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THE OPIUM EVIL.
drug into the United States is prohibited. The importation, manu- facture, and use of it is prohibited in the Philippines.
A recently enacted Canadian statute not only forbids the importa- tion of this form of the drug, but its manufacture, transshipment, or exportation. The Attorney General has held that under our opium- exclusion act of February 9, 1909, prepared opium may be imported into the United States for immediate transshipment by sea.
Mexico has no law on the subject. The result is that the great mass of Macanise opium is brought to San Francisco and immediately trans- shipped by sea to western Mexican ports, from whence it, added to the direct Mexican import, is mostly smuggled into the United States across the Mexican border. Therefore, Portugal, at her colony of Macau, is the only country to-day which permits the export of this vicious form of opium, while the ports of all those countries parties to the convention are closed to it. The measures necessary to counteract and suppress this traffic to the United States are embodied in a pro- posed amendment to the opium-exclusion act of February 9, 1909, and will be adverted to later. It will be shown that if the Congress will enact the proposed amendment the international traffic in smok- ing opium will be practically wiped out.
Chapter III of the convention is an important one and proved to be the most difficult to formulate of all the chapters of the conven- tion except that one containing the final provisions. The traffic in raw opium and opium prepared for smoking had been thoroughly studied by the International Opium Commission at Shanghai and by the various national commissions appointed by the interested Governments before that commission met, or which sat in the interval between the adjournment of the International Opium Commission and the assembling of the International Opium Conference. After the British Government made it a sine qua non that their participa- tion in the International Opium Conference would depend upon the willingness of the interested Governments to pledge themselves to the same drastic legislation for the control of the production, manu- facture, and trade in morphine and cocaine as in regard to opium, all the interested Governments willingly assented to this proposal when it was presented to them by the United States and the Nether- lands Government on behalf of Great Britain. But a new factor was, nevertheless, injected into the problem and had to be met.
The necessity for the British proposals had become obvious to all the Governments interested in the Far East; for, beginning with the suppression of the opium vice in China and other far eastern countries, a determined, and one almost might say a calculated, effort was made by the manufacturers of morphine and cocaine to introduce these drugs in replacement of opium. Such efforts had largely succeeded, and to the world was presented the spectacle of many great Governments willingly sacrificing or providing for the sacrifice of an aggregate annual opium revenue in the neighborhood of $100,- 000,000, only to see the subjects of some of them pressing two other deadly drugs into the hands of those far eastern people who had heroically determined and were bent upon the abandonment of the opium vice. The British proposals in regard to morphine and cocaine were eminently sound, practical, and essential, and it became the duty of the International Opium Conference to provide against the abuse of morphine and cocaine similarly as regarded opium.
THE OPIUM EVIL,
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Chapter III of the convention is not by any means ideal, but rep- resents a fair compromise of conflicting interests, and will no doubt be perfected by future conferences on the question. The first para- graph of Chapter III defines medicinal opium as opium that must contain not less than 10 per cent of morphine. This is superior to the tariff practice of the United States, which provides for the admis- sion of medicinal opium containing not less than 9 per cent of mor- phine, but it confirms the standard for medicinal opium set by the International Pharmaceutical Conference of 1906, to which the United States is a party. Morphine, cocaine, and heroin are also defined by this paragraph.
By article 9, Chapter III, the contracting powers pledge themselves to enact laws or regulations so as to restrict the manufacture, sale, and use of morphine and cocaine and their respective salts to medicinal and legitimate uses only, unless their existing laws and regulations already cover the matter. This article appertains to national legis- lation only, and it will be pointed out later that the United States is the most backward of all the western nations and almost strikingly behind Japan in this phase of legislation.
Article 10, Chapter III, is weak in that the powers only pledge themselves "to use their best efforts to control or cause to be con- trolled" those who manufacture, import, sell, distribute, or export morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts and the buildings in which such persons carry on that industry or trade. The article then goes on to lay down the specific manner in which this object shall be accomplished.
There was a willingness on the part of all the delegations to formu- late this article as strictly as the articles dealing with raw opium and opium prepared for smoking. But there were certain consti- tutional difficulties in the way-notably in the case of Germany-.. and article 10 was a compromise based on the fact that Germany has extremely strict and effective National and State laws governing the question dealt with by article 10. This is also true of several of the other European countries represented in the conference, and cer- tainly of Japan.
By article 11 the contracting powers are to take measures to pro- hibit in their home trade any delivery of morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts to any but authorized persons, and by article 12 the importation of morphine and cocaine is restricted to persons author- ized by the Government.
What was said of article 10 may be said of article 13, where the contracting powers do not pledge themselves to adopt, but only to use their best efforts to adopt or cause to be adopted measures to pre- vent the exportation of the named drugs from their home territories, possessions, colonies, and leased territories to the countries, posses- sions, colonies, and leased territories of the other contracting powers, and provides that each Government may communicate from time to time to the Governments of exporting countries the lists of per- sons to whom authorization or permits to import the named drugs shall have been granted. It was the hope of the American delegă- tion that a distinct pledge be made by the interested Governments to enact legislation to prevent the exportation of these drugs except by authorized persons in one country to authorized importers in another. But it was not found possible to secure this.
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