46 The British Journal of Inebriety

NEW PHASES OF T H E DRUG MENACE. BY BASIL MATHEWS, M.A.

THE discussion of the Opium Commission’s new report, which is being carried through by the Assembly at Geneva during September, almost inevitably will mark a new stage in the fight with the world traffic in dangerous drugs. How perilous that traffic is becoming, few realize, except those to whom there comes from all over the world authoritative statements about the traffic. The Western world has hardly yet begun to awaken to the seriousness of the menace to itself.

The official figures for the United States of America of drug addicts exceeds a million. I am told by a highly responsible statistician that the actual facts are certainly largely in excess even of that. Both Canada and the United States have so high a percentage of the population addicted to drugs that probably (though of course accurate figures do not exist) the proportion exceeds that of China.

Meanwhile, the military Tuchuns of China are amassing wealth for themselves and wages for their soldiers by forcing the peasantry to grow opium for revenue. So far has this process been carried that reliable observers in China write to me to say that there is actual famine threatened in some districts through the absence of legitimate food crops.

The battle has raged round the use of the word “legitimate” in addition to the words ‘‘ medical ” and ‘‘ scientific.” India has urged that to restrict the use of opium strictly to what are normally regarded as “ medical and scientific ” uses, would be impossible in India, where the eating of opium as a prophylactic is a century-old tradition.

A t Geneva in May and June this year, therefore, India ‘‘ contracted out ” from the proposed narrowing of the field to “ medical and scientific,” by agreement for her own purposes. But all the same, in India in the big centres of population, addicts can and do go from shop to shop, buying in each shop the maximum amount that each can sell, and out of, say, eight or ten shops they generally succeed in getting doses adequate for the wildest inebriety. This situation is being faced now frankly by some of the greatest leaders of Indian influence, and we may look in the near future to considerable agitation for increased stringency in the matter of sales, leading towards ultimate extinction of the more generalized opium habit.

One of the most distressing uses of opium in India is that the women working in the great factories and mills, for instance, in Bombay, slip a pill of opium into the mouth of their babies

In India we may witness a change in the situation.

T h e British Journal of Inebriety 47

before going off so that they lie drugged during the mother's hours of work. It is small wonder that in some of the crowded localities where the operatives of Bombay live, the death-rate of children in the first year of life is as much as SO per cent.

Meanwhile the Dangerous Drugs Act in Britain which, with the similar Act in America, is a thoroughly hmz.fide endeavour to grapple with the traffic and is being administered vigorously, is a movement precisely on the lines where the greatest hope is to be found-that is, the control of production and distribution (a) of the derivative drugs like morphine, heroin, cocaine, etc. ; (b ) the actual growth of the opium in agricultural centres.

With Turkey and Persia outside the Convention still, and China in such disaster that though her government wills to carry out the Convention, the Tuchuns refuse it, the situation is intensely difficult. On the other side, we are faced with the .proposal rumoured that Switzerland is willing to come in to the Convention after she has passed an Act making Bade a city free from her Customs regulations. This action, if the news is correct, would mean that her wealthy drug merchants would still be able to carry out their infamous traffic, while their country was professedly in the Convention-which would be a particu- larly " slim " way of making the best of both worlds !

All these last considerations might move us to pessimism, both with regard to the traffic in the West and in the East, and indeed I know one man of wide outlook and sane views who actually holds that there is a subtle international plot afoot to undermine the morale and stamina of Western Europe and America by a progressive expansion of drug addiction with a view to the great, and from this point of view unspoiled, race of the Slavs to rush in and occupy and rule the world. As a plot that seems to us incredible ; but as a working of actual history in the future i t might well come to pass unless the menace is fought and fought to a finish.

When it is remembered that in the year 1922 American merchants alone did traffic amounting to &175,000,000, of which the great part was profit, i t will be seen what a stupendous bait is dangled before the eyes of men who were ready to make money for themselves without care of consequence to others.

The line of hope is quite certainIy the line passionately, vigorously, and progressively pursued by the League of N a t' ions Opium Commission-namely, that of working towards an international community in which the reluctant peoples will gradually be either drawn or driven into line. I n this direction, one of the most hopeful signs of all is that the enormous moral momentum of America both on the governmental and on the religious side is now being drawn into this fight.