The 1927 French Tariff versus Codeine Prohibition
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...