¹ 10 and 11, Geo. 5, ch. 46, an Act to regulate the Importation, Exportation, Manufacture, Sale and Use of Opium and other Dangerous Drugs, 16 August 1920; and Statutory Rules and Orders, Defence of the Realm Act, Amending Regulations no. 40B (DORA 40B), 28 July 1916, HMSO, London, 1916Google Scholar. For wartime restrictions on alcohol, see Wilson, G., Alcoholand the Nation, Nicholson and Watson, London, 1940, pp. 127–31.Google Scholar

² 31 and 32, Vict., ch. 121, an Act to regulate the Sale of Poisons, and alter and amend the Pharmacy Act 1852, 31 July 1868. For the campaign against opium-based patent medicines, see for example ‘Important Decision under the Pharmacy Act, 1868’, Tharmaceutical Journal, third series, 22 (1891–1892), 928–40Google Scholar; and 8, Edw. 7, ch. 55, an Act to regulate the Sale of certain Poisonous Substances and to amend the Pharmacy Acts, 1908.

³ The death rate from narcotic and, particularly, opiate poisoning had declined, apparently permanently, from 5.2 million living in 1900 to 2.8 million in 1910 – Registrar General's Annual Reports, HMSO, London, 1901–11. I am grateful to Nigel Rawson for calculating narcotic death rates.

⁴ For the tradition of collective action, see for example Lowes, P. D., The Genesis of International Narcotics Control, Libraire Droz, Geneva, 1966, pp. 1–9Google Scholar; Bruun, K., Pann, L. and Rexed, I., The Gentlemen's Club: International Control of Drugs and Alcohol, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1975, pp. 7–8Google Scholar; Lyons, F. S. L., Internationalism in Europe, 1815–1914, A. W. Sythoff, Leyden, 1963Google Scholar; Claude, I. L., Swords into Ploughshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organisation, second edition, Random House, New York, 1961Google Scholar; Mangone, G. J., A Short History of International Organisation, McGraw Hill, New York, 1954, pp. 67–97Google Scholar; and Howard-Jones, N., ‘The Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences, 1851–1938’, WHO Chronicle, 28 (1974), 229–47, 369–84, 414–26 and 455–70.Google ScholarPubMed

⁵ For a pro-American analysis of the British response, see Taylor, A. H., American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900–39, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1969, p. 49Google Scholar; and Lowes, op. cit. p. 110. The detailed story of departmental manoeuvrings – conflicts between Foreign Office and India Office civil servants, who were all uniformly hostile to collective discussion of opium, and their ministers, who favoured it – can be traced prior to the 1909 meeting in Public Record Office (PRO), Foreign Office Papers (FO) 371, nos 20, 22, 218, 222, 223, 414, 423 and 433; and India Office, India Office Papers (IO) L-E-7, no. 564.

⁶ Report of the International Opium Commission, Vol. 1, Proceedings, North China Daily News and Herald Limited, Shanghai, 1909, p. 47.Google Scholar

⁷ The domestic political background to Britain's half-hearted acceptance of the American invitation to The Hague, and the importance of the views of both the Colonial Office and the India Office, emerge from 10 L-E-7, no. 652; PRO, FO 371, nos 616, 846, 847, 1,070, 1,072, 1,073, 1,075 and 1,076; and FO 415, nos 1–3. The Board of Trade's anxious protection of British morphine manufacturers is clear in PRO, Board of Trade Papers (BT) 11, no 14.

⁸ Parliamentary Papers (PP), 68 (1912–13), Instructions to the British Delegates to the International Opium Conference held at The Hague, December 1911 to January 1912, pp. 735–42Google Scholar; and PP, CXXI (1912–13), International Opium Convention, 23 January 1912, pp. 61–82.Google Scholar

⁹ PP LXVIII (1912–13), Report of the British Delegates to the International Opium Conference, pp. 743–84Google Scholar. For a more detailed ‘inside’ knowledge of the manoeuvrings at The Hague, Germany's stand on cocaine in particular, see PRO, FO, 371, nos 1,076, 1,330, 1,331, 1,332 and 1,334; FO 415, no. 4; and BT 11, no. 14.

