6
On 20 November 1924, in the middle of the deliberations of the Geneva Opium Conference, the Egyptian delegate Mohamed El Guindy made an off-programme intervention:
There is, however, another product which is at least as harmful as opium, if not more so, and which my Government would be glad to see included in the same category as the other narcotics already mentioned – I refer to hashish, the product of the cannabis indica or sativa. This substance and its derivatives work such havoc that the Egyptian Government has for a long time past prohibited their introduction into the country (except of course the trifling quantity required for medical purposes). I cannot sufficiently emphasise the importance of including this product in the list of narcotics the use of which is to be regarded by this Conference.1
El Guindy’s proposal, when submitted, met with ‘prolonged applause’. The motion to list hashish was immediately seconded by the Chinese and American delegates, Sze Sao-Ke and Stephen Porter.2 Malcolm Delevingne was supportive on principle, and so was the French delegate – unsurprisingly, since hashish was already a prohibited drug in France. The only objections came from the representative for India, which had a long tradition of cannabis use, whether as hashish (locally known as charas) or as marijuana (ganja), including as part of Hindu religious rituals.3 The India representative was barely able to fend off proposals, by the drafting subcommittee that was appointed, for a comprehensive ban of the ‘Indian hemp’ resin, medical or not. In the end cannabis was placed on the same restricted list as the other drugs. The full spread of its derivatives, smoked, eaten or drunk, joined opiates and cocaine in the final treaty text.
Domestic interdictions soon followed. In Britain marijuana became forbidden for recreational use under the Indian Hemp Drug Regulations of 1928.4 In the Netherlands it was made a controlled drug in the same year, and in Germany in 1930.5 The Hague Opium Convention had paved the way for the adoption, across the world, of laws against the non-medical use of opiates and cocaine: the 1925 Geneva Convention became the basis for spreading anti-marijuana legislation.
Just as the proscription of opium originated in China, not Europe or the United States, marijuana legislation began its career in the Middle East. Like opium, marijuana prohibition came about through the effects of colonialism and the backlash against it, even while it found an alibi in Western scientific discourses. It was telling that the subcommittee against which the India delegate had been forced to battle in Geneva had been composed of an Egyptian, a Turk and a Frenchman. The first modern-era cannabis legislation was passed in Egypt, in 1879, at Ottoman behest.6 The first modern law criminalizing the use of hashish was the French Loi du 12 juillet 1916.
What were El Guindy’s motives? There may have been an element of one-upmanship in his proposal. El Guindy was Egyptian, unlike the representative for India, who was actually British. Having his proposal adopted by the League scored a point for the colonized peoples. They too could be the authors of modern norms. The British authorities in Cairo had recently been embarrassed by an affair in which a Frenchman otherwise known to be engaged in gunrunning and other sulphurous undertakings, Henri de Monfreid, had been routing cannabis from India into Egypt. Lord Allenby, High Commissioner in Egypt, had been sufficiently concerned to compile a report to the Foreign Office.7 Monfreid, based in colonial Djibouti, offered the potential to make the French look bad. Perhaps El Guindy could imagine what the OAC would make of Monfreid’s feats of derring-do after hashish had been listed by the League.
There were nevertheless deeper roots to the Egyptian initiative. Arab texts attest to the consumption of hashish in Egypt, where it was mostly taken with the water-pipe, since at least the twelfth century. Long before Europeans discovered hashish, Egyptians had been debating its vices and virtues. Egyptian poetry described the desirable behavioural changes attributed to it (euphoria, sociability, carefreeness, meditativeness) while adversaries pointed to its undesirable effects (submissiveness, debility, prostitution). Critics focused on the parallel with wine, bringing scripture to bear against established tradition. Though hashish is not mentioned by name in the Koran, it had always had an ambiguous status in observant Muslim societies.8
In 1725 the Ottoman Sultan had forbidden hashish, ‘which lately is being smoked like tobacco’, with punishments including exile, condemnation to the galleys, imprisonment and beatings – though the decree, along with earlier injunctions against opium or coffee, had never been more than proclamatory.9 In 1875 the grand vizier issued a new circular to the Ottoman provinces prohibiting any further cultivation of cannabis. The order, based on a public investigation into its health effects, concerned a drug ‘only consumed by a few amateurs’, and it was no more thoroughly applied than earlier measures.10 The exception was Egypt, where consumption was more widespread. In 1877 Istanbul issued a follow-on order to the effect that all hashish destined for Egypt was to be seized and destroyed. Two years later, the Egyptian khedive himself prohibited the importation and cultivation of cannabis. The 1879 khedival proclamation was followed up with action: a subsequent decree ordered the destruction of cannabis fields, and another prevented keepers of public establishments from selling hashish.11
The Egyptian ban mixed traditional motive and modern impulses. The Egyptian elites were proud of their public health and hygiene service: put in place by Muhammad Ali, the country’s first hereditary pasha, the service had become a distinguishing feature of the modernizing Egyptian state. In the interpretation of Ali Mubarak, the minister of education and public works and a key supporter, the ban also involved an element of Muslim pride. Mubarak hoped to upstage a ban by Napoleon – supposedly issued during the brief occupation of Egypt in 1798–1801, but not referenced in French sources – writing: ‘See how non-Muslim sects ban it! Should not the Islamic sect be the first to do so?’12
Yet El Guindy’s Geneva proposal, while it built on a background of domestic legislation, also depended on data collected by the colonizer. In support of his intervention, the Egyptian delegate produced a ‘Memorandum with reference to haschiche as it concerns Egypt’. This quoted statistics and conclusions that could only have been drawn from the Egyptian Lunacy Department, as it was called, the service in charge of the colony’s mental asylums. The service had been run for the better part of the last thirty years by a British medical man: John Warnock. Warnock was convinced that cannabis caused madness, heavily colouring the data from which El Guindy drew.13
‘I have no doubt that in quite a number of cases there hasheesh is the chief if not the only cause of the mental disease,’ opined Warnock.14 But the British doctor, in turn, owed his conviction to data originally collected in India. In 1872 the Indian government had finalized an inquiry into the dangers of cannabis or, as it was termed, Indian hemp. The review was based on contributions by magistrates, tax collectors, policemen and doctors, though in the end it gave weight only to replies from asylum superintendents. Several of these superintendents had volunteered that large numbers of their inmates had been admitted after using ganja (marijuana), with proportions of approximately one-third in Delhi, Bengal, Mysore and so on. ‘There can, however, be no doubt that its habitual use does tend to produce insanity,’ they opined. ‘Of the cases of insanity produced by the excessive use of drugs or spirits, by far the largest number must be attributed to the abuse of hemp.’15
These conclusions soon became controversial, and rightly so. As corrective enquiries showed, the data were meaningless. The causes of insanity supposedly observed by asylum superintendents had not been drawn from medical enquiry but only extrapolated from admission papers. These papers were not filled out by the superintendents themselves but by clerks or police based on assertions by third parties or on plain surmise. ‘For want of any other reason, it has been necessary to enter under the heading of ganjah several who were merely reported to have indulged in its use,’ admitted one of them.16 Asylum inmates belong to closed and idle populations among which a practice such as the use of ganja can swiftly spread. Patients were more likely to have begun smoking the drug after admittance than before.
Another official survey, the 1893–4 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, managed to debunk the first study. The commission picked apart a total of 1,344 admissions into the British asylums of India. (Example: ‘Case No. 1 – (Matabadal Gaola) – In this case the Superintendent is of opinion that the man “was always of weak mind and probably of melancholic habit”. There is no evidence that the man began to use the drug before he was insane. The history shows that he began to use the drug at the same time as he showed signs of insanity. This fact, though noted in the history, has been overlooked by the Superintendent.’17) Out of the 1,344 cases, it concluded that in only 98 could the use of cannabis be reasonably regarded as a factor in having caused insanity. Among them, 38 per cent involved a history of some other cause, such as heredity, syphilis or alcoholism.18 These conclusions stated that
There are not a few witnesses who deny this, who say that they have never seen a consumer of the drugs insane, and do not believe that the drugs ever produce insanity. But the much more common impression is that, at all events if used to excess, the hemp drugs may, and often do, produce insanity . . . This popular idea has been greatly strengthened by the attitude taken up by Asylum Superintendents. They have known nothing of the effects of the drugs at all, though the consumption is so extensive, except that cases of insanity have been brought to them attributed with apparent authority to hemp drugs. They have generalized from this limited and one-sided experience.19
The cat, unfortunately, was out of the bag. Though, in Britain, what medical commentary came out tended to side with the Hemp Drugs Commission and against the asylum statistics, such was not the impression Warnock retained.20 In Egypt the data chimed with official suspicion of hashish in the first place. Confirmation bias further helped ensure it became accepted among Warnock’s superiors and colleagues. There was, moreover, a third strand to El Guindy’s assertions: the Egyptian representative also cited French medical sources in his speech, among whom was Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours.21
Moreau, it will be remembered, was the ‘doctor’ who had administered the green jam to Théophile Gautier on his jaunt to the Ile Saint-Louis. A psychiatrist attached to the well-known Charenton asylum, Moreau was the author of a seminal book on hashish dated 1845. Moreau had experimented with the paste while travelling in Egypt and the Levant. His interest was not actually in the drug as such, or in proving or disproving that it caused madness. He hoped, rather, to explore the fundamentals of mental disorder by making use of hashish’s effects as an intoxicant: ‘Through its effect on the mental faculties, hashish grants those who submit to its uncanny influence the power of studying within himself the moral disorders that characterise insanity, or at least the key intellectual modifications that form the starting point to all categories of mental alienation.’22 Moreau’s view was therefore not that hashish or cannabis, through long-term use, caused madness, but rather that its effects on the subject while intoxicated were a sufficiently good approximation of the state he was interested in researching.
The distinction was quickly lost in his work’s recuperation. In the 1850s the psychiatrist Bénédict-Augustin Morel, based on Moreau’s account, would list hashish among the substances which according to him led to ‘racial degeneracy’.23 ‘The active causes of degeneracy among humans are those which, attacking the brain directly and frequently, produce special deliriums and place those who use them periodically in a state of momentary madness,’ wrote Morel.24 This bridged Moreau’s singling out of the drug as a prop to induce temporary madness and the notion that it had permanent effects. There were no clinical studies on hashish such as were being performed at the time on opium or morphine. Morel’s inspiration owed more to Rousseau’s idealizing of natural man or to tropes about inferior races. (‘Among the feelings of the American native . . . there remains no trace of the man who emerged from the creator’s hands . . . It is not primitive man, we see in him, but degenerate man.’25) Hashish nevertheless acquired, in France, a reputation for causing mental enfeeblement. As a pharmacist and writer put it: ‘The hashish eater’s state is severe: every time he absorbs the drug, he undergoes a hallucinatory state of intoxication, often quite violent, soon leading to dementia, to madness.’26
The upshot was that France became the only Western country, in 1916, to list hashish under its first major drug law and the first in the world to criminalize its possession. But Moreau’s influence went beyond France. Medical writers quoted him everywhere, occasionally alongside Morel. So did the press, French or foreign, when it reported on hashish: for example the Pall Mall Gazette when it passed on the news of the 1875 Ottoman decree. So did, finally, officials such as El Guindy.27 The marriage of Moreau’s notions with popular tropes to form indissoluble truths is all the more striking for occurring not just in France and Egypt but, in parallel, in a third country set to concern cannabis prohibition: Mexico.
In 1860, as part of a short series on intoxicants, the highbrow French daily Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires ran the following extract:
The excess of hashish can lead to raving madness. There are many examples in Algeria. Last May, an act of savage violence was committed in the grand mosque of the Malekites by a hashish smoker named Hamoud-el-Kahouadji, who runs a café rue Philippe. He smoked no less than a quarter pound a day. ‘Suddenly, he was seized with a fit of fury, entered the grand mosque of the rue de la Marine, and jumped on a young Moor, whom he violently bit on the nose. The madman also assaulted the child’s father . . . It took considerable trouble to seize him’. The Akhbar, which reports the fact, adds: ‘. . . In the time of the Turks, the manufacturers and even the consumers of this plant were severely punished. It is a wise prohibition which French civilization might usefully borrow from Ottoman barbarousness.’28
The irony should not be lost that, while the Egyptians thought they were borrowing their anti-hashish legislation from Napoleon, the French believed with equally dubious justification that their inspiration ought to come from the Ottomans. The piece, however, also makes uncanny comparison with a story published in the Mexican newspaper El Monitor Republicano in March 1888:
We read in El Pabellón Nacional that last Saturday around 11 in the morning, there was a great disturbance in San Pablo plaza of this capital city; that the people ran as if they were pursued by an African lion and that the author of such a scandal was a soldier who, under the influence of mariguana, and with knife in hand, frantically attacked the passersby, wounding people left and right.
