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Objects and Reasons.
1. Section 3 of the Opium Amendment Ordinance, 1933, amended section 15 of the principal Ordinance by "bringing within the scope of the section owners, occupiers and managers of premises who knowingly suffer them to he used as divans" (see the Objects and Reasons annexed to the draft Ordinance No. 16 of 1933).
2. In a recent case the Full Court decided that the tenant of a floor of a Chinese tenement house who had sublet a portion of that floor was not an occupier of the portion so sublet within the meaning of the amended section.
3. The present amendment substitutes for section 15 of the principal Ordinance an amended section on the lines of section 13 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, (48) and 49 Viet. c. 69), re-enacting in different terms the provisions of old section 15 relating to persons who smoke in. keep or occupy an opium divan, and, in new paragraph 1 (d), extending those provisions to include a lessor or landlord who knowingly lets, or having let wilfully consents to the use of, his holding or any part thereof for the purposes of an opium divan.
4. Sub-section (2) of new section 15 indicates the scope of the terms "lessee", "tenant", "lessor" and "landlord” used in the section, and the steps which a lessor or landlord who becomes aware that the premises let by him are used as an opium divan should take in order to discharge the liability imposed on him by sub-section (1).
March, 1934.
C. G. ALABASTER,
Attorney General.