¹⁰ ‘Prescriptions of Opium and Morphine’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1904), 1, 617Google Scholar; Gadd, W., ‘The Ownership of Medical Prescriptions’, The Lancet, 2 (1910), 1,030, 1,168, and 1,241Google Scholar; and Gadd, W., ‘How Far can the Abuse of Drugs be Prevented by Law?’, The Lancet, 1 (1911), 932–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ The medical journals were full of details of such legislation in the early 1900s. For example British Medical Journal, 1 (1906), 174–5Google Scholar; 2 (1907), 1,194 and 1.788; and 2 (1908), 438; and The Lancet, 2 (1908), 125Google Scholar; and 1 (1909), 784–6.

¹² Sainsbury, H., Drugs and the Drug Habit, Methuen, London, 1909, pp. 238 and 261–3.Google Scholar

¹³ Armstrong-Jones, R., ‘Drugs of Addiction: A Menace to the Nation’, The Morning Post, 3 June 1914Google Scholar; and Armstrong-Jones, R., ‘Drug Addiction in Relation to Mental Disorder’, British Journal of Inebriety, 12 (1915), 125–48.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Details of earlier discussions about domestic regulation of narcotics are in PRO, FO 415, nos 4, 5, 7 and 8; FO 371, nos 1,330, 1,331, 1,601 and 1,924; BT 11, no. 14; and HO 45, no. 119,609. The inter-departmental meetings of 1914 are covered in FO 371, nos 1,925 and 1,927.

¹⁵ PRO, FO 371 no. 1,927 – fifth meeting of the inter-departmental committee, 30 April 1914.

¹⁶ The British Medical Association gave its opinion to the committee that ‘Any medical man who was found to be allowing his prescription to be used as a means of procuring these substances for the purpose of mere indulgence would be amenable to the discipline of the General Medical Council’, but the matter of maintenance appears not to have been considered any further than this.

¹⁷ Attempts to allocate responsibility for legislation are discussed at various stages between 1911 and 1914 in FO 415, nos 4, 5, 7 and 8; FO 371, nos 1,330, 1,331, 1,601 and 1,924; BT 11, no. 14; and HO 45, no. 119,609. The Home Office had suggested the Privy Council Office late in 1913; that office saw new legislation simply as an extension of the existing pharmacy laws: ‘It is not clear that the purposes of a system of licensing such as appears to be contemplated by the Convention are not already adequately met by existing legislation, so far as internal sales of the substances in question are concerned’ – PRO, FO 415, no. 8.

¹⁸ There is some evidence that an illegal smuggling network had been set up, run by Charles Meing, a Singapore Chinese living in Liverpool and trading as San Toy and Company. This was based on Chinese firemen in British ships. A Hong Kong firm, Jack a Tai and Company, used ‘well dressed’ English or American subjects to carry opium to North America as saloon passengers – PRO, FO 371, nos 2,317, 2,650 and 2,653; FO 415, no. 10; HO 45, no. 189,271; and Privy Council Office Papers (PCO) 8, no. 803.

¹⁹ Hansard, 115 (1919), cols 944–5Google Scholar. Exports of morphia from the United Kingdom to Japan had shown an even more dramatic increase, from 108,000 ounces in 1913 to 372,000 ounces in the first four months of 1916 – PRO, FO 371, no. 2,653.

²⁰ PRO, HO 45, no. 189,271 – reports on the smuggling of cocaine into China, the Straits Settlements and India.

²¹ PRO, FO, 371, no, 2,317; FO 415, no. 10; and PCO 8, no. 803.

²² Hansard, 71 (1915), cols 986–7Google Scholar; and FO 415, no. 10 – letter from SirCollins, W. to SirLangley, W., SirCollins, W., ‘The Ethics and Law of Drug and Alcohol Addiction’, British journal of Inebriety, 13 (1915–1916), 131–54Google Scholar; and PCO 8, no. 803 – memorial from Alfred Holt and Company.

²³ FO 371, no. 2,650.

