PART II
5
On 15 October 1929 a consignment of 1,000 cold lime powder tins arrived in Alexandria and was opened by the Egyptian customs. Upon inspection, it was revealed that 980 of the tins did indeed contain lime powder. The remaining twenty, though, were filled with heroin to the tune of 10 kilograms (22 lb). Heroin having recently been declared illegal in Egypt, the police promptly nabbed the consignee, a certain Moritz Grünberg, alias Georges Cassab, a Romanian printer living in Cairo. The Egyptian counter-narcotics unit decided to find out more and, alerted by the package’s Swiss provenance, dispatched an officer to Basle. With that officer’s cooperation, the Basle police discovered that the heroin had come from the laboratories of a Dr Fritz Müller, who was promptly arrested along with his wife. The investigators were on to a heroin-smuggling ring that had been active since at least 1924.1
The inquiry led to another purchaser named Frederic Cohn, a British subject living in Chatenoy, France. The French police took Cohn into custody early in the following year. The evidence gathered in Switzerland meanwhile pointed to ramifications extending to Geneva, Lugano, Milan, Genoa, Trieste, Vienna, Constantinople, Freiburg im Breisgau and Hamburg. An intercepted letter led to the arrest of a Mrs Metzendorff, from Vienna, at the Jura Hotel in Basle. Metzendorff had been travelling to Basle to take heroin deliveries in double-bottomed suitcases. But she was only a mule, as she revealed, for two male associates named Altmann and Hussein, both based in the Austrian capital. The men ran a business under the fictitious name of ‘The Isihi Egypt Company in Kobe’, whose speciality was the smuggling of narcotic drugs into Egypt and France. The double-bottomed trunk device was a trademark of theirs, and they employed at least five carriers other than Metzendorff.
Müller, the manufacturer, had other clients: one of these was a Dr Rauch of Vernier, in Switzerland, dealing through a Geneva-based firm called Farma SA. Rauch in turn sold heroin to a Tamara Handelgesellschaft in Hamburg, an S. Kajima & Co. in Tokyo and a C. A. Lejeune in Buenos Aires, all fronts for illegal distribution. In one delivery to Germany, Rauch had shipped heroin as ‘Alipogal’, a children’s milk preparation. As luck would have it, the Swiss customs had opened the tins, not in search of drugs but because they wanted to know whether they contained sweetened or unsweetened milk, which attracted different tariffs. A test had revealed that the powder was heroin, but Rauch had managed to convince the officers that the product was a perfectly legal morphine derivative named morphine hydrochloricum. This would react yellow rather than red to nitric acid, Rauch helpfully explained. He was only caught in the backwash of the Müller affair.
The Müller–Rauch connection also trailed into Italy. An individual named Regli and his associate, Piatti, of Milan, had been buying regularly from Müller. The drugs were smuggled through the border by an Italian-Swiss accomplice who kept a little inn near Lugano. Still more scandalous, the inspection of Dr Müller’s books showed that he had delivered large quantities of narcotics to a man called Borella. This may have been Müller’s biggest client, with purchases in the hundreds of kilograms for hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs. Dr Müller refused to release the particulars of the mysterious Borella, but the police had reason to believe he was a foreign diplomat who came to Geneva for the meetings of the League of Nations.
Arrests cascaded one after the other. The trial of the Swiss culprits in Basle made sensational press headlines. The inquiry had been a feat of international police cooperation. The results were nevertheless underwhelming. Grünberg, in Cairo, got a month’s imprisonment plus a fine. Metzendorff spent five weeks in jail. Altmann and Hussein, in Vienna, were condemned to one and four months respectively. The Lugano innkeeper got six weeks plus a fine. Müller was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment plus a fine of 20,000 Swiss francs, and Rauch to four months plus 10,000 francs. Müller’s wife and their two Swiss mules all received ‘not guilty’ verdicts. Because Cohn’s offence had been committed on French territory, extradition proceedings could not be carried out, and he was set free by the police. During the trial, the court called on the expert testimony of a Professor Hermann Emde, director of the pharmaceutical-chemical institute of the University of Königsberg. Emde stated that the control of narcotic drugs in Switzerland ‘was defective from A to Z’. Then he added that actually controls were deficient not only in Switzerland, but in most countries.
Traffickers lost no time moving into the gap created by drug prohibition. As drugs became forbidden articles in one country after another after the end of the First World War, illicit dealers arose to take advantage of the profit-making opportunities. The system founded in The Hague was meanwhile far from complete. International monitoring, licensing, policing: all this remained to be put in place. There was still, besides, the challenge represented by the smoking-opium franchises of the Far East – prohibition may have won out in principle, but in practice they continued to a form a significant exception, potentially even a competing model. The coming couple of decades would make or break the newly installed prohibition system.
The League of Nations was responsible, based on its founding covenant, for enforcing The Hague Opium Convention. The articles dealing with domestic drug legislation were non-binding (however successful they had proved, by the 1920s, in prompting the passage of drug-control laws in a number of countries). The League did not have the power to push for more on that front. It was in charge, however, of the more actionable clauses to do with the international drug trade. Building from this base, the League would, in its twenty years of activity, put in place a system of oversight and policing that remains at the core of the global drug-control architecture today.
At its first assembly in 1920, the League set up an Opium Advisory Committee (OAC). Composed of seven delegates from designated countries (originally China, France, India, Portugal, Japan, Thailand, the UK and the Netherlands) plus three non-country experts, this oversaw the licit trade and, by extension, the traffic in opium and other regulated drugs. Meeting annually for sessions of a few weeks, the committee had access to a special administrative section of the League in Geneva that would collect data and information and act as a secretariat, and it was empowered to come up with new drug-control initiatives.2
The OAC immediately faced the problem of enforcement. States had promised to prevent the export of opium and other regulated drugs, except for medical purposes, to countries where they were forbidden. Yet this was precisely where openings had been created for traffickers. Drugs ostensibly produced for the medical sector, such as morphine, were being smuggled abroad and resold for street use. The OAC could only act through League-member governments: the question was how to ensure state actors did what they had promised to do, and that they did it effectively.
The committee adopted a two-pronged approach. First, it proposed to implement a paper trace on imports and exports to prevent producers from leaking drugs into the smuggling trade. Second, it volunteered to monitor the trade directly in order to identify traffickers and, when leakage did take place, set the competent authorities on them.
Malcolm Delevingne, the author of the 1916 DORA regulation 40b, was Britain’s representative on the OAC and for a while he acted as its de facto leader. As early as the committee’s first session, in 1921, he proposed to subject the international trade in drugs to a double-certificate system. Exporters would first obtain a certificate ‘from the Government of the importing country [proving] that the import of the consignment in question is approved by that Government and is required for legitimate purposes’. Equipped with this document, they would proceed to request an export permission from their own home authorities. The exporter would release the goods only after this was obtained.3 If this procedure was duly followed, theoretically no drug could be diverted from licensed manufacturing facilities into illegal sales. The mechanism would apply both to manufactured drugs such as morphine and cocaine and to the smoking opium that was still being shipped from India to territories such as Indochina, the Malay States or Dutch Indonesia where, unlike in China, it remained legal.
