NCJ Number
102143
Date Published
1985
Length
210 pages
Annotation
This book analyzes key international events and agreements that influenced narcotics control policies in the United States and Great Britain and shows how the interaction of rule-creating institutions produced distinctive drug laws in the two countries.
Abstract
The early history of the Indo-China opium trade and the Anglo-Sino conflicts it provoked influenced the subsequent development of an international system of narcotics control. Between 1895 and 1906, China missionaries, backed by British antiopium societies and American moral reform movements, defined nonmedical opium consumption as an evil requiring governmental and international intervention to eliminate it. The 1909 Shanghai Conference attended by representatives of 13 countries, including the United States and Great Britain, prepared the way for the 1911 Hague Conferences, which were intended to suppress opiate consumption in the Far East. During World War I, problems of regulating domestic opiate-narcotic consumption in Great Britain developed in association with efforts to curb international traffic. The Versailles Treaty ending World War I required signatories to ratify the Hague Convention, which mandated the enactment of drug laws. Differences in the subsequent narcotics control policies in the United States and Great Britain were due to the interaction between administrative entities and pressure groups representing medical interests and ancillary medical activities. Great Britain adopted a medical control approach, and the United States adopted a punitive approach. 180-item bibliography and author and subject indexes.