JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here’s a bit of a quick factoid on the international drug trade in 1923, taken while on a stumblethru  in Basil Mathews’ The World “Dope” Menace and the League of Nations (London, the League of Nations Union, 1923).  This is a very slim (24pp) and compact work but it does have a significant amount of dpo (data per ounce!) impact, particularly when it came to Mathews’ short sober and clinical appraisal of the amount of narcotics being smuggled and consumed in Hong Kong, China, Japan, French Indochina, Ceylon, and Mauritius.  The man has the numbers, and those numbers that struck me the most were those concerning Western shipments of morphine (and etc.) to Japan. He lists them out so, the counties’ exports to Japan: England 10,000 lbs, France 8,000 lbs, Germany 2.800 lbs, Belgium 2800 lbs, Switzerland 4400 lbs, Holland 250 lbs,  and (the big surprise for me) the USA with 18,500 lbs of nasty export. 

The numbers were even more brutal for the China trade, with Mathews stating “In cold literal fact men in Britain and America and Japan have grown rich by debauching of China’s morphino maniacs who are now innumerable.” And  to drive home the human aspect of the drug trade, Mathews continues: “The seriousness of morphine addiction can be understood from the opinion of an expert authority who says Morphine is not only ten times more deadly than opium but is more seductive and overwhelming in results. The addict becomes an absolute slave entirely powerless for not only are his will and moral fibre entirely rotted by the drug itself but he becomes the victim of the most dreadful tortures directly that he is robbed of his doses nervous tortures so terrible that they often drive him mad and end in death.”

Mathews concludes that the drug trade is a major menace to the League and Nations and for international stability as a whole–he makes a pretty remarkable case for cease-and-desist back there in 1923.