The certificates system was also designed to facilitate the collection of data on production, imports and exports. A request of the OAC was that governments submit annual reports on the new legislation they had passed plus statistics pertaining to their national production, manufacture and trade in regulated drugs.4 This made it possible to compare production with legitimate needs – the task of estimating licit needs being assigned to a separate body named the Permanent Central Opium Board, or PCOB. Comparing production with needs, the OAC intended, would reveal how much was entering the black market.5
Even more precisely, the certificates and the data they provided could point to the countries where smuggling originated and even to individual infringement. Discrepancies in reporting would tip the OAC off as to where and when diversion had occurred. Data from 1927, for example, showed Germany had received 440 kilograms (970 lb) of morphine from France which had not been cleared with the German Ministry of Health: Germany wanted the French to supply details of their exports and consignees in that year. The committee thus assumed the role of patrolling the system where it was breached. Assuming such consignments had fallen into criminal hands, it took up these matters, often energetically, with the authorities in each country.6
The OAC even took to examining individual trafficking cases, becoming a clearing house for unsolved international drug-dealing inquiries. It was often Delevingne who led the charge on these matters. A dutiful, career-long civil servant who never married and would eventually retire to tend his roses, Delevingne was dedicated to the cause. For a while he turned into the world’s first flying anti-narcotics cop.7 In 1927, for example, the Danish police reported that it had caught a Mr Ruben in possession of a kilogram of cocaine, in the Copenhagen harbour, whose provenance was the Chemische Fabrik Naarden, the Netherlands. An explanation was demanded from the Dutch government. (It denied everything.) Cocaine had been seized in Hong Kong on the steamer Fook Sang bearing the brand Fujitsuru: Delevingne pushed the Japanese authorities to identify the manufacturer. (They thought the originator might be a Wai Kee from Kobe and were trying to locate him.8) In 1928 the Dutch government seized a case of 60 kilograms (133 lb) of illicit heroin aboard the steamer Gemma, headed for the Far East. A search warrant led to the discovery of sales, over the past couple of years, to China but also to France and Germany. Based on the tips obtained, more heroin was seized in Rotterdam and Marseilles. This in turn helped to identify a Viennese trafficker named Wilhelm Stuber, for whom the Austrian police were looking.9
By 1923 a few states had put the certificates system in place of their own volition, including the UK, South Africa, Spain, Mexico, Thailand, Japan and Czechoslovakia.10 For the mechanism to become general procedure, however, a treaty was required. A conference was accordingly called, in Geneva, in 1924–5. This eventually produced a new International Opium Convention: the 1925 Geneva Convention, which put more flesh on The Hague terms and institutionalized the international control system revolving around information sharing and the issuance of import/export permits championed by Delevingne.11
Member states also needed to be encouraged to develop their own drug-fighting capabilities. In parallel to these innovations, state actors established their own specialized anti-narcotics units. In Britain, after the passage of the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Acts, the Home Office appointed an inspector, an assistant and a pair of clerks to support police officers around the country. This increased to four inspectors and five clerks in 1937 and expanded again in 1939 by absorbing the staff and responsibility for policing ‘obscene publications’.12 In 1927 the Berlin police set up a specialized anti-narcotics unit named the Rauschgiftpolizei, which was expanded on a countrywide basis in 1935, with a dozen policemen and administrators at headquarters and nineteen local intelligence-gathering stations.13 In Egypt the colonial administrator Thomas Russell created a Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau in 1929. Russell Pasha, as he was known, a ‘hard-bitten Briton in charge of Cairo police’, chased desert caravans carrying opiates and patrolled Egypt’s long coast for night-time smuggling on fishing boats.14 His bureau would have the honour of pioneering the use of sniffer dogs in drug searches, a practice soon borrowed by his American counterparts.15
Drug enforcement most quickly acquired significant means in the United States. As early as 1920, the Treasury Department, which had been made responsible for narcotics control under the Harrison Act, could deploy 170 agents working out of various district offices.16 This remained for a while the adjunct to a larger Prohibition Unit in charge of chasing down bootleggers and busting speakeasies. After a corruption scandal engulfed the narcotics division chief, though, and as alcohol prohibition started to become less popular, the authorities spun off drug control into an independent bureau. In 1930 a Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was born under the leadership of the formidable Harry J. Anslinger, a self-taught investigator and law enforcer who combined the toughness of a former breaker of navvy gangs and the talent for intrigue of an ex-consular official. By the close of fiscal 1931, the FBN counted 426 employees, among whom were 271 agents, and possessed a budget of $1.7 million.17
The OAC lauded the ‘exemplary punishment’ meted out to drug traffickers by American agencies.18 It encouraged the formation of specialized anti-narcotics forces and in 1931 managed to make their creation mandatory under a new treaty.19 It also tackled weaknesses and loopholes in multi-jurisdictional law enforcement, which it was essential to close if cross-border smuggling was to be stopped. At another conference in Geneva in 1936, the League managed to establish a number of drug offences as extraditable. Exchanges of information on illicit transactions, trafficker identities and drug sources would boost police cooperation.20 The resulting treaty finally committed signatories to ‘make the necessary legislative provisions for severely punishing, particularly by imprisonment or other penalties of deprivation of liberty’, a long list of drug-related acts ranging from illicit manufacturing or sale to possession.21
Police cooperation, nevertheless, could only achieve so much. The field was vast, and domestic forces, even the American FBN, were stretched. The gangsters, as the OAC was well aware, were often one step ahead. Even the certificates system was insufficient. It was a useful tool, but it was imperfectly applied, and as soon as it was adopted it became subject to fraud. The committee, even driven on by the indefatigable Delevingne, could only accomplish so much – there were too many cases in which national authorities were unable or unwilling to follow up. Therefore, with the ink on the 1925 Geneva Convention barely dry, the shibboleth of supply suppression began again to rear its head.
The brothers George, Nassos and Elie Eliopoulos were glittering socialites. They frequented fashionable resorts and hotels. They entertained lavishly. Elie, the leader of the three, was on a first-name basis with ‘more crowned and uncrowned royalty than anyone else on the French or Italian Rivieras’.22 Originally hailing from Greece, where he claimed to have been an arms merchant during the First World War, he had later moved to Paris. There, ‘he was the bon vivant, a frequenter of boulevard cafés, impeccable, always carrying his gold-topped cane which was a kind of trademark, splashing his money around for champagne parties, race tracks, opera and dinners, and an assortment of women.’23 Ostensibly the Eliopoulos were bankers and industrialists. In reality, their fortune came from drugs, and in their heyday they were probably the biggest drug dealers in the world.
