The League of Nations

New Weapons Against Drug Traffickers

SINCE the Spectator last dealt with the opium question, the problem, or rather the creation of machinery for dealing with it, has entered a new phase. Three years ago, in 1925, the whole question was hammered out at an International Conference at Geneva, in which a United States delegation, among others, took part. The solution reached was not sufficiently drastic for the Americans, who came with cut- and-dried ,proposals and would listen to no compromise. America, consequently, did not sign the Convention which the Conference produced. But some twenty other States did; and the machinery created was to operate as soon as a specified number of ratifications, including those of seven members of the League Council, were received. Like all ratifications, they have been slow in coining in, but in the course of July the full tale was made up and the Central Board, which the Convention was designed to set up, should be at work before the year 1928 is out.

THE INCENTIVES TO SMUGGLING.

That body will have no easy task, for the drug smuggler holds nearly all the cards in his hands as against the Governments which endeavour to lay him by the heels. The high intrinsic value of the commodity in which he traffics makes the smuggling of quantities almost infinitesimally small in volume profitable. The Customs authorities have nothing but a stroke of luck, or occasionally well-founded suspicions, to help them. They cannot, for example, examine one in ten thousand of the perfectly innocent family trunks that pass through their hands to discover whether it has a false bottom or false sides lending harbourage to thousands of pounds' worth of narcotics. Even if they could examine every one of them and did, that would only divert the smugglers to one or another of the hundreds of alternative expedients equally serviceable.

A SERIES OF SAFEGUARDS.

Any method offering any hope of success must aim at applying checks and safeguards all the way from the poppy field to the chemist's shop .(what applies to opium and its derivatives applies equally to the coca plant and its products, but it will be sufficient to discuss opium here). There must be restriction of actual production, as there is in India and, for a brief period, was in China. There must be supervision over the export and transport of the raw material. There must be strict control (as there is in Great Britain and the United States and is not in some other countries where there should be) of that limited number of factories where the manufacture of narcotics is permitted. There must be equally strict control over chemists who sell the drugs and the doctors on whose prescriptions they can be obtained. And there must be strict observance of the valuable "export and import certificate system," whereby no Government issues a licence for the export of narcotics until it has received a certificate from the Government of the country to which the consignment is to go, declaring that the drugs in question are needed for strictly legitimate purposes.

How To SUPERVISE.

At present practically all those safeguards do in fact exist on paper, but there is, so far, no effective machinery for supervising their operation. The Social Section of the League of Nations has general charge of the opium problem, so far as it is handled by the League, and it receives from different countries reports of the measures they have taken and statistics of seizures. But that section has its hands more than full with the duties already falling to it, and the framers of the 1925 Convention acted with unquestionable wisdom in Providing for the creation of a new and independent Central Board to watch with a new degree of organized vigilance over the, world-movement of narcotic drugs, both licit and illicit.

LEGITIMATE NEEDS.

The Central Board will have large functions to perform and it is essential that it should be adequately equipped in personnel for the task in hand. Its business, very briefly,

is to see to it that there is sent into any country just so much drugs as that country legitimately needs and no more. The problem should not, on the face of it, be intractable, in spite of all the difficulties already mentioned. There are less than half-a-dozen countries in the world producing opium on a considerable scale, and there are not more than thirty factories manufacturing it into drugs. Given proper estimates of a particular country's needs and reliable import and export figures for every Country, it should be possible to establish at any rate a far more effective control than exists to-day. The system proposed is worth understanding. A particular country, A, will furnish the Board with an estimate of its annual needs. Unless that estimate is manifestly outrageous it will be accepted. Every quarter that country will supply figures of its actual imports. If these mount up to something substantially in excess of the estimated need, there will obviously be something wrong and the Government concerned will be requested to investigate. There, is, moreover, a second check. Suppose it is discovered that the exports of countries B, C and D, and perhaps others, to country A amount in total to something in excess of A's own estimated need, again there will be clear ground for investigation.

A QUESTION OF PERSONNEL.

But two conditions are essential for the effective working of the Central Board. In the first place, all countries con- cerned must send their import and export statistics regularly and those statistics must be such as can be relied on. In the second place—and this is absolutely vital—the Board itself must be staffed by men of experience, courage and complete independence of character, devoted as singlemindedly to the discharge of their task as an English judge is to dealing out justice. They must have no connexion whatever with the Government of the country to which they may happen to belong, and they must be as ready to arraign their own country as any other. Such men can be found. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League supplies an analogy. Members of that Conunission are not appointed by Governments and do not represent Governments. It is, indeed, a condition of their appointment that they hold no official position in their own countries. A man like Lord Lugard, the British member of the Commission, could be relied on to criticize British Mandate maladministration as severely as French or Belgian or Japanese.

WHERE GOVERNMENTS FAIL.

Unless the appointments to the Opium Central Board are based on the same principle, and unless men of similar calibre are obtained, the Board will enter on its work with no hope of achieving success, for some Governments are far from blameless in this matter, and there are countries where the campaign against the illicit drug traffic is lamentably half-hearted. The British Government not long ago revoked the licence of a manufacturing firm whose connexion with the illicit traffic was established. The Dutch Government has recently taken similar action. Other Governments that might have done the same have not. Basle is still a notorious centre of the illicit traffic, though it should be said in justice to the Government of Switzerland that it is exercising increasing vigilance in this field.

TONS OF CONTRABAND.

The drug traffic remains a blot on our civilization. The League of Nations has so far grappled with it with good intent and with perhaps as much success as the circumstances per- mitted. But at the last meeting of the League's Opium Committee it was reported that according to the best estimates smuggled narcotics last year reached a total of something over five tons. That figure may be read in the light of the fact that the legitimate needs of the population of countries where modern medical methods prevail is put at seven grains per head of opium and .11 grains of cocaine. Now new weapons have been forged, and they must be wielded without fear or favour by men who know how to use them.

YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT,