As trade was established between Europe and Asia, and points in between, so too was the knowledge of cannabis. As those from the West traveled East they learned more about the culture and the ways people of the East enjoyed themselves. Where alcohol wasn’t popular, cannabis and the hashish made from its resin often was. Hashish from the Middle East and the Indian cannabis and herb drink called bhang were becoming popular in port towns of Europe, where the ships docked to trade goods brought back from the East. Along with the exotic imports there were rumors of where they came from and how they were grown or created. One rumor about hashish was that it was collected by sending naked plantation laborers to run through the fields, then the resin of the plant was gathered their skin.
When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798 his soldiers were introduced to hashish. They used it as an alternative to wine, which was prohibited in the Islamic country. When authorities attempted to prevent the soldiers from using cannabis, the troops apparently continued their use, even bringing it back to France when they returned home.
The European use of cannabis increased. It was used both as a medicine that could be purchased at pharmacies and as an intoxicant that could be purchased from those who sold imported goods.
The first government action against cannabis may have been carried out in Cairo during the year 1253. That was when the local government raided and burned the cannabis gardens of the Sufis who were considered a threat to local society because of their independent culture.
It appears that the first laws aimed at controlling or outlawing cannabis were also associated with the Sufis. In 1378 the Egyptian government burned cannabis farms. Those who grew cannabis were imprisoned, and it is said that some had their teeth pulled out as punishment, and others were executed. Nearly 500 years later, in 1868 Egypt made hashish possession a capital offense, but the law wasn’t effective. Some eradication efforts were made with police burning cannabis gardens, but many of the police involved in confiscating it were also reselling it. By 1884 the Cairo government allowed the local authorities to export the hash they had confiscated, but that only increased the corruption. The laws continued being ineffectual, with use and smuggling common. By the 1920s the government of Egypt was focusing on cocaine, heroin, and morphine, and placing less attention on cannabis, which was too well established in the local culture in the form of hashish, and too easy to grow, to effectively ban.
With each advance in the government’s suppression of any substance came inventive ways of smuggling. By the 1930s the British head of the Egyptian Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, Thomas Wentworth Russell (also known as Russell Pasha), had armed the police with guns. Tragically, they took to shooting drug smugglers. As the drug trade became well organized and financed throughout Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, and into Europe and other countries, so too did the law enforcement working against it. It didn’t suppress the demand, but did greatly increase the price while creating a drug warfare scenario.
Russell began working for the Egyptian Civil Service in 1902. He held the opinion that cannabis in the form of hashish was not a major problem, and even considered that it should be grown locally and taxed, which would stop the illegal importation of hashish, prevent money from going out of the country, and bring revenue into the local governments. He thought that hashish should not be considered in the same classification as opiates, the worst of which he considered to be heroin. However, his job was to enforce the law, including busting those who broke the Egyptian laws against hashish. A focus was placed on those who were smuggling it into the country.
Russell’s success in breaking up a well-financed drug network helped him land the position of vice-president of the League of Nations Advisory Committee in 1939. That organization had spent the decade, and lots of money, working to unsuccessfully impose an international ban on the heroin trade. Ironically, this was being done by the British government which, since at least the beginning of Warren Hastings’s position as governor-general of British India in 1773, had partially financed their East India Company by protecting and encouraging the production of opium so that it could make money by being sold to the East Indies and China.
In the 1830s the British House of Commons openly allowed the British East India Company to maintain their opium exporting to support the company. This was a formality. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 resulted in Britain annexing Bengal, and this solidified the British East India Company’s business in India’s opium exports, which had already been going on for decades. By at least 1767, it was known in the British government that the British East India Company had been exporting opium to China. British merchant and passenger ships traveling to India purchased opium there, then traveled to China to exchange the opium for other goods they could then sell in Britain, including tea, precious metals, jewels, jade, porcelain, silk, art, and other luxury and exotic items.
For more than a century, Spain had been involved in bringing opium into China with shipments of corn, tobacco, and other more useful items, including silver from South America. As the global demand for Chinese products increased, so too did the amount of opium being brought into China from India on British ships. By the 1820s the annual importation of opium to China from British Bengal was estimated to be in the range of 900 tons. By the 1840s, businesses from several other countries were involved in the trade, including Augustine Heard & Company and Russel & Company, which were both based out of the busy docks of Boston. U.S., French, German, Dutch, and Japanese companies were in financial arrangement with the British companies, who held sway over what went in, and what went out of China’s docks. The British had their own gated and guarded communities in China, especially in Canton (Guangzhou).
Eventually the Chinese farmers began to grow poppies not only to make money, but also to stop money from going to other countries, including to Britain. These situations were what caused the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60. The British fought with the Chinese, and the Chinese government held public executions of Chinese citizens believed to have been involved in the importation, production, and sale of opium. Opium storage facilities in Canton and other areas were raided and destroyed and their contents destroyed. Britain fought the war using steam-powered ships that carried gun platforms. After taking Canton, the British vessels traveled up the Yangtze and took control of the ports. China’s defeat in their fight against Britain lead to the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, Treaty of the Bogue, and, after the second Opium War, the Treaty of Tannin. These allowed the British government to increase trade with China and forced them to cede Hong Kong to Queen Victoria for what eventually lead to a lease good for 99 years. China was also forced to repay British and other foreign merchants for their loss of opium that was destroyed by the Chinese.
Of course, none of this ended the opium trade, but increased prices, created an underground market, and helped to spread opium, and subsequently heroin, use throughout the world. Britain played a major role in this because they continued to import opium into China.
In 1840, when the House of Commons enquired about the opium production in India, they were told by banker W.B. Baring that canceling it would lead to an increase in the use of hemp (cannabis) “which was in every way more injurious than the use of the poppy.” This claim was discounted by Dr. William Brooked O’Shaughnessy, professor of chemistry at the Medical College of Calcutta, India.
As he detailed in Transactions, the journal of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, O’Shaughnessy first conducted cannabis tests on animals. After finding that the animals experienced no apparent harm, he used cannabis on people suffering from various ailments. He found that cannabis worked as “an anti-convulsive remedy of the greatest value.” His work with a London pharmacist, Peter Squire, produced the medicinal extract of cannabis called Squire’s Extract, which was sold as a pain reliever. A similar medicinal extract named Tilden’s Extract was sold in the U.S.
By the 1880s China was growing more opium than the amount being imported. Even so, the East India Company continued to sell opium to China.
In the 1870s the British government investigated the possibility of creating laws against cannabis in India (where it was known as ganja). They appointed a commission to study the moral issues relating to use of the plant, to evaluate the impact it had on society, and to consider the reasoning behind placing a prohibition on the growth of the plant. A second cannabis study conducted in 1890s India involved a thousand people. The report was issued in 1894 and concluded that cannabis was relatively harmless and trying to prohibit the use of it would be unworkable. The studies found cannabis in wide use among a variety of professions in “all classes of labourers.” They concluded that it was basically a nonaddictive substance that didn’t contribute to crime or violence. While examining hospital records, they found that stories of patients being admitted for insanity caused by the use of cannabis were unsubstantiated. The Report of the India Hemp Drugs Commission concluded that banning cannabis would be unworkable, especially since the plant was wild and that it was so easy to grow that “it would be impossible to prohibit” a man “from gathering, from such a plant, the daily quota used by him and his family.” The government of India grew it and licensed shops to sell it.
In 1905 the British government offered to reduce the amount of opium being brought in to China if China also agreed to reduce their production of the drug. An agreement was reached between the two governments that the opium traffic would end within ten years’ time. When American authorities in the Philippines informed their superiors, the response by the State Department was to organize the Shanghai Opium Conference of 1909. Thirteen countries were represented at the conference. American representatives argued for international support of the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, which had just been passed by the U.S. Congress to limit the import of opium to pharmaceutical companies. The American law was its first to make certain substances illegal to import, possess, or sell outside of a licensed pharmaceutical business. The Americans failed to get the support. The conference only resulted in an agreement between the countries to work to reduce the international production of opium and its derivatives, heroin and morphine. This did not stop the underground opium market.
At the urging of President Taft, a second international conference on opium and its derivative drugs was held. The International Opium Convention was signed at The Hauge (the third-largest city in the Netherlands) on January 23, 1912. Countries represented included China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, Siam, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. This resulted in another ineffectual agreement to limit the production and distribution of opium, its derivative drugs, and cocaine to authorized parties for pharmaceutical purposes. There was no supervisory board, no way to determine if member countries were taking measures to do away with the drug trade, and no definition of the amount of opium needed to maintain medical and scientific supplies. While some efforts in reducing the opium trade were temporarily successful, especially in China, this agreement did not end the underground opium market. There were too many addicts, and too many people and governments making money from the cultivation of poppies and the manufacture and distribution of the drugs. The actions of the very same governments represented at the conference show how uncommitted they were to the task of reducing the opium market, especially Britain, which continued to run the hugely profitable Indian opium trade.
In February 1909 a report was published by Britain that was the result of a study conducted to explore the possibility of ending the British-supported opium trade in India. The report (Proceedings of the Commission appointed to Enquire into Matters Relating to the Use of Opium in the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty) concluded that ending the trade would result in a loss of half of the revenues from the Straits Settlements (territories in Southeast Asia originally included in the British East India Company beginning in 1826) and the Federated Malay States. American writer Ellen Newbold La Motte found a copy of this report in the New York Library. Her interests in the opium market were triggered by a chance meeting with a “young Hindu” on a boat as she was traveling in the Far East in 1916. This man told her how Britain was running the opium trade in Asia. Her disgust and curiosity about this led her to explore the topic as she traveled in Eastern countries. La Motte’s home country, the U.S., had passed the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914. The act, while not successful in conquering the underground drug market, was meant to restrict the use of opium drugs to medical and scientific uses within U.S. borders.
While traveling in Asia, La Motte investigated claims that the poppy production had been reduced by international trade agreements. Her conclusion was that although the opium market had been reduced in certain regions, the poppy market and the underground drug smuggling they supported were not only still present, but had also increased production after the international agreement. She also learned that what the “young Hindu” had told her about Britain running the opium market was true. She found that the British government loaned money to poppy farmers without interest, and ran opium processing plants where the poppy farmers brought their crops. The British government also ran an opium auction market in Calcutta. She wrote, “We must face the facts, and recognize clearly that the source of supply is the British government, through whose agents, official and unofficial, it is distributed.”
“In British territory the cultivation of the poppy for the production of opium is mainly restricted to the United Provinces, and the manufacture of the opium from this region is a State monopoly. A limited amount is also grown in the Punjab for local consumption and to produce poppy seeds. In the monopoly districts the cultivator receives advances from Government to enable him to prepare the land for the crop, and he is bound to sell the whole of the produce at a fixed price to Government agents, by whom it is dispatched to the Government factory at Ghazipur to be prepared for the market. The chests of manufactured opium are sold by auction in Calcutta at monthly sales. A reserve is kept in hand to supply the deficiencies of bad seasons, and a considerable quantity is distributed by the Indian excise departments. Opium is also grown in many of the Native States of Rajaputana and Central India. These Native States have agreed to conform to the British system. No 6 opium may pass from them into British territory for consumption without payment of duty.”
– Statesman's Year Book of 1916; page 140, The British Empire: India and Dependencies
In the Conclusion of her 1920 book, The Opium Monopoly, La Motte wrote, “We have seen that certain British colonies, Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements, for example, derive from one-third to one-half of their upkeep expenses from this (opium) traffic.” She also found that France allowed and encouraged opium shops in Indo-China while refusing to allow them inside the borders of France. During World War I Britain made a loan to Persia based on opium sales.