Their rise had been meteoric, reflecting the extraordinary opportunities created by the post-war drug regime. Sometime in or shortly before 1927, finding himself in ‘low waters’ financially, Elie had sat down in an Athens café with David Gourievidis, a Russian native who had fled his country during the civil war and taken Greek citizenship. Gourievidis told Eliopoulos of the vast profits to be made in narcotics in China. He claimed to have good contacts there. The two men flew to Tianjin to get the lie of the land, and on their second trip they met another compatriot, Jean Voyatzis, the boss of a gang of smugglers established in that city’s French Concession.24 Eliopoulos’s value was that he could procure manufactured drugs, namely heroin and morphine. He established himself in Paris, where he was able to convince two major manufacturers, the Comptoir des alcaloïdes and the Société industrielle de chimie organique, both licensed businesses, to become his suppliers. From 1928 Eliopoulos had been importing opium from China into France – most of the time legally but sometimes in crates marked ‘tea’ – which he sold to his industrial partners below market prices. The finished goods were smuggled back to Tianjin or shipped elsewhere, the United States soon becoming another important destination.
At its height, Eliopoulos’s business was sending a monthly average of 300 kilograms (660 lb) of white drugs to China alone, for which he received $50,000 per month from Tianjin via American Express.25 ‘Within one year, Elie had agents working for him not only in China, France and America but in Egypt, Turkey, Greece, England, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy.’26 Sealing his mastery, Eliopoulos gained the protection of Inspector Martin from the Paris Préfecture de police, also known as ‘Zani’, whom he bribed to the tune of first FRF5,000, then 10,000 French francs per month. Eliopoulos promised not to sell drugs in France and to expose competing dealers to Zani.27 His activities eventually reached such proportions that they came to the attention of the OAC. Delevingne passed a complaint from Anslinger to the French, who would later apologize to the FBN commissioner for the whole affair. For now, though, Eliopoulos remained beyond the reach of the law.28
It was only in 1931 that a series of mishaps brought his operation down, forcing him to go on the run. First, Elie fell out with Gourievidis, either after some private spat or because Gourievidis became nervous knowing that he was under suspicion of narcotics trafficking. Gourievidis went to the Paris police and noise got out in the press, causing Eliopoulos to lose his protection.29 Around the same time, an American gangster who was a buyer from the Eliopoulos network, August Del Gracio, or ‘Little Augie’, was caught in Hamburg taking consignment of 250 kilograms (550 lb) of morphine cubes. The affair was murky, involving double dealing and a mistimed delivery concealed within crates of machinery parts. (Del Gracio had been swindled, his delivery diverted and reported stolen, but then an intermediary unwittingly approached him as the seller of the exact same quantity of morphine from the same provenance.) The police connected Augie to a woman living in Berlin, and from her to an Afghan national who was tied to the Eliopoulos operation.30
But what brought the whole business down was the capture of Jean Voyatzis himself, or rather of a thinly encoded notebook holding the key to the entire network. At this stage, Voyatzis was under watch. When he left China for a trip to Athens, the British consular authorities sent a cable to Cairo warning that he would be passing through Port Said en route. From Port Said, Voyatzis continued his journey by train to Alexandria, but he left his heavy baggage in bond to follow by goods train: there, Russell Pasha’s bureau conducted a complete search of it. ‘More valuable . . . than gold or rubies’, its agents found a pocket-book that was ‘a perfect “Who’s Who” to the contraband trade and gave the key to the code which he was using in his telegrams to the Paris group and others’.31
Several deliveries were promptly seized. The notebook listed the members of the Voyatzis gangs in China and Japan, the Eliopoulos brothers, Gourievidis, their buyers, their transports and their industrial suppliers. The ring was suddenly closing around Elie. He had already been arrested on his way through Mannheim on suspicion of involvement in the Del Gracio affair, although, the Voyatzis notebook not yet having been found, he was released for lack of evidence. Having taken flight to Athens, he made a bold move: he contacted Russell Pasha and asked that he send over an agent, to whom he would reveal all.32
The Eliopoulos operation was typical of the style of drug-trafficking venture prevalent in the 1920s, or perhaps it represented its apex. These ventures sourced drugs from legally established manufacturers and sold them into the black market. It was the simplest method of procurement. Manufacturers were unused to the new drug regime and enough of them were corruptible. Export/import permits could be falsified or circumvented altogether. Long before Elie’s cable to Cairo, the OAC knew this much: illegal drugs came overwhelmingly from legal producers. Its solution, therefore, was to shut down this line of supply.
The idea was to impose a production-quota system on the main manufactured drugs: morphine, heroin and cocaine (plus a few related alkaloids). The Italian delegate on the OAC, Stefano Cavazzoni, was the first to introduce it in 1927. Cavazzoni noted that worldwide production exceeded medical needs by a good margin, leaving large quantities of drugs to be diverted. Worried by his own country’s position, he asked for direct limits to be placed on manufacturing.33 Cavazzoni was at first forced to water down his proposal because other committee members told him that imposing quotas could not be done without a new treaty.34 A while later, however, a private initiative landed on the OAC’S desk: a proposal by the American businessman and philanthropist Charles Crane to do exactly what the Italian delegate had suggested. This also attracted scepticism at first, including from Delevingne and from the French, Swiss and German representatives. But Cavazzoni supported the plan. France became concerned, meanwhile, at having been identified as a major source of smuggled drugs. The OAC also knew that the idea was likely to be viewed favourably in the United States. Changing his mind, Delevingne went to the League Council, which agreed to call a conference.35
The conference met in May–June 1931, and it gave rise to a Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs, also known as the 1931 Geneva Convention. The treaty applied solely to manufactured drugs, not the raw materials that were opium and the coca leaf. Each year, countries would make estimates of the amount they expected to need for home consumption and of what volumes they planned to export or import. These estimates would be collected and vetted by a newly created supervisory body, which would assign annual quotas to producers. Each designated state would only allow its manufacturers to produce up to its approved amount.36
The new system of double controls, cleared with a central authority, curtailed the bogus imports/exports that had still been possible based solely on the certificates. Before 1931 the volumes allowed under import/export permits had been unlimited, providing scope for issuing fakes. Drugs could also be diverted from production theoretically earmarked for domestic markets. Now manufacturing itself was constrained, and in each country it became subject to direct inspection, drastically reducing opportunities for leakage.
The League enthused over the results. The OAC struck a buoyant tone in its 1933 report to the Council. The illicit traffic’s European sources were fast drying up thanks to the 1931 Geneva Convention, it wrote.37 The Eliopoulos brothers, Gourievidis, Del Gracio and a few notorious others had been ‘pulled from the shadows where they were complacently hiding’.38 France, meanwhile, had withdrawn the licences of three of its largest morphine producers, retaining only three more authorized manufacturers.39 The volume of morphine officially produced worldwide fell sharply: it shrank from a high of just under 60 metric tons in 1929 to 27 tons in 1934.40 The Permanent Central Opium Board estimated that by the mid-1930s the legal manufacture of morphine, heroin and cocaine had dropped to the level of legitimate, medical demand.41 For the rest of the decade, the OAC minutes would be far less concerned with illicit trafficking cases.
