opium than Russia, Austria–Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy put together. Massaging data that actually showed a downward trend in the last decade, Wright revealed that: ‘Since 1800 the population of this country has grown 133 per cent, while the amazing fact is plainly on the records that our opium consumption has increased 351 per cent.’¹⁰¹ The press scarcely needed this kind of encouragement, but Wright’s tactics were popular. The New York Times, for example, agreed that the American people were at risk of ‘degenerating back to something worse than monkeydom’.¹⁰²

Passing legislation was trickier, and Wright initially overreached. President Taft presented the American delegation’s report on the Shanghai Opium Commission to Congress in 1910: this concluded that ‘habit-forming drugs’ should be regulated federally, through the Treasury Department.¹⁰³ With this backing, Wright arranged for representative David Foster of Vermont, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, to introduce a measure for eliminating the non-medical use of key drugs. The bill imposed meticulous record-keeping, labelling and reporting obligations on drug distributors, with stiff penalties for violators.¹⁰⁴

The hearings, carried out in December 1910 and January 1911, were chaotic. A representative of the National Wholesale Druggists Association, Charles West, attacked the use of stamps and labels and the financial burden it would entail. He felt the law’s provisions were too severe, though he did acquiesce to a simpler law, ‘one that can be enforced and will not inflict too much hardship on the trade’. West was meanwhile questioned by Francis Harrison, who asked: ‘What about this material they call Coca-Cola? . . . Isn’t it a habit-forming drink?’ West agreed that it was, and so was Pepsi-Cola. Harrison then proposed that coca leaves be included in the bill as an ingredient of ‘Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola and all those things that are sold to Negroes all over the South’.105

Another witness, Charles Towns, operator of a drug and alcohol hospital in New York, thought that the most dangerous substances were codeine and cannabis, opining that ‘there is no drug in the Pharmacopoeia today that would produce the pleasurable sensations you would get from cannabis . . . and of all the drugs on earth I would certainly put that on the list.’ Charles Woodruff and William Muir spoke on behalf of the drug manufacturers and the New York Pharmaceutical Association respectively: both denied that the trade associations opposed legislation, but they warned that they were against the painstaking registration of infinitesimal doses. They incidentally disputed Wright’s numbers on the prevalence of drug abuse. Finally, Henry Wiley, the architect of the Pure Food and Drug Act, arrived from the Bureau of Chemistry with samples of narcotic-containing proprietary medicines, including addiction remedies and infants’ soothing syrups. Wiley wanted a prohibitory law, but he thought caffeine should be added to the list, as well as the major drugs of abuse that were acetanilid, antipyrene and phenacetin.¹⁰⁶

The bill failed. Its control provisions were too onerous and scared off the trade associations. Both the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association were favourable to a properly framed drug law. They did not necessarily support measures such as the denial of opiates to dependent users, though, or, in the pharmacists’ case, the removal of exemptions on patent medicines. They were also weary of being asked to carry the burden of control, with all the costs it involved.¹⁰⁷

Wright resumed his campaign in June 1912, after the success of The Hague conference. His new sponsor, after Foster had died, was the New Yorker Francis Burton Harrison. Again, the bill at first failed to pass the House Ways and Means Committee, the cantankerous Wright having abstained from incorporating changes demanded by the drug trade. The manufacturing and distributing interests had formed a National Drug Trade Conference (NDTC) to keep tabs on narcotic legislation. Harrison sat Wright across from the NDTC and had them agree a compromise. Harrison introduced his revised bill in the House in June 1913 and, anti-climactically when compared to the failed Foster Bill, it passed within a week.108 With special interests out of the way, its sponsors were able to invoke on the one hand The Hague Convention and on the other the dangers of drugs in the abstract, achieving a swift consensus.

The bill languished in the Senate for a year, but on 17 December 1914 it was signed into law. The Harrison Act established registration requirements for anyone importing, manufacturing or distributing opium or coca and their derivatives. It relied on the purchase of stamps from the Bureau of Internal Revenue of the Treasury Department, which was thereby established as the regulatory authority. It made it illegal, finally, for anyone to either sell or be in possession of these drugs except ‘in pursuance of a written prescription issued by a physician, dentist, or veterinary surgeon’. Penalties consisted of fines up to $2,000 and five years of imprisonment.¹⁰⁹ Drug prohibition had come to America.