In the closing chapter of her book La Motte wrote that the opium not sold into the Asian countries “goes out for smuggling purposes, to be distributed in devious, roundabout, underhand channels throughout the world. We [Americans] are coming in for our share in this distribution.” She noted in her book that the 1907 agreement between Britain and China meant the phasing out of opium sales into China. Interestingly, she found information that more opium was then being imported into England, and it wasn’t for medicine and science, but was to feed the underground market in opium, heroin, and morphine. She quotes from the The Japan Society Bulletin No. 60: “The Japan Chronicle, speaking from ‘absolutely authentic information,’ states that 113,000 ounces of morphia [morphine] arrived in Kobe from the United States in the first five months of 1919.” It appears that the opium was brought to England. Morphine was manufactured, then it was brought into Japan on American ships. It was truly a worldwide drug market, and it was clear that Britain was working with the U.S. to evade the agreement it made with China.
By 1919, Japan was purchasing increasingly larger amounts of opium at the British-run Calcutta opium markets, then exporting opium and its derivatives into China. “In South China, morphia is sold by Chinese peddlers, each of whom carries a passport certifying that he is a native of Formosa, and therefore entitled to Japanese protection. Japanese drug stores throughout China carry large stocks of morphia. Japanese medicine vendors look to morphia for their largest profits. Wherever Japanese are predominant, there the trade flourishes.” In this way, Britain was getting around its agreement to stop importing opium into China. Not just opium, but the more addictive extract, morphine, which would surely keep millions of Chinese addicted and dependant on the British opium monopoly.
“That such conditions existed were to us unheard of, and unbelievable. It seemed incredible that in this age, with the consensus of public opinion sternly opposed to the sale and distribution of habit-forming drugs, and with legislation to curb and restrict such practices incorporated in the laws of all ethical and civilized governments, that here, on the other side of the world, we should come upon opium traffic conducted as a government monopoly. Not only that, but conducted by one of the greatest and most highly civilized nations of the world, a nation which we have always looked up to as being in the very forefront of advanced, progressive and humane ideals. So shocked were we by what this young Hindu told us, that we flatly refused to believe him. We listened to what he had to say on the subject, but thinking that however earnest he might be, however sincere in his sense of outrage at such a policy, that he must of necessity be mistaken. We decided not to take his word for it, but to look into the matter for ourselves.
We did look into the matter. During a stay in the Far East of nearly a year, in which time we visited Japan, China, Hong Kong, French Indo-China, Siam and Singapore, we looked into the matter in every country we visited. Wherever possible we obtained government reports, and searched them carefully for those passages giving statistics concerning the opium trade, the amount of opium consumed, the number of shops where it was sold, and the number of divans where it was smoked. We found these shops established under government auspices, the dealers obtaining their supplies of opium from the government, and then obtaining licenses from the government to retail it. In many countries, we visited these shops and divans in person, and bought opium in them freely, just as one goes to a shop to buy cigarettes. We found a thorough and complete establishment of the opium traffic, run by the government, as a monopoly. Revenue was derived through the sale of opium, through excise taxes upon opium, and through license fees paid by the keepers of opium shops and divans. A complete, systematic arrangement, by which the foreign government profited at the expense of the subject peoples under its rule. In European countries and in America, we find the governments making every effort to repress the sale of habit-forming drugs. Here, in the Far East, a contrary attitude prevails. The government makes every effort to encourage and extend it.”
– Ellen Newbold La Motte, in the introduction of her book, The Opium Monopoly, 1920
The same year that La Motte wrote her book, The Opium Monopoly, about the British government running the opium trade, Britain’s Ministry of Health sent Dr. Harry Campbell to the U.S. to study the survey of the success of the Harrison Narcotics Act. Campbell concluded, “The country [U.S.] is overrun by an army of peddlers who extort exorbitant prices from the helpless victims. It appears that not only has the Harrison law failed to diminish the number of drug-takers, some contend, indeed, that it has actually worsened it; for without curtailing the supply of the drug it has sent the price up tenfold, and this has had the effect of impoverishing the poorer class of addicts and reducing them to a condition of such abject misery as to render them incapable of gaining an honest livelihood.” In other words, Campbell clearly did not endorse creating a similar law in Britain. Instead, doctors in England were permitted to prescribe a “maintenance” amount of heroin to drug addicts so that the addicts would not be supporting an underground market.
