14
which I consider
mis taken - H.K. would do better to establish Sour.
Malaya
Saloons as
dors - but we
now till the
Commission has
I understand that Mr. Lunn is concerned
about the policy of the Hong Kong Government as
regards suppression of small offences under the Opium Ordinance. (See para. 6 of the Hong Kong
section of annexed memorandum). The position
is that there is a Government monopoly of the sale
of opium in Hong Kong. The Government itself, in
X pursuance of long established policy, does not
maintain divans or smoking saloons, that is, places
where opium may be smoked publicly, and the only
legal way of smoking opium in Hong Kong is to Sovenment purchase it at a long one shop and smoke it privately
in the home. There are however a number of illicit
Camer do anything smoking dens or divans where smuggled opium is
purchased and smoked. There are two alternative ways of preventing this illicit smoking, either to
concentrate on the divans and prosecute the owners
and customers discovered, or to concentrate on preventing the illicit importation of opium from
China.
reportad
Ź
The first method leads to a large number of
prosecutions and most of the offenders have to be
imprisoned as they are Chinese of the poorer classes and unable to pay anything more than nominal fines. It was found that the prisons of the Colony were
inadequate to accommodate all the offenders so convicted, while at the same time, this method did
not seem to be stamping out the illicit consumption. The Governor therefore decided to drop the concentra-
tion on divans and to turn his interest to an attempt
to prevent the wholesale illicit traffic.
This change of policy was reported in the
Governor's despatch of the 7th of May, 1928 (No.8
on