In China the anti-opium campaign was proceeding apace, or at least it did so until a revolution overthrew the Qing in 1911. Its success rested, aside from poppy eradication, on two innovations. The first was to enlist local anti-opium societies or create new ones when necessary. The Fuzhou Anti-opium Society, for example, standing at the heart of a regional branch network, organized rallies and parades, burned smoking implements, leaned on scholars to make public statements and lectures against opium, and so on. The Fujian Anti-opium Society went further, running treatment centres and sometimes participating in uprooting poppy plants. It helped with the organization of the smoker census and the allocation of user licences. It even became involved in the investigation of illegal smokers and opium dens, its inspectors patrolling the local wards alongside police, searching premises and looking for violators.¹¹⁰

The campaign’s second original idea was to develop a new language and visual imagery designed to attack opium’s popularity. The smoker was portrayed as lazy and neglectful of his family and national duties. His figure (the stereotypes used were male) was associated with crime and indolence. Rather than fashionable, he was portrayed as enslaved by his drug. But what was new was that the opium smoker was increasingly shown as frail, thin and poor. Associating its use with poverty and low social standing stripped opium of the glamour it had hitherto possessed. Chinese people had tended to hold ambivalent views of the drug, believing that responsible use was possible and even socially useful while condemning excess. The new iconography banged home the opium rake’s progress as he slid down the path to physical and financial ruin. This, over time, would curb opium use more effectively than any other measure.111 Though opium smoking became resurgent in the interwar republican and warlord period, it would never recapture the heights seen in the late Qing.

The eradication programme was meanwhile pursued with force. Lands were confiscated, houses burned, farmers imprisoned on long sentences or even shot. Local gentry were jailed or flogged, and failing to inform could be punished just as severely. A 1922 magazine article retrospectively wrote: ‘Crops were uprooted and trampled on; men were beaten senseless by the roadside in the midst of their ruined fields; the job was done with a savage thoroughness which defies parallel.’¹¹²

Alexander Hosie, the same British consular official who had criticized China’s opium statistics at the Shanghai conference, was tasked with investigating the extent of poppy eradication in 1910 and 1911. Hosie’s report was laudatory. If he saw any violence, incidentally, his account glossed over it: ‘Towards the end of November of last year it was discovered that at a place called Yün-t’ai-p’u or Yün-t’ai-ch’ang . . . the farmers had sown the poppy, and when the magistrate of Ch’ang-shou proceeded to uproot the young plants, resistance was offered, and the magistrate obliged to beat a retreat. The matter was reported to the viceroy, who dismissed the magistrate, and instructed the Prefect of Chungking to proceed to destroy the crop. This was done, and Yün-t’ai-ch’ang is believed to be the only place in which cultivation was attempted throughout the whole province in 1910.’¹¹³

Hosie reported that, in the few key provinces where most of the opium was grown, drastic reductions had been achieved, ranging from 70 to 100 per cent. In his own words, this was ‘a notable achievement’, and well ahead of schedule. A sign of things to come, Hosie only noted that after the revolution began ‘the Central and Provincial Governments lost control, and were unable, for the time being, to prevent a recrudescence of poppy cultivation’.¹¹⁴

The Paris professor of medicine Paul Brouardel recounts, in his multi-volume lectures, the following anecdote:

A well-heeled lady was arrested in the act of stealing from a store. After her arrest, it was discovered that she was a morphine addict. Her husband, seeking to find where she obtained the money to buy the drug, discovered that she had sold the second row of the books on her bookshelves, and even her grandfather’s field marshal’s baton. Thereupon, a pharmacist had the audacity of presenting the husband with an invoice of FRF 1,650 for the provision of morphine. Within the space of 516 days, he had supplied 6,930 g of morphine in deliveries of 10, 15, 20, 40, 60, and 100 parcels, for a total of 3,465 parcels of 2 g each. To begin with, the pharmacist had merely fulfilled the order contained in two medical prescriptions, but he had proceeded to replenish the same amount, then sell more without prescription, even agreeing to post his wares to the lady while she was travelling.

The husband refused to pay and sued the pharmacist who, on the strength of my testimony, was condemned to eight days’ incarceration. In addition, he was ordered to pay for the lady’s treatment in a clinic . . . Fortunately for the pharmacist, she died after six weeks.115

As this shows, in France, too, the drug trade was not without restrictions, though they continued to fall lightly on dishonest dealers. As in the USA, the Shanghai conference coincided with the first French measures targeted at opium smoking. In 1908 the authorities tightened registration procedures on opium imports and wholesaling, reiterating that retail sales were restricted to pharmacies and required prescriptions.¹¹⁶ This was followed by more aggressive enforcement of the law on ‘poisonous substances’, the pharmacy law as it applied to opiates. Whereas prior to that date, no more than a handful of people had been indicted annually for violation, the number climbed, in the five years to 1913, to a total of 182 indictments.¹¹⁷

The Hague conference acted as the prompt for the preparation of a comprehensive drug law, as it did in Britain. In 1913 three French MPS separately drafted acts governing the sale, transport and possession of cocaine, ether, hashish, morphine and opium outside medical channels.¹¹⁸ In Britain a governmental committee was put together to consider how to make good the resolutions of the Shanghai and Hague conferences. At a set of meetings running from March 1913 to May 1914, this committee established the British version of their requirements.¹¹⁹

The French government hesitated. For one thing, it still balked at penalizing possession. Did the means exist to police drug users? Perhaps forbidding drug use in public places would suffice, a draft decree suggested. As an experimental measure, the vice squad was reorganized to include a section for combating the narcotics traffic.120 In Britain pharmaceutical representatives signified that they were unhappy at the low thresholds established at The Hague – 0.2 grams of morphine, for example – though they did not object to the law itself.¹²¹ In both countries, reform was delayed by the declarations of war.