The question, nevertheless, is whether this was any more than a pyrrhic victory. The evidence is that production merely moved underground, typically ending up in more violent hands. Perhaps there was a hiatus, but traffickers today refine heroin or cocaine in their own labs, and for higher margins. They began to do so in the 1930s. The Eliopoulos affair provided a hint of what was to come. When, a year or so before he was caught, the French authorities closed down his French suppliers, Elie had persuaded them to move to Turkey. ‘At his urging, the factories supplying him with drugs in France packed up their equipment, their machines and trained personnel and shipped them off to Istanbul. Here – backed by Devineau of Paris – Elie convinced his clients that the production would not only continue but increase.’42
Morphine refining spread to the weakly policed Near East and Balkans, to Turkey, Albania and Bulgaria, where the poppy was also cultivated. An example is provided by Georges Bakladjoglou. A Turk who had moved to Athens, Bakladjoglou established a pharmacy there, which he used as a front for selling heroin. By 1934 he was running an extensive narcotics business from illicit factories in Bulgaria and Turkey. He boasted to an informant that he received most of his heroin from ‘hundreds’ of small factories working in Turkey. For a while he also operated his own facility in Tirana, though apparently Albania’s lawlessness was too much even for a heroin dealer, and the place was plundered by his own partners. Bakladjoglou dealt with Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians and Italians. Eschewing riskier bulk deliveries, he shipped heroin to the United States in 1-kilogram packages carried by stewards on Italian steamer lines.43
Production also moved farther afield. As Elioupolos confided to Russell’s agent: ‘Recent measures in France, Germany, and Turkey make it practically impossible to obtain for other than legitimate needs any considerable quantities of narcotic drugs in Europe . . . The situation in China has entirely changed . . . As a result the Far Eastern traffickers have turned to Chinese opium for their raw material and many factories have been established in China for the manufacture of narcotic drugs.’44 An example of this reversal of flows is provided by the fortunes of the Ezra family of San Francisco. Under its patriarch, Isaac Ezra, the family had long dealt in opium in Shanghai, dominating the legitimate business around the turn of the century. It had only profited from the return of Chinese prohibition in 1906. After a hiatus in which they lost the fortune bequeathed them by their father, the brothers Isaac and Judah began again smuggling narcotics from Europe to Shanghai in 1927. But by 1931 European manufactured drugs were growing scarce, and they decided to move the same product from Shanghai to San Francisco instead. Using a wood-oil-importing company as a front, they packed opium, cocaine, morphine and heroin inside oil drums and shipped the drugs to California. They distributed narcotics throughout the West Coast through such local underworld figures as John Rose, Leong Chung and ‘Black Tony’ Parmagini. The FBN finally arrested the Ezras in 1933. The San Francisco district attorney estimated that they had moved a total of $1.5 million in drugs, at street value, into the United States.45
In New York, the principal American point of importation for drugs, distribution was just beginning to shift, in the 1930s, from the Jewish to the equally violent Italian gangs. During the 1930s bureau officials believed that one of the ‘most powerful operations in narcotics traffic was that of the Newman brothers.’ The brothers George, Charles and Harry Newman would have distributed narcotics worth $25 million on the streets between 1934 and 1938. With their headquarters in Manhattan, they were believed to be the source for drugs distributed by ‘Big’ Bill Hildebrandt in Minneapolis, the Kayne–Gordon gang in Chicago, Louis Ginsburg in Dallas and Arthur Flegenheimer (‘Dutch Schultz’) in New York.46 Internationally they were or had once been connected to the Eliopoulos operation.
Other kingpins included Meyer Lansky, who would enjoy an extended career after the Second World War, Yasha ‘Jack’ Katzenberg and Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, all of whom cooperated as much as they competed with each other. Some of these gangsters were caught (we often know of them only because they were caught). Katzenberg used another Greek supply source in China to move opiates to New York. His network relied on a corrupt American Express agent to ship goods via France to the United States, and on two New York customs officers whom he bribed to let the drugs through.47 Pursued by the FBN, Katzenberg eventually fled the country, but he was apprehended in Romania and deported. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in jail.
Lepke, the son of Russian immigrants, had by the 1930s become the ‘nemesis’ of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.48 Lepke imported heroin from China into New York to the tune of $10 million between 1935 and 1937. He was also known to run various racketeering operations in the garment and baking sectors. Lepke was well connected, and the FBN only moved against him at the end of 1937. At first he went into hiding, but he surrendered himself two years later, hoping for a lighter sentence. Lepke was condemned to twelve years. In a final twist, the Justice Department managed to tie him to a contract-killing syndicate infamously known as ‘Murder Inc.’, run by gangster Emanuel ‘Mendy’ Weiss. In 1940 the bureau arrested Weiss after it uncovered a morphine plant he operated. Both Lepke and Weiss were convicted for their roles in Murder Inc., and Lepke died in the electric chair in 1944.49
As to Eliopoulos, his gamble to appeal to Russell Pasha paid off. To the Egyptian envoy and the FBN agent who came to participate in the interviews, he spun wild tales. He threw overboard one of his mules, a naive but high-profile Peruvian diplomat named Carlos Bacula. He managed to disassociate himself from the Hamburg seizure and from Del Gracio, who unlike him had been caught red-handed. The rest of the evidence was too circumstantial. Or perhaps Eliopoulos managed to intimidate his antagonists, threatening to make public his deal with Zani of the Paris police, and cause major embarrassment to the French government.50 Eliopoulos remained in Greece. Ostensibly his trafficking activities ended, but it is possible they moved underground in a smaller format. During the war, after the German invasion, he briefly collaborated with the Nazis but was eventually forced to flee, escaping first to South America and later to New York. Commissioner Anslinger was waiting for him, a thick file at the ready. (‘We knew he was coming; our men were at the pier waiting when the ship came up the harbor past the Statue of Liberty . . . We picked him up as he came down the gangway.’51) In 1943, after a lengthy investigation, the Eliopoulos brothers were duly convicted of narcotic trafficking by a Brooklyn jury. Three months later, however, this was overturned on the grounds that the statute of limitations excluded most of the evidence. Elie walked. The war over, the FBN managed to have him deported to Greece, where he spent his last years as a mining entrepreneur.52
The United States was not a member of the League of Nations. As such, it could not participate directly in running its institutions. At the same time, it was too passionately engaged on the side of drug prohibition not to try to influence what they did. The resulting policy confusion, though mostly self-defeating, had an unforeseen impact on the second major domain the League set itself to govern: that of the forever contested Southeast Asian smoking-opium franchises.
League members realized that they could not leave the United States out altogether. When the first members of the Opium Advisory Committee were appointed, they took care to nominate an American among its three non-country assessors: no less than Mrs Elizabeth Wright, the widow of Hamilton Wright of Hague Opium Convention and Harrison Act fame. At the very first meeting of the OAC, which was concerned with the teething problems of procedure and reporting and obtaining the ratifications of remaining treaty outsiders, Mrs Wright was already asking for a new conference.53 Meanwhile the State Department itself sent an observer, the former surgeon general Rupert Blue, to the first of the 1923 meetings. In these early sessions, the committee was preoccupied with measuring how large the illicit drug problem was. The simplest yardstick was to compare reported worldwide narcotics production to legitimate global needs. But what constituted legitimate needs? Did drugs handed out for the maintenance of existing users count as legitimate? If so, in particular, the countless regular customers of the Asian opium monopolies counted towards legal needs. The American visitor would have none of it. Blue hectored the committee members. At his insistence, the Mixed [medical] Sub-committee agreed to its report, redefining drug abuse to include all non-medical use and declaring quasi-medical use ‘not legitimate’.54 Running far ahead of the committee’s agenda, Blue went on to advocate restrictions on cultivation, forcing the baffled OAC to postpone its vote on the question originally asked.