The same newspaper notes that a gendarme attempted in vain to detain the man on Molino Bridge, but far from succeeding, he received a wound in the back, and the possessed soldier could not be captured until, with a club, another gendarme applied a powerful blow to the man’s head.29
It was the Spanish who had introduced cannabis to South America: in the sixteenth century the Crown had instructed its subjects to sow hemp for fibre. The hemp farms fared only moderately well, but Indian farmhands picked the seed up and, with more success, planted it in their vegetable gardens. They discovered the plant’s medical and quasi-medical virtues, and by the eighteenth century it had assumed a place in popular divination rituals under the name pipiltzinzintlis. (The Inquisition promptly forbade the practice: the herb, eaten or drunk at this stage in its career, facilitated visions and Devil worship, in its opinion.30) That the pagan herb was cannabis had temporarily been obscured, but in the 1770s the polymath scientist José Antonio Alzate proved that pipiltzinzintlis and cannabis were one and the same. By 1842 the Farmacopea Mexicana listed cannabis as a local herb. Around the same time, it began to be smoked and acquired the name ‘mariguana’ (later ‘marijuana’).31
Mexican marijuana use long remained anything but widespread. Medical writers knew it best through the European literature on hemp and hashish, in particular O’Shaughnessy, Moreau and the various French authors who quoted Moreau. But marijuana was also sold in herbarias, small shops or stands run by local women. Over time, fuelled by the French theories, racial prejudice mingled with discourses on degeneracy to sow suspicion among the intellectual elite. The Mexican prohibition on marijuana, when it passed in 1920, would be called the ‘Dispositions on the cultivation and commerce of substances that degenerate the race’.32 But it was the drug’s use around barracks and prisons that ensured it became associated with violent behaviour. Mexican soldiers and prison inmates were the first demographics widely to take up marijuana smoking. As newspapers published stories of soldiers and prisoners committing violent acts while under the drug’s influence, the belief spread that marijuana caused not just insanity, but fits of violent rampage.33
Modern research has debunked the notion that cannabis use leads to insanity or violence. Something like 190 million people smoke marijuana worldwide, and no surge in random public violence has resulted.34 Cannabis intoxication may mimic certain aspects of psychoses such as schizophrenia, triggering strange thoughts, auditory hallucinations or socially inapt emotions (for example, smiling instead of feeling sad), but these effects all dissipate. A recent study involving eight hundred subjects performed in New Zealand found no link between cannabis and either anxiety disorders or depression. Large-scale studies show that rates of schizophrenia have not increased, historically, alongside rising marijuana consumption within national populations. The worst that can be said is that marijuana may exacerbate psychotic symptoms in schizophrenics, and that psychotics who use cannabis regularly are more likely to be hospitalized.35
How did the belief that marijuana leads to madness become popularly ingrained in settings ranging from India to North Africa and Mexico? The members of the Indian Hemp Commission observed: ‘The unscientific or popular mind rushes at conclusions, and naturally seizes on that fact of the case that lies most on the surface . . . An intoxicant would naturally be more readily accepted than other physical causes, because some of its effects as seen in ordinary life are very similar to the symptoms of insanity.’36 Marijuana intoxication could look outwardly similar to insanity. Morel made the same false generalization from Moreau de Tours. So did newspapers when looking for a cause to the public incidents they wrote up, and so did asylum administrators in India and Egypt.
The developing Mexican discourse on marijuana was in turn relevant to accepted wisdom in an important neighbouring country: the United States. Since the United States was neither a member of the League of Nations nor a signatory to the 1925 Geneva Convention, it did not need to follow their guidance. At the same time, historians struggle to explain the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. There had been significant Mexican immigration into the United States between 1915 and 1930, mostly to southwestern states. The immigrants and the hostility to them propagated the lore. ‘When they are addicted to the use they become very violent, especially when they become angry and will attack an officer even if a gun is drawn, they seem to have no fear,’ testified a Texas police captain. It took several men to handle one who was intoxicated, such was their strength, marijuana producing ‘a lust for blood’ and ‘superhuman strength’.37 Between 1914 and 1931, 29 states passed laws banning the non-medical sale of marijuana, including California, Colorado and Texas.38 By one interpretation, the driving force behind these laws was the image of the Mexican immigrant smoking marijuana and committing crimes. Discussions that preceded the passage of anti-marijuana legislation in the southwestern and western states were prone to make reference to the Mexican origins and/or the violent effects of the drug.39 The same stories would have prompted the passage of federal legislation.
This ‘Mexican hypothesis’ is disputed. The historian Jerome Himmelstein writes that ‘prior to the 1960s, marihuana was a nonissue in the United States nationally and in most local areas.’40 It only rarely made the headlines, and theories about a 1930s marijuana panic centred around Mexican immigrants are not supported by the evidence. Himmelstein’s thorough investigation of the databases found almost no American press articles on marijuana until 1935 – less than one article per year compared to more than one hundred for alcohol – and only very few thereafter. Marijuana was rarely mentioned in anti-Mexican propaganda. Even in the southwest, both floor debates and newspaper coverage of state marijuana laws were minimal, and their passage was greeted with indifference.41 A competing explanation, therefore, is that the Marihuana Tax Act was the product of bureaucratic action, especially by FBN commissioner Harry Anslinger (the ‘Anslinger hypothesis’).
Anslinger was a redoubtable figure who gained the reputation of a hard-boiled anti-narcotics fighter. Physically imposing, square-jawed and in his later years bald, he has been described by some as ‘a sort of beefy Mussolini’ and ‘the ultimate tough cop’. He cultivated this image himself with curt, unforgiving aphorisms. (‘Wherever you find severe penalties, addiction disappears.’42) Of a modest social background, Anslinger had begun his career as an investigator for the Pennsylvania Railroad, disproving false insurance claims but also pushing back against gang brutality on navvies. He asserted meanwhile that his hatred of drugs harked back to his youth. One day, a woman had begun screaming on the second floor of a neighbour’s house. Her husband despatched him to the pharmacy. ‘I recall driving those horses, lashing at them, convinced that the woman would die if I did not get back in time . . . I never forgot those screams. Nor did I forget that the morphine she had required was sold to a twelve-year-old boy, no questions asked.’43
Anslinger was certainly prepared to twist evidence to support legislation on marijuana. During the hearings, he transparently planted gruesome stories in the press. (‘The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marijuana, and to history as hashish.’44) He may have helped sweep under the carpet reports put together by the military in the Panama Canal Zone, dated 1926 to 1933, which portrayed marijuana as neither addictive nor dangerous.45 During testimonies, he was prepared to trot such stories out as the ‘Licata’ case, the case of an axe murderer found to have been high on marijuana – without mentioning a prior examination report showing that the culprit had been diagnosed as criminally insane, subject to hallucinations and homicidal impulses.46
Yet Anslinger, behind the facade, was a complex man and a deft political operator. Contemporaries described him as humorous, cosmopolitan, musically accomplished, proficient in several languages. His knowledge of German had originally gained him a place in the State Department. As consul in Nassau, the Bahamas, in the 1920s, he had accomplished the feat of convincing the British authorities to cooperate in alcohol prohibition – it had helped earn him his position as an FBN commissioner.47 In 1956 a senator asked: ‘Is it or is it not a fact that the marihuana user has been responsible for many of our most sadistic, terrible crimes in this nation, such as sex slayings, sadistic slayings, and matters of that kind?’ The commissioner replied: ‘There have been instances of that, Senator. We have had some rather tragic occurrences by users of marihuana. It does not follow that all crime can be traced to marihuana.’48
Anslinger at first refrained from throwing his weight behind the Marihuana Tax Act, which remained under consideration for several years before its passage. He instead supported the enactment of more state laws.49 When pressured, simultaneously, to ensure that powerful sedatives known as barbiturates were listed as narcotics, he resisted having them added to the FBN’S load.50 After the Second World War, he would show the same hesitation with regard to amphetamines. Anslinger was no zealot forever looking to add to the narcotics list. To make such a change, he needed a good reason, preferably one supported by sound political logic.
What, then, accounts for the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act? Without dismissing Mexican influence, explanations fall back on the League and earlier adopters. Could Anslinger resist the prohibition of a drug that had been banned in France in 1916, in Britain in 1928 and in Germany in 1930? If America was seen to fall behind the League, could it remain the champion in the fight, including against opiates? Anslinger attended the 1930s League conferences, communicated regularly with OAC members, and was well attuned to their agendas. He even owed his job, in part, to the international treaties – specifically the 1931 Geneva Convention, which the United States had signed. In 1933, under fiscal strain, the administration had proposed transferring the FBN to the Department of Justice and merging it again with the Prohibition Bureau. The State Department pointed out that a ‘reorganization of this nature would be in violation of Article XV of the 1931 Geneva Convention . . . requiring that each signatory maintain a separate, central narcotics office’.51
As to El Guindy’s own success in 1925, it is easily accounted for. It was a difficult conference already. China and the United States, keen to prove their drug-fighting credentials, endorsed banning marijuana in knee-jerk fashion. None of the intermediary powers – Japan, the Netherlands, Thailand – had any reason to spring to the defence of cannabis, the existence of which they were scarcely even aware. Nor was any industrial or trade interest involved, as they had for a time been on the side of opiates.
In practice this left two powers with a word on the matter: Britain and France. Hashish was already illegal in France. The UK, though its home marijuana consumption was negligible, had a potential problem if cannabis were to be banned in India. There too, however, some regulation of the hemp drug had been trickling through. While concluding that it ‘produces no injurious effects on the mind’, the 1893–4 Hemp Drugs Commission had highlighted the risk that ‘excessive’ use might worsen the condition of people already afflicted by, or predisposed to, mental-health problems.52 Its report recommended the harmonization of hemp taxation, the licensing of cultivation and controlling the number of retail outlets. It also advocated placing limits on the amount an individual could buy. The various Indian presidencies and princely states had been slow to comply, but by the 1920s such controls had been put in place in most of the country.53 As long as cannabis was not banned outright, especially its medical or quasimedical use, British India had no reason to oppose its listing by the League.
The Foreign Office, moreover, had other motives to welcome the El Guindy initiative. In Egypt itself, High Commissioner Allenby found the hashish traffic irksome. He described how hashish arrived from Greece and Syria in rubber bags to be thrown off boats and picked up or carried inland on Bedouin camels. ‘Hashish has been found in the middle of cotton goods from Manchester, it is put in bundles of newspapers from abroad, it is hidden inside imported goods of all kinds such as tins of petroleum, bricks, millstones, marble columns, hollow bedsteads, barrels of olives, looking glasses etc.’54 It was proving impossible to put a stop to these practices, and if international action could be taken, that would be welcome.
Finally, there was South Africa. Indian immigrants there had for a long time been smoking cannabis, having brought over the practice from their home country. But Black South Africans also consumed it, and they ostensibly traded hemp with members of the Indian community, in dealings that escaped the purview of white authority. The prospect of two non-white communities finding common ground around a mysterious drug with a reputation for inducing derangement and violence was unlikely to appeal to South Africa’s colonial masters.55 El Guindy’s intervention at the Geneva conference was preceded by a letter from the office of the South African prime minister, brought up at the OAC in August 1924. This read: ‘I have the honour to inform you that, from the point of view of the Union of South Africa, the most important of all the habit-forming drugs is Indian hemp or “Dagga” and this drug is not included in the International List. It is suggested that the various Governments being parties to the International Opium Convention should be asked to include in their lists of habit forming drugs the following: Indian hemp, including the whole or any portions of the plants cannabis indica or cannabis sativa.’56
The prohibition of marijuana would have fateful consequences for the war on drugs decades later, but for now it could be clocked as a victory. The international trade in cannabis was minimal. The plant was barely cultivated at all outside India, the Levant and parts of Africa, where it was locally consumed. International hashish seizures are rarely even mentioned in OAC records; in 1933 and 1934, when they did appear, they occurred only in Egypt, Canada and Romania.57 Nor did the PCOB, the drug system’s main statistical organ, bother to ask member states for production data, only information on international trade, medicinal preparations and confiscations.58
As the 1930s drew to a close, the League congratulated itself for major strides accomplished in the fight. It had placed the trade in the main drugs of abuse – opiates, cocaine and now also cannabis – under a stringent system of international certificates. It had inspired member states to set up specialized anti-narcotics units and facilitated their cooperation through shared information and extradition procedures. It had instituted quotas for manufactured drugs, putting an end to diversion from licensed producers. It had helped put a number of traffickers behind bars. That trafficking was merely moving underground was not immediately apparent, and the closing of sea lanes during the Second World War would usefully retard the development of new drug-dealing networks. By 1945 the League’s system of control seemed vindicated, awaiting only a few finishing touches. Drug prohibition was inching towards its zenith.
