T
This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Governinent. 508
OPIUM.
CONFIDENTIAL.
[33922]
No. 1.
[August 28.]
SECTION 2.
C
о
30132
Sir,
Board of Trade to Foreign Office.-(Received August 286
२८०० REGE 15 SEP 11 Board of Trade, August 26, 1911. WITH reference to your letters of the 9th and 23rd August, with their enclosures, respecting the proposed Opium Conference, I am directed by the Board of Trade to state that they concur in the tenor of the communication which Sir E. Grey proposes to address to the Netherlands Minister on the subject, and that they assume that suitable communications will be addressed to the German and United States Embassies in reply to the notes, copies of which were transmitted with your letter of the 9th August.
With regard to the penultimate paragraph of that letter, I am to forward to you the enclosed statement (which has been compiled from monthly reports received during the current year from the Commissioners of Customs and Excise), showing the quantities of morphia and cocaine, of United Kingdom and of foreign and colonial production, exported from this country in the first six mouths of the year, distinguishing The various countries to which these exports were consigned.
For the purpose of the present investigation no importance need, of course, be attached to the exports of foreign and colonial produce, which, as will be seen, consist of cocaine only. As regards the morphia and cocaine of British production, no complete information has been obtainable with regard to the names of the exporting firms or the quantities exported by each, and in the absence of such information it is impossible to make any definite statement as to the extent of the manufacture of the drugs in question in the United Kingdom.
The Board have, however, reason to suppose that the manufacture of both products in this country is in the hands of comparatively few firms, most of whom are of high repute, and, so far as they can judge from interviews which they have had with representatives of some of these firms, the British manufacturing interests would welcome any international arrangement for preventing the exportation from the contracting States of the drugs in question, except when they are consigned to medical institutions, doctors, recognised chemists and druggists, or other authorised
persons.
The Board would be able by the end of the year to add a few further months' figures to those given in the enclosed table.
I have, &c.
GEO. J. STANLEY.
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