²⁴ Delevingne's personality and career are detailed in The Times, 1 and 8 December 1950; in his Dictionary of Notional Biography entry; in Who Was Who; in Renborg, B. A., ‘The Grand Old Men of the League of Nations’, Bulletin on Narcotics, 16 (1964), 1–11Google Scholar; and in Martindale, H., Some Victorian Portraits and Others, Allen and Unwin, London, 1948, pp. 31–9Google Scholar. Despite his undoubted intellectual gifts, he was criticized for ‘being too much of the bureaucrat who thought that to settle a matter you had only to tie it up in a bundle of regulations, preferably of his own drafting’.

²⁵ PCO 8, no. 803 – Home Office memorandum to inter-departmental conference.

²⁶ The Times, 20 December 1915 and 5 and 11 February 1916.Google Scholar

²⁷ The Folkestone and Hythe Advertiser, 12 February 1916Google Scholar; The Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgatc and Chcriton Herald, 12 February 1916Google Scholar; The Times, 10 and 12 February 1916Google Scholar; and The Daily Mail, 11 February 1916Google Scholar. Throughout this paper, the terms cocaine ‘addict’, cocaine ‘habitué’, and narcotic ‘addiction’ (in relation to cocaine) are used in the way in which they were employed in the early part of this century. The terms ‘addict’ and ‘addiction’ are in fact no longer widely used in medical writings on this subject. The word ‘dependence’ has been recommended by the World Health Organization and is now in general use. It is thought to avoid some of the loaded overtones which ‘addiction’ had acquired and it encompasses not only physical but psychological dependence. There is currently some medical disagreement about the precise effects of cocaine in this sense. While not an addictive drug in the way in which opiates create a steady physiological need and abstinence sickness, cocaine can induce an intense craving, and the psycho logical consequences of its abuse can be worse than those of opiate addiction (although even this point has been disputed). But it does not produce such intense physiological symptoms on withdrawal and can more easily be used intermittently. Cocaine, like cannabis, has also been classified, again according to the legal definition which still prevails, as a narcotic, although most modern researchers are agreed that it is in fact a stimulant. But cocaine abuse was, and is, seen as part of a narcotic ‘addiction’ problem, and the term is thus used in its historic sense here. Further discussion of the whole concept of depen dence can be found in Grinspoon, L. and Bakalar, J. B., Cocaine: A Drug and Its Social Evolution, Basic Books, New York, 1976, pp. 149–50 and 177–216Google Scholar; and a plea for its controlled legalization, currently a much discussed issue in the United States, in Ashley, R., Cocaine: Its History, Use and Effects, St Martin's Press, New York, 1975.Google Scholar

²⁸ Questions were asked in the Commons about this – Hansard, 80 (1916), cols 218–19Google Scholar. But police investigations revealed that the allegations were ‘absolutely without foundation’ – PRO, Metropolitan Police Papers 2, no. 1,698.

²⁹ SirCook, C. (ed.), Manuals of Emergency Legislation: Defence of the Realm Manual, seventh edition, HMSO, London, 1919, pp. 515–18.Google Scholar

³⁰ ‘The Traffic in Narcotic Drugs’, The Lancet, 1 (1916), 1,133Google Scholar; and ‘Restrictions on the Sale of Cocaine’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1916), 117–18.Google Scholar

³¹ PRO, HO 45, no. 10,813 – letters from Belgian refugee ex-policemen, 15 and 24 April 1916.

³² Details of the William Johnson case and the use of Gilbert Smith as a decoy are in HO 45, no. 10,813; The Morning Advertiser, 12 May, 22 June and 13 July 1916Google Scholar; The Daily Mail, 19 and 20 July 1916Google Scholar; The Daily Express, 19 July 1916Google Scholar; and The Daily Chronicle, 19 and 20 July 1916.Google Scholar

³³ SirCollins, W., ‘War Measures Against Inebriety’, British Journal of Inebriety, 14 (1916), 41–4.Google Scholar

³⁴ Edith and Ida Yeoland were two unemployed actresses whose deaths in 1901 led to speculation that they had been using cocaine. Ambrose Winterton, a cocaine addict, defrauded the editor of The Literary World of £1.11.6 in 1903. His case was publicized as ‘A Slave to Cocaine: The Terrible Results of a Drug Habit’, in The Daily Mail, 22 July and 10, 13, 15, 16 and 19 August 1901Google Scholar; and in The Daily Graphic, 12 September 1903.Google Scholar