The war put an end to the League of Nations, but its narcotics-control organs were salvaged from ruin. In 1940 Anslinger arranged for the removal of the staff of the DSB and PCOB – the boards supervising quotas and statistics under the Geneva conventions – to Washington. A 1946 protocol transferred the League’s drug-control responsibilities to the newly created United Nations. The OAC ceased to sit, but it was reborn under the name Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND). It now enjoyed American participation, with as representative none other than Anslinger. For a while the world’s supervisory organs would all be housed in New York, though the CND relocated to Geneva in 1954.59
The war years were bleak for addicts everywhere as supplies collapsed and black-market prices skyrocketed. In the United States, drug-using populations had shifted: the morphine addict who had contracted his or her habit from medical use was giving way to the heroin-using, urban-ghetto white male. Total numbers had fallen: while perhaps numbering 100,000 in the late 1930s, American addicts stood at about half that by 1950.60 There was a surge in drug use in the occupied countries – Germany, Austria, Japan – in the immediate postwar years as U.S. Army morphine stockpiles seeped into the black market, but this was short-lived.61 Elsewhere in Europe and North America, drug-user numbers had never been very high. In Britain interwar Dangerous Drugs Act prosecutions had rarely totalled more than one hundred annually.62 German drug law infractions fell in the 1950s to fewer than 1,000 per year.63 Canada dutifully compiled estimates of its addict population, medical and non-medical: as of 1949 these numbered 3,500.64
As to Asia, during the war the Americans had convinced the British and Dutch to shut down the opium monopolies in their colonies. France promised to follow suit in Indochina in 1945.65 A major source of illicit supply was, moreover, drying up: China. There, also, the war had disrupted opium availability. Military operations, coming on the heels of the Kuomintang suppression programme, had further hit production. The People’s Republic of China turned to opium eradication as soon as it was founded. In language typical of the Communist regime, it issued grand proclamations couched in antiimperialist terms, opium having been ‘forcibly imported into China’ in a ‘plot to poison’ the country, and the cultivator having been forced to grow poppies to support ‘the reactionary rule and the decadent lifestyle of the feudal bureaucrats, compradors, and warlords’.66 A General Order dated February 1950 set out a comprehensive elimination plan, including a propaganda campaign, poppy eradication and addict rehabilitation. By the end of 1952 the government announced it had arrested 82,056 traffickers and sentenced 34,775 to prison or to death, and another 2,138 to labour camps.67 Within a few years, China was at last rid of opium.
Communist China’s elimination of the drug was less brutal than is sometimes supposed. It involved few death penalties: 1 per cent of the sentences dealt.68 Those who had not been arrested often turned themselves in for lenient treatment. Many people rushed to confess in order to avoid the risk of execution. The People’s Republic benefited from earlier efforts by the Nationalist regime, and from opium’s long decline in popularity in the decades since the late Qing. Yet there can be no doubt that it was only possible finally to rid the country of the drug by totalitarian means. The broader Communist campaign against ‘counter-revolutionaries’, which preceded and overlapped that against opium, is officially estimated to have killed 500,000–800,000 people and many more unofficially. After that, fear alone sufficed to dissuade drug offenders. The clampdown was otherwise made effective by the implementation of mass surveillance and denunciation systems typical of totalitarian regimes. Local police stations were staffed with household-register appointees whose role was to report everything that took place in the community under his or her jurisdiction. Organizations such as the Communist Youth League, the Women’s Association, the trade unions and residents’ associations were asked to keep tabs on their members, leaving no room for anyone to hide. As to poppy cultivation, the collectivization of agriculture ensured that it could never be resurgent.69
This did not prevent Anslinger, in the same period, from accusing China of running narcotics into the free world as part of a subversion effort. At the CND he blamed the People’s Republic for running heroin labs and smuggling routes, naming the individuals supposedly involved. In the New York Times, he wrote that both to reap profits and to ‘demoralize the people of the free world’ Communist China was flushing out its surplus drugs to traffickers.70 (The article recycled a twenty-year-old story on the Ezra family, the masters of the Shanghai–San Francisco route who had been arrested in 1933.) China, not represented at the United Nations at the time, could not rebut his claims, though the Soviets and delegates of other communist countries regularly protested Anslinger’s allegations.71 With a surprising lack of scepticism, the British newspaper The Times repeated Anslinger’s assertion that China had ‘totally reversed’ Chiang Kai-shek’s opium eradication policies.72 None of this was more than Cold War fear-mongering or obfuscation. Ironically, however, there was a kernel of truth to the story that China’s relationship with opium was not dead: the Communists had not revived poppy growing, but the fleeing Nationalists had.
In a zone overlapping northern Burma (now Myanmar), the southern tip of the Chinese province of Yunnan and northwestern Laos lay the territory of a people named the Shan. The Shan, ruled by their own chieftains and numbering around 1 million at the turn of the century, had adopted poppy cultivation from the Chinese. Within British Burma they had been allowed to keep growing opium on the grounds that it was traditional.73 In 1950 remnants of the fleeing Kuomintang army established themselves in the Shan states. Bordering on Yunnan, the region was a good staging post for raids or even a future invasion into China.
The densely forested, mountainous terrain made it impossible to police for the weak Burmese state. The Kuomintang forces in Burma, numbering several thousand, soon controlled a large swathe of territory going all the way to the sea. They began to buy opium from the Shan tribes, refine it into heroin and take that for sale into Thailand. There, they bought food, clothing and munitions. They also received American supplies in the form of radios and weapons. Shan state opium capacity, at around 60 tons in 1950, would grow to 300–400 tons within a decade.74 In 1951–2 the Kuomintang forces attempted two attacks into Yunnan, which both failed miserably. Burma protested to the UN, and the threat of embarrassment led to an evacuation to Taiwan. A large clandestine army nevertheless stayed behind with its labs, its networks and its smuggling savvy.75 Therein lay the origins of the Golden Triangle: the opium-growing and -refining zone overlapping Burma, Laos and Thailand that became one of two major illicit heroin centres in the world from the 1960s onwards.
The second major source of trafficked heroin emerging in this period was the French Connection. Here, too, trafficking cultures exhibited surprising resilience. France, after all, had clamped down on diversion from its morphine factories in the early 1930s. Even after Eliopoulos had moved suppliers to Turkey, his operation had been dismantled. After the Second World War Marseilles mobsters began routing opium from Turkey’s Anatolian plateau into Lebanon, where it was churned into morphine base. A Lebanese dealer named Sami El Khoury subverted Beirut airport, customs and police to allow imports in and exports out. From there, the morphine was shipped to Sicily for refining; then, after the Sicilian labs were raided, to southern France. After that it was freight-forwarded to the United States.76
Meyer Lansky, one of the few surviving New York Jewish gang leaders, ran the network at the American end. Lansky owned casinos in Havana, and his connections ran through (pre-Castro era) Cuba and Miami, where he had formed an association with the aptly named Trafficante mafia ‘family’. The money was laundered through Swiss banks thanks to arrangements by an old gunrunning friend of Lansky named John Pullman.77 One question concerns the involvement of Charles Lucania, aka ‘Lucky’ Luciano. According to both Anslinger and the historian Alfred McCoy – whose sources consist mostly of verbal accounts and reports from the FBN – Luciano, a long-time associate of Lansky, was the Connection’s mastermind. The gangster, who had once been behind a number of rackets of which narcotics were only one, had been indicted for running a considerable number of brothels in New York in 1936, and he had spent the Second World War behind bars. During the war, however, he may have provided the Office of Navy Intelligence with valuable contacts in Sicily and/or among New York waterfront gangs capable of flushing out subversives. According to this story, Luciano was rewarded with parole in 1946. He and another hundred mafiosi were deported to Italy, from where they went on to establish the long drug-smuggling route that began in Anatolia and ended among his old associates in America.78
Yet Luciano has over time become a semi-mythical figure. After 1946 he remained under close surveillance and at risk of extradition. He may have brokered a few contacts, but it is unlikely he enjoyed the freedom, at that stage, necessary for building a large and sophisticated trafficking network. ‘Listen,’ he told Earl Wilson of the New York Post Home News, ‘it’s not necessary for me to fool around with dope,’ cause I’m not that hard up for money.’79 It is also unclear whether Luciano actually helped either naval intelligence or the armed forces during the war, and it is just as likely that he bribed his way out of prison.80 Altogether it seems that Luciano may have played an early role in the establishment of the long-running French Connection, but that the heavy lifting was performed by Lansky and more shadowy French and Italian figures.