Meanwhile, steps were being taken to address the worldwide underground drug trade. Some say these moves were being taken by grandstanding politicians who desired to make it appear that they were doing something while not much was actually being done. When taken into consideration who was ruling the world opium market, having politicians and their appointees oversee the enforcement of the international drug laws was about as useless as trying to cool a boiling pot with an ice cube. At least with Britain’s East India Company, the government officials were largely being supported with money from drug sales.
The Paris Peace Conference resulted in the January 25, 1919, agreement to form the League of Nations with a charter, The Treaty of Versailles, being signed by 44 countries on June 28, 1919. The U.S. was not one of the original countries to join the League. The first meeting of the League was held in London on November 15, 1920.
In addition to working to prevent war and improve collective security, the League of Nations was given a supervisory role over international agreements, such as those governing drug manufacturing and importation. Within the league there was a Permanent Central Opium Board which was set up to establish a legal trade in narcotics to serve the medical and scientific communities.
When the South African government attempted to establish international cannabis laws at the 1923 gathering of the League of Nation’s Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and other Dangerous Drugs, the British government vetoed it because banning cannabis would result in a loss of tax revenue. Cannabis had been outlawed by the British government in southern Africa in the 1870s, but the laws were basically ignored. The owners of the diamond mines grew cannabis to provide for their workers who lived in camps. In a move to criminalize the Blacks that used cannabis, the White aristocracy of South Africa banned cannabis in 1910.
It wasn’t until the International Police Commission (Interpol) was formed in Paris in 1923 that serious talk of international laws against cannabis were considered. No laws were established and the focus was on drug trafficking as part of international crime. That very same year the British still were of the opinion, expressed by Lord Inchcape in a commission report done to study the finances of the East India Company, that the amount of land under poppy cultivation should not be reduced because it is a “most important source of income” for the British government in India. The first Lord of Inchcape (James Lyle Mackay), who died in 1932, was involved in banking, shipping, export, tea, mail distribution, and jute and khaki fabric production in India. His family’s business was considered to be nearly as important to the British presence in the subcontinent as the East India Company.
Under the League of Nations Advisory Committee, an International Opium Convention was signed by member states on February 19, 1925, and it went into effect on September 25, 1928. In the U.S., Congress passed a law restricting the importation of heroin. The U.S. delegates tried to persuade the league to add such measures to the convention, but were unsuccessful. Even at home the act had been criticized. The June 1926 edition of the Illinois Medical Journal expressed the opinion that the restriction would allow drug dealers to bring in “double the money from the poor unfortunates upon whom they prey.”
Egypt tried to add a prohibition on hashish and other cannabis substances to the International Opium Convention, but delegates from India spoke against establishing limitations on cannabis because the substance was used in religious ceremonies as well as for meditation, spiritual enlightenment, or ritual. Placing a ban on cannabis was viewed as unenforceable because it was a wild plant, and because so many people smoked it for both religious and social means that laws against it would be impossible to enforce. A flimsy compromise was reached that was not included in the convention. It was that member countries agreed to voluntarily ban the exportation of cannabis that they may place prohibitions on its use, and to limit shipments to what was required for “medical or scientific purposes.”
Opium traffic continued. Although the International Opium Convention was to establish a Central Narcotics Board to oversee the production and sale of opium for legitimate medicinal and scientific needs, the board was never organized. Drug-producing countries had no place to report how much opium, heroin, morphine, or cocaine they produced or exported. Countries that were importing the drugs also had no place to report how much of the drugs they were importing.
In the summer of 1931 the Opium Advisory Committee agreed to limit the production of opium in drug-producing countries to a predetermined set amount based on the estimated needs of medical and scientific uses for opium, heroin, and morphine. This was known as the Blanco formula, named after the person who thought it up, A. E. Blanco, a British man who worked in the Chinese Customs Service office. The formula was designed to keep track of the drugs from the raw materials to the production and on to the delivery and use at medical and scientific facilities. It didn’t stop the underground production or sale of the drugs.