³⁵ The Times, 13, 22, 25 and 27 July 1916Google Scholar; and The Daily Chronicle, 19 July 1916.Google Scholar

³⁶ There was some governmental anxiety about army morale, of which the cocaine ‘scare’ formed part. War-weariness found expression in 1917 in strikes and the mutiny at Etaples base camp, never publicly reported. See Dallas, G. and Gill, D., ‘Mutiny at Etaples Base in 1917’, Past and Present, 69 (1975), 88–112.Google Scholar

³⁷ Hansard, 83 (1916), cols 300–2Google Scholar; and 84 (1916), cols 1,196–7. The ‘behind-the-scenes’ activity surrounding the drafting of DORA 40B is to be found in PRO, HO 45, no. 10,813.

³⁸ Statutory Rules and Orders, Amending Regulations, DORA 40B.

³⁹ SirCollins, W., ‘The International Opium Convention and the Traffic in Cocaine and Opium’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1916), 198–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; SirCollins, W., ‘Restrictions on the Sale of Cocaine’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1916), 117–18Google Scholar; and SirCollins, W., ‘The Regulations with Respect to the Sale of Cocaine’, The Lancet, 2 (1916), 238.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ The Times, 3 August 1916Google Scholar. By the end of the year, doctors' prescribing of cocaine had been brought within the ambit of criminal prosecution – Statutory Rules and Orders, Amending Regulation, 5 December 1916, HMSO, London, 1917.

⁴¹ The Billie Carleton case involved the death of a popular young west-end actress, supposedly from an overdose of cocaine. Her death was later proved to have been the result of veronal poisoning. The Times, December 1918-March 1919Google Scholar, and the popular papers, for example The Daily Moil and The Daily Express, were full of the case. Some insight into the drug ‘scene’ at the time is given by Crowley, A., The Diary of a Drug Fiend, Collins, London, 1922Google Scholar; Mills, Lady D., The Laughter of Fools, Duckworth, London, 1920Google Scholar; and Rohmer, S., Dope: A Story of Chinato-wn and the Drug Traffic, Cassell, London, 1919.Google Scholar

⁴² Police reports are in HO 45, nos 10,813 and 10,814.

⁴³ PP, XXI (1910) Report of the Inquiry into the Question of Deaths resulting from the Administration of Anaesthetics, pp. 788–90Google Scholar. Cases where deaths had resulted from the administration of cocaine by unqualified men were given much publicity in the medical journals, for example in ‘Cocaine and Unqualified Dentistry’, British Medical Journal, 1 (1908), 657.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Details of the case of Dr Francis McDonald of Partadown, Northern Ireland, are in HO 45, no. 10,814.

⁴⁵ Hansard, 84 (1916), cols 2,069–72Google Scholar; 85 (1916), cols 609–11, 1,210, 2,043–4 and 2,690–1; 86 (1916), cols 86–7, 988–9, 1,124–5, 1,594 and 1.814; and 87 (1916), col. 585 detail the parliamentary pressure on behalf of unregistered practitioners. Herbert Samuel's growing disquiet and extra-parliamentary pressure are in HO 45, no. 10,814.

⁴⁶ Testimony given before the committee on the use of cocaine in dentistry is in HO 45, no. 11,013.

⁴⁷ PP, VIII (1917–18), Report of the Committee on the Use of Cocaine in Dentistry, pp. 151–7.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ See for example reactions in ‘The Report on the Use of Cocaine in Dentistry’, British Dental Journal, 38 (1917), 289–91Google Scholar; British Journal of Dental Science, 60 (1917), 225–8Google Scholar; British Medical Journal, 1 (1917), 896Google Scholar; and The Times, 10 March 1917.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Delevingne thought the committee's conclusions ‘an unsatisfactory result’. He considered that the evidence it had heard should be published, ‘but I suppose that with the present paper restrictions that should not be done’ – HO 45, no. 11,013.

⁵⁰ Report of the Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction, HMSO, London, 1926.Google Scholar

⁵¹ The most easily accessible account of the background surrounding the report of the Second Brain Committee of 1965 and the new treatment clinic structure it advocated, which was established in 1968, is in Laurie, P., Drugs: Medical, Psychological and Social Facts, revised edition, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1974.Google Scholar