During the interwar period, there would be three phases to U.S. interaction with the League: a period of exhortation during which the Americans stood belligerently outside the door through to 1925, an empty-chair policy that lasted until 1931, and a tentative resumption of cooperation starting from the time of the 1931 Geneva conference. (The Americans were able to make formal appointments to the supervisory body created by that conference as well as to the Permanent Central Opium Board, which, as the products of self-standing treaties, were both technically independent from the League.55) Ironically, the United States was probably the most dutiful country in reporting high-quality data, including production, trade, seizures and so on, to the OAC and PCOB. At the same time, it made little contribution to the drug-control apparatus built by the League. Incapable of compromise, it kept pushing for treaties and devices it subsequently refused to ratify. There was nevertheless a caveat: the Americans acted as the League’s guilty conscience, forever urging the total prohibition which they held as the only valid goal. The result of this pressure, perversely, was that the League and through it the opium monopolies ended up successfully taming opiate use in East Asia.
The Americans returned with an even more muscular delegation for a special visit to the OAC’S next session: Rupert Blue; Stephen Porter, who was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and the patriarch of the Shanghai and Hague conferences, Bishop Brent. They brought with them a list of five resolutions. Three of these merely had to do with the more stringent implementation of the Hague Opium Convention, but the other two were squarely aimed at Far Eastern opium: that all use of opium products other than medical constituted abuse, and that raw-opium cultivation must urgently be controlled ‘in such a manner that there will be no surplus available for non-medical and non-scientific purposes’.56
Smoking opium remained, as before the First World War, the wedge by which America would push for an ever stricter drug regime, as well as a tool by which to maintain influence in China and the region. (At the same session, the Chinese representative, Chao-Hsin Chu, complained that the colonial monopolies had failed to produce the reductions in consumption promised before the First World War.57) More broadly, the action of the United States was fed by the conviction that its norms were superior and deserved to prevail over those of the immoral colonialists. Brent made a speech to the OAC, complete with quotes from the Lord’s Prayer, urging it simply to put an end to opium use. Porter was a self-appointed champion of the cause who would later become responsible for the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Quoting Cicero, he brandished the Harrison Act at the committee.58 Meanwhile both had their hands tied: when Porter asked the Senate for funding to participate in the 1924–5 Geneva conference, it responded by attaching strings to the effect that the delegation could not sign an agreement that did not both limit narcotics to medical use and place controls on raw materials.59
But the lakeside Swiss city actually hosted two narcotics conferences in 1924–5, not one. The first dealt with the adoption of Delevingne’s import/export certificate system described above. But the League also called up a parallel set of proceedings, on the back of the original intervention by the Porter team, to debate the opium monopolies. The main conference, involving a wide set of participants, began on 17 November 1924. The second, parallel conference on opium opened just before that with representatives nominated by eight countries only (the UK, China, France, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal and Thailand, but not the United States). It was actually Delevingne who had thought up the tactic of splitting the proceedings. The main conference, for adopting the certificates scheme, was successfully in planning. But American insistence, seconded by China, on placing Far Eastern opium on the agenda could not be ignored. His solution was to separate the issues.60 Delevingne, however, had not allowed for American wrecking tactics through their participation in the main proceedings.
At first the talks on the Far East went smoothly. The opening address reiterated the goal formulated in The Hague: the long-term suppression of opium smoking.61 The Japanese delegate found that the solution was to treat addicts as sick people: the model to follow was Taiwan, which allowed users to function with maintenance doses while denying opium to potential converts.62 The Chinese delegation, whose main speaker was the former government minister and ambassador to Washington Sze Sao-Ke, complained that no progress had been made in eradicating opium in the region. But China was isolated: warlordism had caused a recrudescence of poppy cultivation and opium smuggling. The Chinese republican government’s own anti-opium regime was regarded as ineffective at best. From mid-November the conference therefore moved on. The Japanese delegate volunteered an expression of goodwill towards China, looking forward to future cooperation. Then the session turned to prepared points, the first of which was the generalization of opium monopolies.63 By mid-December a text was even ready for signature, recommending the adoption throughout the region of government-run opium Régies alongside a list of constraining measures.64
By then, however, Porter and his team, which once again included Brent and Blue plus Mrs Wright, had managed to throw a spanner into the works of the main conference. Brent, in a grand speech taking for its axiom that ‘moral considerations must determine practical measures,’ set the scene. The certificates system under discussion must apply to raw and smoking (‘prepared’) opium as well as to manufactured drugs, he insisted. This was nothing controversial, but Brent also introduced the proposal that the opium monopolies adopt a ten-year reduction plan, sloping down to zero.65 Porter went even further. He wanted to establish the principle that opium and coca could be grown only for medical use.66 An acrimonious discussion ensued between Sir John Campbell, who represented India on the OAC and at the conference, and Porter and Brent.67 The conference was being wilfully derailed, as several delegates noted with dismay. The bickering only ceased when the Spanish representative proposed that everyone refer back to their governments.68 The conference broke up. But so did the parallel proceeds actually meant to debate the Far East, with their now completed draft treaty.
Brent, disgusted, decided to return home. He was invited to London, where he met Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain. Chamberlain managed to persuade him of the reasonableness of the British position: the civil war in China precluded a solution to the Far Eastern opium question, he explained, and restricting domestic production in India was therefore useless. Brent passed on the request to drop the smoking-opium ban to Porter.69 Talks nevertheless remained gridlocked when they resumed in January 1925. The assembly agreed to form a joint commission to work out a compromise: Delevingne, Sze and Porter all sat on this committee. Porter proposed to extend the termination period for smoking opium to fifteen years. The French and British countered that this would be nullified and indeed made worse by smuggling from China. The deadlock was only broken as the main conference convened for its next session, in early February: the Porter delegation theatrically announced that it was pulling out. China soon followed. With them gone, both sets of proceedings could conclude without obstruction.70
Paradoxically, however, the American tactics did bear fruit. The final treaty mandated its signatories to institute government opium monopolies, if they had not already done so, in the territories they administered. Sales to minors would be prohibited. Opium-den numbers would be curtailed, and the recycling of dross forbidden. Materials warning against opium would be disseminated in schools and public places. None of this was revolutionary, but along with the treaty came a protocol: this enshrined the Porter proposal to end the production of smoking opium within fifteen years.