It was no more than a hiatus. Wartime conditions actually favoured the passage of the proposed laws. The French parliamentary chambers debated the governmental text in 1915 and 1916. Worries over the French population’s physical condition compared to the enemy’s had not disappeared; on the contrary. Nor had journalistic enthusiasm. The senators who introduced the law thanked the newspapers for having whipped up the right level of enthusiasm: ‘The press has widely honoured itself, by putting a red-hot iron to the wound, by pursuing opium and cocaine addicts into the underworld.’¹²² The Shanghai commission and Hague conference finally set a model for the world which France was honour-bound to champion: ‘They were the starting point for legislative and humanitarian measures which, if faithfully applied, would soon have put an end to poppy cultivation and the opium trade: the new era began of a crusade among nations against an evil whose ravages remain incalculable, an international impulse set to put an end, to mutual benefit, to the degeneration of both Eastern races and Western peoples.’¹²³ The law passed, having met no opposition, on 12 July 1916. Its penalties involved imprisonment of up to two years, whether for illegal sales or for possession. Unlike the Harrison Act, it listed hashish alongside the drugs of addiction that were opiates and cocaine.

Britain enacted its own restrictions by administrative fiat reliant on emergency wartime powers. Unlike France, the role of the press and public were minimal, even if the cases of a London prostitute and an ex-convict arrested for selling cocaine to Canadian soldiers caused a minor sensation in February 1916.¹²⁴ In May 1916 the Army Council moved to forbid the sale or supply of cocaine, opiates and other drugs to members of the forces. Yet it was an under-secretary at the Home Office, Malcolm Delevingne, who took the initiative of using the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and its emergency provisions to pass Britain’s first comprehensive anti-drug measures. Under DORA regulation 40b, it became an offence to sell or be in possession of cocaine or opium except based on a medical prescription.125 These provisions became the basis for a Dangerous Drugs Act, passed in 1920, which also applied to morphine. Contravention was punishable by a fine of £200 and up to six months’ imprisonment.¹²⁶

When asked, years later, why Britain had passed its first Drugs Acts, Delevingne observed that ‘Great Britain has been fortunate in that the vice or disease of drug addiction has not spread to any serious extent among its population.’ He was sometimes asked why Acts were therefore necessary: ‘The answer is that the Dangerous Drugs Acts are the outcome of a profound international public opinion which for many years had been steadily growing, and which has culminated in international action – an action which it is steadily believed is for the benefit of the whole human race.’¹²⁷ The Acts ‘sprang directly out of International Agreements arrived at after prolonged consideration by official conferences in which Great Britain took part’.¹²⁸

The drug laws – the Harrison Act, the Loi du 12 juillet, DORA 40b – all passed with varying degrees of public pressure and involvement from medical and pharmaceutical lobbies. None of them met any opposition other than technical. They all had in common two things. The first was a background by which drugs, namely opiates and cocaine, had acquired a uniformly sinister reputation. Ultimately this reputation sprang from disease notions of addiction as defined by the medical body, though only as mediated and embellished by other voices and lobby groups. This background made drug laws conceivable in the first place, and helped ensure the absence of opposition. The second commonality these laws shared was that they took their inspiration from the conferences initially called to deal with the continued struggles over opium in China and the Far East or, in other words, to amend the damage done by the Opium Wars. The conflicts of the Far East reacted with the template of Western science, giving birth to the anti-narcotics order we still possess.

Germany had yet to ratify the Opium Convention. Nevertheless, by the close of the last sitting in The Hague eleven states had done so, including the United States, Thailand and China, and four had announced that they were prepared to oblige: the UK, Japan, the Netherlands and Persia. A provision now allowed ratifying powers to put the convention into force among themselves, regardless of what other states did, after the end of 1914.129

At the war’s close, the victors insisted that the defeated powers – in particular Germany and Turkey – adhere to the convention. Article 295 of the 1919 Versailles Treaty specified that accession to it was equivalent to automatic ratification of the Opium Convention. Signatories had twelve months to enact the necessary legislation.¹³⁰ Within a few years, a flood of national drug laws followed, among the Versailles Treaty signatories but also among neutral states. In 1919, for example, the Dutch Opium Act restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine and any patent medicines containing them to medical purposes – possession would be criminalized in 1928.¹³¹ Canada implemented its own set of drug laws between 1911 and 1921, with illegal possession punishable by up to several years’ imprisonment.¹³² Spain passed its first narcotics law in 1918, and Colombia in 1920.¹³³ It was not just that the Versailles Treaty bound its signatories to enact the Hague Convention. It had also placed a new body in charge: the League of Nations. The war on drugs had enlisted its first global institution.