Both the Franco-Turkish network and the Golden Triangle remained, in any case, at early stages in their careers. Trafficking at that time was at a low ebb. In 1950 internationally reported drug seizures totalled 59 metric tons of opium, 80 kilograms of heroin and 12 kilograms of cocaine.81 (See Appendix III for tables.) In 1931, by comparison, seizures had been significantly larger: 56 tons of opium, 943 kilograms of heroin and 70 kilograms of cocaine.82 By 2015 drug seizures would total 587 tons of opium, 90 tons of heroin and 864 tons of cocaine: a tenfold increase for opium and more than a thousandfold for heroin and cocaine.83
Nor was it just that the world’s police forces were slow to hunt down dealers. In the United States, the FBN at the ready, drug-related offences were also down. Opium seizures fell from 1,653 kilograms in 1929 to 45 kilograms in 1950, and morphine/heroin seizures from 98 to 22 kilograms.84 Federal drug Act offences numbered 10,133 in 1929, but only 4,494 in 1950 (plus 1,490 violations of the Marihuana Tax Act).85 Few people took drugs anywhere, and there were few dealers.
It is in this environment that the American legislature saw fit to pass its most punitive drug laws: the Boggs Act of 1951 and Narcotic Control Act of 1956. The Boggs Act set minimum sentences ranging from two to ten years for drug violations, with longer sentences for repeat offences, including possession.86 Average prison terms climbed from around forty months before the Act to over seventy months afterwards; almost no offender got under five years, and many got ten, twenty or more.87
The 1956 Narcotics Control Act lengthened sentencing again. The minimum for trafficking rose from two to five years for a first-time offence. Possession of marijuana now carried a minimum sentence of two years for the first offence, five for the second and ten for the third. With the exception of a first-time possession offence, the Act forbade judges from suspending sentences or imposing probation. For the first time, a drug offence could carry the death penalty: the sale of heroin by an adult to a youth under eighteen.88 The sentencing that followed could be frightful. In one instance, an epileptic with an IQ of 69 was given two life sentences for selling heroin to a seventeen-year-old provocateur. In another, a Black veteran with no previous record was sentenced to fifty years without parole for selling marijuana.89 A prominent doctor complained: ‘A man was given ten years for possessing three narcotic tablets. Another man was given ten years for forging three narcotic prescriptions – no sale was involved.’90
Such complaints rarely invoked much pity. It was a time of easy triumphs for the prohibitionists. The American Bar Association, finding the Boggs Act excessive, created in 1954 a special committee on narcotics, and in 1955 it formally called for Congress to review and amend federal drug policy. The American Medical Association opened its own investigation into the drug policies in place around the same time.91 Anslinger shot back with a book entitled The Traffic in Narcotics, not all of whose arguments were worthy of his challengers. According to the book, marijuana users found early on that ‘the will power is destroyed . . . the moral barricades are broken down and often debauchery and sexuality results.’92 The FBN commissioner ‘proved’ that addiction led to crime based on a pre-war Taiwanese report and on FBN files showing that 83 per cent of ‘trafficker–addicts’ had prior criminal records.93 In a different era someone might have asked what this actually showed and whether it did not prove, on the contrary, that prohibition was a gift to criminals, but in this case the parliamentarians were impressed. Congressional hearings, running in 1955 and 1956, closed with the passage of the Narcotics Control Act.94
Drug users were so few and marginal that the state could afford to treat them like pariahs. It was not that drugs were a terrible menace, but that they had well-nigh ceased to be one. Particularly tough antidrug legislation was passed in the United States in the 1950s, in response not to a serious drug problem but to the absence of one. The same could be said of the UN drug-control system, which was soon to produce its crowning piece of legislation: the Single Convention of 1961.
With the Chinese supply out, world opium output had by the mid-1950s fallen significantly. Licit world opium production amounted to 820 metric tons in 1955. The lion’s share went to three producers: India, Turkey and Iran. Diversion from Indian poppy fields was minimal, as CND assessments confirmed.95 The situation was different in Iran and Turkey. Though these now both centralized opium purchases through government agencies, helping keep better track of the product, incentives remained high for farmers to sell into the black market. Officially, Iran produced 95 tons of opium and Turkey 222 tons per year. Adjusting the official Iranian and Turkish numbers based on their poppy acreage but keying in Indian yields provides more realistic numbers: 411 tons for Iran and 905 tons for Turkey.96 To this may be added perhaps 100 tons for Burma. World opium production, even then, would have stood at just under 2,000 tons in 1955. Pharmaceutical industry needs totalled 863 tons, leaving in the order of 1,100 tons to the illegal traffic. This was a fraction of pre-war volumes, which had never been less than 5,000 tons.97
For coca the data are hazier, but the world’s two main and almost sole producers, Peru and Bolivia, both provided data to the Permanent Central Opium Board in 1954. This placed world output at 13,113 metric tons, of which 700 were needed for medical use. The PCOB, however, estimated that 12,000 tons remained in the Andes to be chewed.98 If these numbers are to be taken literally, 413 tons would have been left for refining into illicit cocaine, yielding 1.1 tons of the drug – enough to support perhaps 3,500 heavy users worldwide.99 This is necessarily imprecise, but more accurate cocaine seizures only averaged around 10 kilograms annually.100 The traffic was minimal and cocaine abuse, in this period, anecdotal. In 1957 the Commission on Narcotic Drugs itself agreed ‘that the cocaine traffic was no longer a major problem in most parts of the world’.101
None of this dissuaded the commission from pushing for total eradication; on the contrary. The CND, the United Nations’ antinarcotics steering committee, began elaborating plans for direct controls over the opium supply. The idea was to extend to raw materials the quota system that already applied, based on the 1931 Geneva Convention, to manufactured drugs. Raw-material quotas would reflect ultimate medical needs. Member states would submit estimates concerning the amount of opium planted, harvested, consumed domestically, exported and stockpiled. The DSB would be responsible for allocating quotas, and the PCOB would have the power to enquire into discrepancies, conduct inspections and impose embargoes. In exchange for submitting to these conditions, seven named countries were to receive a monopoly on licit sales. The Frenchman Charles Vaille introduced the proposal in the CND in 1951.102 The project, which soon took the shape of a new UN instrument in drafting named the Opium Protocol, earned Anslinger’s vehement support. By 1953 the protocol was ready, in 1954 it was ratified by the Indian government, and by 1959 Iran had acceded to it.103
The coca leaf, likewise, was coming under assault in its principal country of production: Peru. The coca leaf was and is still used in the Andes to alleviate hunger, thirst and fatigue, and as a folk remedy to relieve pain. The leaf’s cocaine content is small, less than 1 per cent, but coca chewing can provide a physical boost during moments of hard work, especially at the high altitudes where it is typically consumed. It also serves to seal acts of hospitality, marriages or the building of a new house’s foundations. In the 1920s and ’30s Peru had ignored the League (for reasons independent of cocaine or coca), only agreeing to join the OAC in 1938.104 But in the 1930s and ’40s, a Peruvian ‘Indianist’ movement, a socially aware political current, began to make its mark nationally. The people composing this movement wanted to pass land and other reforms designed to better the condition of Indigenous Andean people. They were not Indigenous themselves, though, and they took a patronising view of coca chewing. Traditional culture was not something they valued, and their leading experts militated against coca. The leaf’s defenders became the conservative elites: coca was a taxable commodity, and it helped finance infrastructure and other budgetary items.105