Admittedly, the countdown was only to kick in once China’s domestic situation had improved and smuggling ceased to be a threat, putting off the final deadline.71 Notwithstanding this loophole, the Geneva conference would end up having a major impact on the Far Eastern opium markets. In the same year, the Indian government donned the mantle of virtue and decided to end opium exports to states acting as centres of illicit traffic – even if they produced valid import certificates – such as the Portuguese-owned Macao and Persia. In 1926, dropping the precondition that China curtail its own illicit poppy cultivation, it announced a gradual reduction in exports of nonmedical (or, as it was euphemistically called, ‘quasi-medical’) opium, to slope down to nil over ten years.72 The government discontinued its opium auctions. The maximum volume of smoking opium allowed for export to each country would be reduced by 10 per cent per year.73 By 1930 the poppy acreage of British India, the source for the overwhelming majority of the opium smoked in Southeast Asia, had fallen to 25 per cent of its 1923 total.74 This was slightly less radical than it sounds: the reduction in acreage applied only to territories directly under Crown rule (‘Bengal’ opium), not the nominally autonomous principalities (‘Malwa’). Yet Malwa sufficed to meet little more than domestic needs. Between 1925 and 1935 total Indian opium output would fall by 75 per cent.75 The rest of the region, willy-nilly, was by then moving along the same path.
It was not quite true, as the Chinese complained, that the colonial monopolies had failed to preside over reductions in opium smoking. In Indonesia, compared to 1900, opium consumption per capita had remained approximately flat. In French Indochina, however, it had roughly halved between 1900 and 1922, from 6 to 3 grams per capita per annum. In Burma it had done likewise, and the percentage fall was comparable in Thailand. In the Federated Malay States opium consumption had fallen by two-thirds between 1911 and 1922, and in the Straits Settlements by a quarter.76 The data, which did not always include smuggling, were necessarily imprecise, but the magnitude of these falls was sufficient to be conclusive.
More was to come in the 1920s and ’30s. In Taiwan the number of opium smokers, who were all registered, had fallen from 169,064, or 6.3 per cent of the population, in 1900 to 26,942, or 0.6 per cent, in 1928. By then, the authorities recognized that this probably failed to account for a substantial amount of unofficial consumption, especially in rural areas. They launched a fresh registration drive, netting 25,527 applicants. This doubled the number of opium smokers, but the total still stood at less than a third of the 1900 number, and even less in terms of the percentage of the population.77
In 1924 the government of British Malaya (the Malay States plus the Straits Settlements, or most of present-day Malaysia and Singapore) published the results of an inquiry into opium smoking. This rejected prohibition: ‘We feel impelled to utter a warning that Government cannot rely on the active and continuous support of the Chinese community in carrying out measures which will be distasteful to an appreciable portion of that community,’ the report warned.78 Anti-opium societies only enjoyed limited support locally. A ban, besides, would bring smuggling, corruption and police malpractice in its wake. (Perhaps this may be regarded as cynical advice, yet around the same time, in 1926, Britain itself adopted policies allowing for the maintenance of existing opiate users, something similar to what was being proposed for the colony.79) The authors recommended the introduction of smoker licensing, with for the first steps the takeover of the retail trade by the monopoly in place, a reduction in the number of shops and stricter packaging rules.
By this date, government monopolies or Régies had become ubiquitous throughout the region. A growing number of regimes were also becoming closed to new entrants through registration systems. Smokers were now asked to register in Taiwan, Burma and Dutch Indonesia and from 1929 in British Malaya.80 India remained a patchwork, but an Act dated 1930 let provincial authorities adopt smoker licensing or even prohibit opium smoking.81
Governments were also bringing restraining measures to bear through control of the retail trade. In British Malaya retail was now directly government-operated. In Burma it remained in private hands but it was mandatory for an official supervisor to be present in each retail establishment. In Taiwan retailers were licensed but tightly inspected. The system varied in both Indonesia and Thailand, with a mix of government-operated and licensed shops, but it was trending towards direct control. In French Indochina, finally, they remained under license, but retailers were only allocated a fixed quantity of opium each.82
The system began to produce lower user numbers. Gone were the days of the opium farms. In the 1920s and ’30s the volumes of opium smoked fell in every territory, in some places drastically. (See Appendix II for tables.) In Burma total opium use fell from 31 metric tons in 1922 (the year the OAC began to collate statistics) to 19 tons in 1937 (the last interwar year for which reliable data are available). For the Malay States and Straits Settlements, volumes declined even more steeply, from 108 to 59 tons. For Thailand this was 50 tons in 1922 and 30 in 1937, and for Indonesia 64 and 21 tons.83
Since populations were rising, these falls were even more pronounced when expressed on a per capita basis. Thai opium use, for example, fell from 5.3 grams to 2.1 grams per capita, or by 60 per cent. Registered smoker numbers tell the same story: while Indonesia had 142,730 registered opium users in 1923, by 1937 there remained only 41,260. The Malay States had recorded 107,906 opium smokers in 1930 after they completed their registration drive, but by 1937 this had fallen to 52,097. In Taiwan, in spite of the update given to the registers in the late 1920s, smoker numbers declined from 42,923 in 1922 to 12,063 in 1937.
There is no reason to believe these falls reflected shifts towards contraband. The amount of smuggled opium went by definition unreported, but it can be approached tangentially through seizures. In Indonesia seizures remained small, at 540 kilograms in the mid- 1930s. In Thailand they were higher, at over 3,000 kilograms, but this did not necessarily point to a black-market shift: the country’s geography makes it certain that smuggling had already been significant in the 1920s.84 As to the Straits Settlements and the Malay States, they reported that ‘the illicit traffic is insignificant or non-existent.’85
In French Indochina the Régie distributed 68 metric tons of smoking opium in 1922, and 51 tons in 1937. This last data point was an outlier, however, possibly due to an influx of Chinese refugees. In 1935–6 the average volume had been 34 tons, half of what it had been in the early 1920s. Trafficking was sizable, helped by the colony’s lengthy jungle border and proximity to Yunnan, one of China’s prime poppy-growing provinces. The French reported that a typical annual number was 8 to 9 metric tons.86 Again, however, smuggling is likely to have been just as prevalent in the previous decade. Opium seizures actually peaked in 1928, at 15 tons.87 Even allowing for contraband, total consumption was sure to have fallen materially between the early 1920s and late 1930s, perhaps even more sharply than the official fall of 50 per cent suggested.
As to the Régie’s income, higher prices compensated for a while for the falling volumes. Net receipts nevertheless fell sharply through the 1920s and ’30s. While the opium monopoly contributed, on a net basis, 19 per cent of Indochina’s budgetary receipts in 1920, this was down to 4.7 per cent in 1929. For 1937, the number was 12.9 per cent, but this was only because the Régie, burdened with unsold inventory, was able to cease importing that year, bringing its material costs down to zero. In 1933 and 1934 its net receipts were actually nil, and the average for 1932–7 was no higher than 5 per cent.88
This is where any argument that the Southeast Asian regimes were not sincere in their reduction programmes or that they merely regarded opium as a cash cow ceases to be tenable. Throughout the region, fiscal receipts from opium collapsed. In the Straits Settlements these fell from 43.6 per cent of total budgetary income to 20.6 per cent between 1923 and 1937, and in the Malay States from 16.9 to 5.2 per cent. Hong Kong saw a reduction from 23.3 per cent to zero. The contribution from the Indonesian Opiumregie was 7.1 per cent of the colony’s budget in 1923, and 1.4 per cent in 1937. For Thailand the same number fell from 20 to 7.8 per cent, and for Taiwan from 3.8 to 1 per cent.89 Opium ceased to be a significant budget contributor anywhere except for the Straits Settlements, where its importance had even so fallen by half.