The Conference for the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Dangerous Drugs was held in 1932 and worked to further encourage countries to agree to a number of restrictions on drug trafficking. Although it did not sign on to the agreement, the U.S. was the most active in working to enforce the restrictions.
By the 1939 start of World War II the international drug trade was still flourishing. The war effort also contributed to the lack of control and suppression of the drug trade as resources were focused on other matters. After the war, in 1945 the United Nations Organization replaced the League of Nations.
My point in mentioning all of this information about opium is to show that when international drug laws first began to form around the start of the twentieth century, they were concentrated on opium and its extracts, heroin and morphine, and also on cocaine, but not on cannabis. I also wanted to give some detail about how governments, including the U.S., are involved in, and profit from, the international drug trade.
Cannabis wasn’t added to an international treaty to control drugs until the Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs treaty was signed in 1961. Even then the international treaty relied on member states to enforce the law. The U.S. implemented the treaty within its boundaries by enacting the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Despite the efforts to control the underground opium and cocaine markets, they continued to flourish. Growing poppies and coca to produce the drugs was simple, smuggling was relatively easy, demand for the drugs was global, and it was a billion dollar industry. Mass quantities of opium drugs and cocaine were being produced in European and American laboratories, then sold into the world drug trade. This was detailed in the 1925 book Opium by John Palmer Gavit, chief of the Washington Bureau of the Associated Press. The 1934 book, Inside Dope, British journalist Ferdinand Tuohy further details the opium market of the day, including flaws in the Opium Advisory Committee’s plans meant to control the drugs, and the story about prisoners using carrier pigeons to obtain drugs.
The Nation magazine was also following the international drug trade. Ellen La Motte had become a correspondent for the magazine and was writing articles about the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee, which the press had nicknamed “The Smugglers’ Reunion.” The Committee’s response to the exposure was to limit the access journalist correspondents had to the Commission’s meetings, and to guard the printed records of the meetings.
The cannabis market had also been increasing. But because cannabis wasn’t seen as an addictive drug, it was not included in the focus on either opiate drugs (opium, heroin, morphine) or cocaine. Some say that perhaps this was because cannabis could not yet make as much money for governments. This was not the case in India where the British government also encouraged the cultivation of cannabis.
In 1927 a British man named Horace Gundry Alexander, the son of the secretary of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Traffic, traveled to the Far East to investigate the drug trade. He became an acquaintance of Gandhi, who described him as “one of the best friends India has.” Alexander found that the 1926-27 report of the Excise Department of the United Provinces reported that the “downward tendency in the sales of charas [cannabis] has now been arrested.” In other words, cannabis sales had increased, which improved the revenue for the British colony. Alexander commented, “Even in the limited sphere of drug and drink habits, the main guilt of the West, for which sooner or later the East will call us to account, arises from the expoert of manufactured habit-forming drugs, such as morphine and cocaine, and from the expoert of spirits. So long as we go to the East with these things in our hand, Chinese and Indians and Malays are not likely to have much use for the programme of social reform that we carry in the other.”
Gandhi had a history of trying to work against the drug trade. He referred to opium as “the other oppressor,” with the British government being the first. When some of Gandhi’s followers worked to eliminate the production of opium in their region they were arrested for “undermining the revenue” of the colony.
The Mideast-to-Europe drug trade was the topic of the book The Hashish Crossing. It was published in 1933 and written by a former drug smuggler named Henry de Montfreid, an Islamic convert who wrote books under the name of Abd el-Hai.
In regions outside India, Britain conveniently ignored their earlier studies on cannabis and continued to treat it as if it were a great contributor to crime, violence, and mental health issues. During World War II British forces were used to destroy many acres of cannabis in Palestine. This too did not stop the use of or demand for cannabis. But it did succeed in increasing its price while creating a crime factor in which the government tried to suppress the production and sale of cannabis. And Britain did so to protect its own interests.
Just as in modern day, the early laws against cannabis didn’t stop the cultivation, distribution, or use of the plant. Ditto with poppies and the drugs created from them.