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1929 Britain, Hongkong Drug Reports

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  On the night of 21-22 November 1928, Shanghai police and a military garrison struggled over 1250 lbs of opium.( link ) The next morning NY stock volume broke records with deep crashes and Saturday market closings.(NYT 22, 24NOV1928) The story was suppressed until 20JAN1929 (NYT 8E) but this cartoon scooped the mystery Crash the preceding day in the Berkeley paper.( link ) Opium Section member Duncan Hall , a labour unionist ingratiated with the League, archly brought up a reference, indeed, a "written statement" on consumption of dangerous drugs in Great Britain on Saturday, January 19, 1929 in Geneva. On that note Sir John Campbell (India) harrumphed and pointed to a disclaimer to the effect that no official proof had yet emerged that British drugs had been found in the legislated illegal market. Others present remembered the session four years earlier at which Mrs Hamilton Wright brandished a copy of the Indian Year Book as proof that coca shrubs were cultivated there .( ...
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1929 drug report discussions: Formosa/Taiwan

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  America's parade float self-image, 1929 The League Opium Advisory Committee meeting of 19JAN1929 turned to the drug report for Formosa, then under Japanese control. All participants leaned eagerly forward as Japanese representative Mr Sato disclosed that this report included, for the first time, production of coca leaves and manufacture of crude coca paste. If grown from Javanese coca shrubs these leaves would be twice as strong as Andean coca . Great Britain's representative pointed with puzzlement to the claim that no coca paste, cocaine or coca leaves were exported. Mr Sato assured him that transfers from Formosa to other Japanese Islands weren't exports at all. India's representative congratulated Mr Sato on the drop in opium imports to that island, and others poured on gushing praise.  Formosa opium imports dropped by more than 90%  Sato bragged that despite there being no medical cure for opium addiction, the number of Formosan addicts fell. No new habitués w...
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The 1927 French Tariff versus Codeine Prohibition

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  1927: The U.S. had been collaborating with China to ban all manner of drugs for 22 years. So France exported a shipment of codeine-laced cough syrup U.S. customs grabbed in New York about the middle of August.  Out of nowhere came the September 9 news story that France had slapped a 400% tariff on a wide range of American exports already enroute to France .  Word of the cough syrup shipment seizure leaked out in a small newspaper ( link ) while the League of Nations was in one of its dope temperance conventions in Geneva, Switzerland. American infiltrators were lobbying for explicit international export-import controls to be applied to codeine --a morphine product similar to heroin which the United States shifted to after banning manufacture of heroin itself. Precisely because of those restrictions, many European pharmaceutical companies had switched to producing codeine for the more laissez-faire regulatory treatment this novel morphine derivative enjoyed.  Fre...
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