The situation was more chaotic in China. The republic had initially stuck to the Qing’s prohibition of opium, though with great difficulty in enforcing it. In 1916, after the death of the dictator Yuan Shikai, the country began to fall apart. Army-generals-turnedwarlords took entire regions under their own rule. Amid economic and social breakdown and under the pressures of military competition, opium turned once again into a ready and easy source of cash. In 1924 the Kuomintang regime, at the time based only around Canton, established an opium monopoly. This was a departure from the nominal prohibition of the Qing and early republic. It was also a sham. In practice, there was no control, and various phases in the production and sale process – purchase, wholesale, boiling and so on – were farmed out to the highest bidder. The practice persisted under various permutations after the Kuomintang, having defeated its rivals in 1927 and moved its capital to Nanjing, achieved at least nominal control over the rest of the country.90
The problem was made worse by Japanese intrusion, especially after it morphed into full-scale invasion in the 1930s. Japan had taken over the Kwantung Leased Territory, a peninsula on the gulf east of Beijing, in 1905. This became the site of an opium farm, then in 1912 a Taiwan-style registration scheme, and finally a monopoly run by an ‘Opium Prohibition Office’, but none of this was serious. The peninsula functioned as a major smuggling centre, channelling drugs through Tianjin and other Chinese cities. The office was beset by a major scandal implicating high-level Japanese political figures in 1921.91 Korea served as another trafficking platform. After its 1910 annexation, Korea had been made to adopt Japanese anti-opium laws, but the Japanese had also begun to grow opium there for use by their pharmaceutical industry. In the mid-1930s the country entered the club of significant producers with an output of 20 metric tons, not all of it for licit use.92
Japan even had its own version of Elie Eliopoulos, though in this case he possessed his own legally established pharmaceutical firm: Hoshi Pharmaceutical. Hoshi Hajime had long pushed for the development of a native Japanese opium supply, and he had been rewarded during the First World War when this had been allowed. Alongside his Japanese business, he owned a morphine-manufacturing concession in Taiwan, and this became the base for more questionable transactions. Hoshi imported crude morphine into Taiwan, then arranged for it to disappear from the records. He stored excess opium in bonded warehouses, a legally valid practice with the advantage that the product was not registered as imported. Both were discreetly taken to China. No one checked how much actually remained in the warehouses. Hoshi bribed the Monopoly Bureau chief, Kaku Sagataro, to keep his eyes shut to the vanishing opiates. Between 1915 and 1924 Hoshi is estimated to have trafficked in excess of 28 metric tons of morphine, or something approximating the medical needs of the entire world for one year, into China.93
Hoshi was more successful than Eliopoulos. In 1924 a new prime minister began to make changes to the personnel of the Taiwanese Government-General. One by one, Hoshi’s friends in the colonial bureaucracy departed. Their successors revoked his crude morphine concession. An inquiry followed, and in 1925 he was convicted of narcotics trafficking. The next year, however, he managed to have this overturned on a technicality. Hoshi published press accounts portraying himself as an upstanding businessman and the victim of chicanery. He set up Hoshi Pharmaceutical anew after it had gone bankrupt: by 1927 it was once again processing morphine in Taiwan, though it now shared the licence with two other firms. (Kaku Sagataro managed to avoid prosecution altogether and was even promoted. In 1924–5 he represented Japan at the Geneva conference.94) During Japan’s ultra-nationalist phase, in 1937, Hoshi was elected to the lower house of the Diet, and he again became a member of parliament in 1948. He died some time thereafter while en route to inspect a coca plantation in Peru, where he had set up an operation.95
After Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and, from 1937, began overrunning the rest of China, its opium dealings spiralled out of control. Japan set up an opium monopoly in the Manchurian puppet state of Manchukuo, complete with centralized purchase from cultivators, registration of smokers and prison sentences for breach. The organization had registered 500,000 smokers by the end of 1936. In 1938 it introduced a ten-year reduction plan. But the region was a significant poppy grower – the Manchukuo coins even bore an image of a poppy in bloom.96 The regime’s grasp on rural areas was tenuous, and smuggling, a precious source of funding for the Japanese military, remained rife. Neither output nor the number of addicts fell, and large amounts were diverted into China proper.97
As to the rest of occupied China, the Japanese imposed various nominally Chinese-run governments in the areas they conquered after their 1937 offensive. Knowing they lacked the reach and authority to make them function, these did not even try to put opium monopolies in place. The occupier merely slapped opium farms or taxes on these areas, milking imports and dens. The invasion itself disrupted both local cultivation and imports. Both Manchukuo and Japanese-controlled China, however, began ordering large shipments of opium from Persia, one of the last few exporting countries that remained open for business.98
Nor were the Japanese alone in abetting the traffic. The International Settlement and French Concession in Shanghai long acted as platforms for distribution beyond the reach of Chinese law. The Settlement was thick with grandiose opium dens. An American journalist noted: ‘Shanghai was not only far and away the largest consumer of narcotics in the country, it was the reservoir for the stream of poison that flowed through China’s veins. Incalculable quantities of mind- and body-wrecking poppy juice and its crystalline laboratory progeny, morphine and heroin, found their way into the city.’99
The separate French Concession went one further. It was for a long time the base of Shanghai’s opium king, a gangster named Du Yuesheng. Du had a particular eye for opportunity. A small-town youth, he had initially pursued an indifferent career of small jobs and petty crime, then later joined the Green Gang, an organization half answering to the description of Chinese secret society and half to that of modern mob. At the time, a crime boss named Huang Jinrong ran or co-ran the gang. Since 1918 Huang had also been doubling as chief superintendent of police in the French Concession – French policy being to turn poacher into gamekeeper, or rather to let the gamekeeper continue to poach for himself while imposing a semblance of order on the rest. In 1924 Huang clashed with the local warlord in a spat over a Beijing opera actress. Du, who had risen to become his confidant, took his place.100
From 1925 the French extended their agreement with Huang to Du Yuesheng. The gangster ran opium shops and trafficking operations from the concession and paid off the French, who as a side benefit harassed his competition. The sums were significant and helped meet a large share of the administrative costs of the French Concession. In 1927, when the concession authorities became concerned about the disorder mounting in and around Shanghai, they extended the bargain to include internal security and strike-breaking. They distributed rifles and revolvers to Du’s men, who helped execute the anti-Communist coup that took place that year. The arrangement lasted until 1932, when the French, wishing to avoid provoking the Japanese, decided to clean house.101
Yet Du’s expulsion from the French Concession did not mean that his opium career was at an end. On the contrary, it flourished as the Kuomintang took over. In a bewildering double game, Du was sequentially appointed as the head, or to the boards, of various drug-control structures set up by the nationalist regime in Shanghai and Jiangsu province between 1933 and 1935. Du paid large bribes and was allowed to operate what amounted to opium farms under the names of Special Tax General Bureau or Shanghai Municipal Opium Suppression Committee.102 Like drug barons before and after him, he even played the philanthropist. Du provided disaster relief to areas hit by floods; made gifts to hospitals, orphanages and schools; and sponsored a model farming community. Bolstering his mediocre pedigree, Du had a temple to his ancestors built in his home town, Gaoqiao, in 1931.103