The status quo broke after the Second World War, first under a left-wing government inclined towards social reform, then after a coup installed in power an authoritarian regime closely aligned with the United States. In 1949 the government revoked all existing licences and set up a crude-cocaine monopoly, also charged with regulating cultivation and distribution and with collecting taxes. With exports placed under control, this theoretically put the lid on smuggling. In the same year, Peru aligned its penal code with international norms – cocaine became criminalized, leading to scores of arrests and seizures.106 This left open the question of coca chewing: the United Nations stepped into the breach with a special mission to Peru and Bolivia in 1949.
The UN commission visited laboratories, hospitals, schools, missions, prisons, agricultural stations and farms, factories, mines and so on. Its researchers sought evidence of physical characteristics, such as dry skin, missing teeth or low IQ, which it could tie to coca, though it declined to accept notions of ‘race degeneration’. It took down statements from the Bolivian and Peruvian military that forbidding coca-chewing among recruits had improved their physical condition.107 When it came to addiction, it found itself in a quandary. Noting that addiction required compulsive use, a tendency to increase doses and physical dependence, the commission noted: ‘In the light of this definition, the observations of the Commission show that coca-leaf chewing is not an addiction (toxicomania) but a habit. It may, however, in some individuals, become an addiction, but generally it can be given up like other habits.’108 Its conclusions, nevertheless, were foregone: ‘The Commission desires, however, to state that the habit of coca-leaf chewing is also dangerous, because the leaves contain a toxic substance – cocaine.’109 Even if coca chewing did not match the criteria for drug abuse: ‘Limitation of the production of coca leaf for chewing should be effected gradually until complete suppression is achieved.’110
Ever since 1948, Anslinger had been promoting the idea of a Single Convention to unify, replace and extend the piecemeal controls applicable under the existing treaties. Based on a single legal instrument, all drugs, whether raw or manufactured, would be placed under a set of restrictions applying to cultivation, production, trade, distribution and domestic penal norms. The Single Convention was a far more important piece of legislation than the Opium Protocol, but discussions on both ran in parallel. The CND kept charge of elaborating a draft convention – which was too elaborate a treaty to be left entirely to a conference – while it urged the Opium Protocol upon key opium-producing states.
Anslinger put allies in place to help push them forward: the Canadian Clement Sharman, a colonel and former officer in his country’s narcotics service; the American Herbert May, a former pharmaceutical executive and long-time PCOB member; and Charles Vaille, a pharmacist and civil servant who had been a member of the French Resistance and was a staunch prohibitionist. Sharman took the chairmanship of the CND. May became president of the PCOB. Vaille had introduced proposals for the Opium Protocol, and he led much of the preparations for the Single Convention through the 1950s.111 The commissioner meanwhile maintained friendly relations with the assistant secretary general of the UN, Hoo Chi-tsai, a former Chinese foreign minister who had worked with him on narcotic control in the Far East before the war.112 Yet Anslinger overshot. He wanted the Opium Protocol to pass as a priority. As a consequence, the elaboration of the Single Convention stalled, holding up both agendas.
Iran’s ratification of the Protocol was a significant win. Opium, long cultivated in Iran, had spread down the social ladder in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as cultivation took off. Widely taken in pill form or as an additive to infusions, it was sometimes known as the ‘hashish of the poor’.113 Several times, the state had attempted to curtail both cultivation and use. Iran had enacted legislation in 1911 aiming to phase out the non-medical consumption of opium over a period of eight years. It had acceded to the Hague Convention and passed compliant legislation in 1919.114 In 1926 the League had sent a commission to Iran, and this had recommended a programme of gradual reduction accompanied by infrastructure development and crop substitution.115 Half heeding this advice, in 1928 Iran had put in place a purchasing monopoly responsible for sweeping the whole of the poppy crop. None of this was effective, however, and both opium cultivation and use had continued to expand. Production rose above 500 tons annually in the 1920s and ’30s.116 Much was smuggled, earning Iran a poor international reputation, but significant quantities were also consumed domestically: in the order of 25 grams (0.9 oz) annually per capita, by one estimate, higher than China at the time.117 By the early 1950s it was found that output had increased again.118
Following a coup d’état favourable to American influence, Anslinger approached the Iranians. ‘We talked with the Shah of Iran, who agreed to curtail Iranian opium production. We then sent our own Colonel Garland Williams, former head of our New York office, to Iran.’ Garland advised complete suppression. ‘He organized the Iranian police to deal with the job of suppressing the production in the fields, the opium dens and addiction. Not only Iranian police but also the army and the Iranian customs were enlisted. The clean-up job was efficient and thorough.’119 The authorities had become alarmed, besides, at spiralling domestic use. A 1955 law banned the cultivation of the poppy, involving heavy sentences – to rise, in 1966, to death for illegal opiate manufacturing or distribution, or possession of over 500 grams (18 oz). The military tore through the poppy fields with mechanical ploughs.120
This left Turkey as the principal stumbling block. Unlike Iran, however, Turkey as a country saw very little domestic use; its opium was essentially a cash crop and an economic boon. In a running spat with the Egyptian representative, the Turkish member on the CND remarked: ‘The fact that narcotic drugs existed was not sufficient reason to explain illicit consumption; if this were so, all the opium-producing countries would have been seriously affected. Fortunately, this was not the case, and although India and Turkey were major producers, drug addiction in those countries was at an extremely low level.’121 And later: ‘There was little or no addiction in Turkey, which was a producer country . . . The representative of Turkey regretted that the Arab States repeatedly complained of traffic alleged to be coming from neighbouring countries, but did not appear to make any serious efforts to curb the traffic in their own territory.’122
Domestically, Turkey regulated opiate distribution and use along international norms. Though it had only acceded to the Hague Convention late, by 1931 it had adopted the international permit system. Cultivation was another matter. In 1933 Turkey put in place an opium purchasing monopoly similar to Iran’s.123 Yet this worked on a declaratory basis, and the state neither issued licences to growers nor controlled possession or quantities in storage, with the result that massive diversion took place.124 That this went into international trafficking networks was an embarrassment, but neither the UN nor Anslinger were able to pressure the Turkish government into relenting and acceding to the Opium Protocol.