As Du Yuesheng’s ability to reinvent himself proves, the nationalist regime struggled, for the decade or so it managed to hold China together, between the urge to suppress opium and the temptation to use it for firming up its fragile grip on the country. Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang founder, had always proclaimed his hostility to the drug. Opium smoking did not sit well with the party programme of national strengthening and modernization.104 Once the nationalist government became established in Nanjing in 1927, it began to pass fresh opium-control regulations, emulating the Qing edict of 1906. ‘All cultivation of opium was prohibited forthwith. The import of, and wholesale traffic in, the drug was placed in the hands of the Opium Suppression Bureau . . . All dealers and smokers would be licensed, and no license would be granted to any person under the age of 25 years . . . An annual reduction of one-third of that quantity was to be effected so that the trade should be exterminated at the end of 1930.’105 There was a repressive side to the laws passed. In 1931 the sale or use of opium became the most common criminal offence in China, with 27,000 out of 70,000 reported convictions throughout the country.106 The government also opened addiction centres – numbering around six hundred by 1934 – housing patients in often rough conditions.107 Yet the need for funds proved more pressing. There was a catch in the form of a stamp tax on the product. This made it overwhelmingly tempting to keep the system in place without the planned reductions. Fiscal shortages battled the official anti-opium stance in the years that followed. The Opium Suppression Bureau changed names and measures, and tested more or less severe regional formulas, but it continued to draw in revenues.108
It was only in 1935 that ideology finally trumped necessity. That year, the government launched a new six-year reduction programme which, this time, it made its best efforts to enforce. It was late in the day, but the regime was in earnest. Its credibility was on the line: the plan, announced on the anniversary day of Lin Zexu’s 1839 burning of the foreign opium in Canton, belonged to a policy dubbed the ‘New Life Movement’, a political creed mixing Confucianism, Christianity and authoritarianism meant to characterize the Kuomintang. The next year, 18,523 drug offenders were arrested and 1,294 sentenced to death. Confiscations swelled, with 370 tons of opiates seized between 1935 and 1939. A fresh eradication drive combined with efforts to push users into yet more treatment centres.109 User numbers at last began to decline.
The campaign benefited from earlier, positive trends, notwithstanding the cataclysmic conditions affecting China in the interwar period. Even in 1922, after warlords everywhere had recommenced poppy farming, the OAC estimated that Chinese opium production stood at no more than 25 per cent of the 1907 level.110 By then, of course, Hoshi, Voyatzis and their ilk were pouring morphine into the country by multiple illegal means. But the volume of trafficked morphine is calculable, in the period before the 1931 Geneva Convention, since most supply came from licensed manufacturers whose output was officially collated. Worldwide morphine production reached a 1920s high of around 60 metric tons. It sank to about 25 metric tons, a level regarded by the PCOB as legitimate, in the following decade. The difference was 35 metric tons, the equivalent of about 450 tons of opium. Even if all of this had been diverted into China, it would have represented a tiny proportion of the late Qing total of several thousand tons.111 As a best estimate, the late Qing opiumsmoking population stood at around 15 million, or 3.3 per cent of the population. In 1935, according to a survey, 3.7 million people used opium or its modern equivalents in China, or 0.8 per cent of the population.112
Another positive factor was that control was now working with the cultural trend, rather than against it as it had in the nineteenth century. Anti-opium propaganda continued to rely on connecting the drug to downward social mobility. The message was hammered home, in the 1920s and ’30s, through texts and pictorials. The pressure was kept up by a powerful National Anti-opium Association, which produced plays, dissertation contests, posters, public speeches, radio programmes and propaganda films shown in cinemas. The association also harassed the warlords and the Kuomintang. It compiled statistics to be provided to the League of Nations, and it urged firmness on Chinese representatives in Geneva. It ensured that there could be no complete return to opium legality, only disbanding in 1937 after the adoption of the six-year reduction plan.113 The pipe finally ceased to be fashionable. The social elites – civil servants, teachers, professionals – had become less likely to smoke than the average person. The rest of the population followed, setting the direction of the trend downwards.114
Yet the Chinese success also belonged to the League of Nations. The first, repressive phase over, the Kuomintang adapted the system to look more like the monopolies prescribed by the League, with a monopoly and tapering supplies. The six-year reduction plan relied on a smoker registration system modelled on those in place in the rest of the region. China may have complained and refused, alongside the Americans, to ratify the League’s conventions, but this was what the 1925 Geneva Convention prescribed. The reduction which the Kuomintang belatedly achieved fitted within a regional trend that had commenced earlier, and it made use of the same tools.
China began at last providing statistics to the OAC in the late 1930s. According to the official data, its opium production fell from 5,855 metric tons in 1934 to 890 tons in 1937, the year of the Japanese invasion. To be added to this was Manchurian production, estimated by a U.S. representative on the OAC at 1,271 tons.115 A substantial share of the Persian and Turkish outputs may also have ended up in China. But this, too, is approximately known since in both countries poppy cultivation was legal and in neither was it subject to quotas. Persia may have produced in the order of 1,000 metric tons in the late 1930s.116 The picture was more complex in Turkey, but it may have been the source of the equivalent of 300 metric tons in diverted opium.117 Even if all of this went to China (it did not, since much went to Europe and the United States), this would still have placed Chinese consumption at 8,000 tons in 1935 and something around 3,500 tons in 1937. In 1906, according to this book’s estimate, Chinese opium use had stood at 25,000 metric tons.
The opium monopolies had substantially succeeded in their goal of managing drug use downwards. Both total opium use and addict populations fell. Though smuggling persisted, it ostensibly also declined or remained at manageable levels, except as a result of the Japanese invasion of China. Drug control combined with maintenance supply and adequate retail supervision worked. Government monopolies could bring down drug use and could do so without the cycles of repression and violence often associated with prohibition. They were arguably the more effective system, especially when dealing with large user populations.
The practical successes of the Far Eastern monopolies were never recognized; nor was their applicability for containing situations of rampant drug use. By acting as the League’s half-in, half-out bad conscience, the Americans obscured the results their exhortations had helped happen. Unrelenting, they insisted that the complete prohibition of drugs other than for medical purposes could only ever be the sole valid goal. That half measures could produce a better outcome was heresy. But the League itself believed in the power of its legal instruments. The lesson that was learned, rather, was that of the supposed triumph of the quota system instituted on manufactured drugs under the 1931 Convention. As experience would show, this only achieved dubious results. Already traffickers were moving geographically, and they had begun to undertake their own manufacturing, inaugurating a business model destined to flourish and grow a thousandfold. For now, the power of policing, especially as bolstered by the 1936 treaty instituting international cooperation, remained dogma.
The Second World War would further contribute to making the prohibitionists look right. It would disrupt international trafficking more effectively than any organized body ever could. Drastically hitting supplies, it would make zero drug use appear within reach. Further bolstering the apologists of supply suppression, it would pave the way for the construction of an even stricter regime under the United Nations. But this was not all. The League had engaged in another experiment pregnant with consequences: the prohibition of marijuana.