The hold-up was only overcome when the Single Convention, long delayed, was finalized regardless and adopted in conference in 1961. The convention was a comprehensive item of legislation, dealing with the ‘cultivation, production, manufacture, extraction, preparation, possession, offering, offering for sale, distribution, purchase, sale, delivery on any terms whatsoever, brokerage, dispatch, dispatch in transit, transport, importation and exportation of drugs’.125 It contained a tiered schedule of drugs, with opium, morphine, heroin, coca leaf, cocaine and cannabis all listed in schedule I.126 It enshrined the systems of import/export certificates and manufactured-drug quotas already in existence. It established production controls on all drugs, not just manufactured drugs. For opium, coca and cannabis, it mandated producer states to establish national agencies for licensing and purchase/collection.127 The convention specifically included provisions mandating member states to punish drug offences, including possession, with ‘adequate punishment particularly by imprisonment or other penalties of deprivation of liberty’.128 It confirmed as paramount, of course, the principle that drug use should be limited to medical purposes.
With 73 state participants, the Single Convention, and with it the drug prohibition regime, acquired global scope. There remained for a few more years a notable exception: the United States. The Convention’s clauses subjecting raw materials to quotas superseded the Opium Protocol. The wording, however, was weaker. In the conference, producer states, Latin American and Asian, had fought the controls the text placed on opium, coca and cannabis, and they had been able to force amendments.129
The treaty also admitted exemptions for certain non-medical uses. Peru, though it accepted the principle of prohibition and was prepared to accede to the Single Convention, had led a successful rearguard action on coca chewing. Anthropologists had suddenly discovered coca’s place in Peruvian folklore. Local agricultural authorities were sceptical of crop-substitution proposals, and the state, besides, had earmarked taxes on coca for highway construction.130 As to opium, its quasi-medical use persisted in key countries, such as India and Pakistan. Article 49 of the Single Convention accordingly contained ‘reservations’ exempting the traditional use of certain listed drugs, namely the coca leaf, smoking and quasi-medical opium, and cannabis, including the resin. Signatories were allowed to ‘permit temporarily’ the use, production and manufacture of these drugs within their territories, though the quasi-medical use of opium had to be abolished within fifteen years and coca-leaf chewing within 25.131
Anslinger, furious, disowned the legislation he had had such a major role in initiating. He tried to derail ratification by friendly member states, and he persuaded the American Senate Foreign Relations Committee to reject the treaty. For a while, he boycotted CND meetings.132 The situation that had prevailed under the League threatened to repeat itself.
This time, however, the UN Secretariat fought back. In 1962 it announced that 81 nations had approved the Single Convention. The treaty entered into force in spite of Anslinger’s opposition in December 1964. The State Department, sensitive to the diplomatic damage if it remained on the sidelines, changed its mind. In May 1967 the United States deposited its ratification, giving its essential imprimatur to this long-withheld and hard-fought instrument.133
The Single Convention remains the foundation stone of the world’s drug-control order today. Under its aegis, the Committee on Narcotic Drugs acts as the legislative organ of the international drug system. Presently consisting of the representatives of 53 members elected on a rotating basis, it monitors the international drug market and is empowered to make proposals with regard to control and enforcement. It is also responsible for the all-important drug scheduling. An International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) runs the quota system for raw materials and manufactured drugs alike – this replaces the PCOB and DSB originally created by the interwar Geneva Conventions. Finally, a large office for collecting and sharing data and information supports these institutions: having changed names and shapes several times, it is currently called the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and is based in Vienna. Two key treaties have since then supplemented the original convention: the 1971 Psychotropic Convention, whose main role has been to extend prohibition to a raft of stimulants and hallucinogenic drugs (amphetamines and LSD, for example), and the 1988 Vienna Convention against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs, pledging participants to cooperate against and extradite traffickers, and to clamp down on drug-related money laundering. The system’s architecture, nevertheless, remains that established in 1961.134
Anslinger may have been sulking, but the United Nations was triumphant. Drug use was down everywhere. Opium smoking, once ubiquitous in the Far East, was in its death throes. China had ceased cultivating the poppy. In India diversion was minimal. Another major source of illegal opium had been hit with a vigorous eradication programme: Iran. Turkey remained a problem, but after it acceded to the Single Convention it was to be hoped that this last illicit source might also be jugulated. Other trafficking geographies, such as Mexico, remained minor. Peru and Bolivia, finally, had proclaimed themselves open to cooperation with the UN, and cocaine smuggling had wellnigh disappeared.
One country after another reported that their addict populations were vanishing. ‘The representative of France mentioned that the addiction problem was not important in his country . . . In Denmark, the observer of that country informed the Commission, the number of addicts had not changed substantially. This number, 600, included all persons who, over a period of years, have come to the attention of the narcotics division of the Sanitary Police.’135 At a 1962 White House conference, President Kennedy celebrated the FBN’S accomplishments: ‘In recent years we have seen a dramatic reduction in the volume of illegal narcotics . . . Under the forceful and purposeful leadership of Commissioner Anslinger the Bureau reduced this misery-producing traffic so effectively, that where 35 years ago addicts could purchase 100 per cent, or pure heroin, the sharply curtailed amount entering the United States today requires traffickers to dilute their product to the point that the addict obtains only 3 to 5 per cent heroin in the packet that he purchases.’136
The prohibitionists were victorious. Overcoming the last divisions among themselves, they had defeated their nemesis. Unbeknown to them, they were about to witness the biggest surge in drug use humanity had ever seen.