were storm warnings along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Florida.  A few blocks north of the White House, a 41-year-old research physician named Hamilton Wright was crossing Massachusetts Avenue at Scott Circle when he heard somebody shout his name. He turned and there was Cal O’Laughlin, the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

Wright was known to the press. After graduating near the top of his class at McGill University, he had gone to the Far East and established a laboratory in the Malacca Straits to study tropical diseases.  While still in his thirties, he became famous for discovering that beri-beri was a bacterial infection. He was wrong, unfortunately—it’s a vitamin deficiency—but that turned out to be irrelevant since he had already married the daughter of industrialist W. D. Washburn, the powerful Republican senator from Minnesota.  When Dr. Wright and his bride arrived in Washington just after the turn of the century, he discovered he liked politics better than medical research, and he let it be known through his father-in-law that he was available for some kind of suitable governmental employment.

 Cal O’Laughlin was eager to help the son-in-law of one of the country’s major power brokers.  “In his usual direct way,” Wright later noted, “He asked me if I would like to be a member of an opium commission about to be appointed by President Roosevelt.”  The commission was news to Wright.  He didn’t know much about opium but he had no trouble recognizing the possibilities.  “I saw at a glance that it was bound to be a large and extensive bit of work.”^[3]

The opium commission that the Tribune had just got wind of was a creation of the U.S. State Department, and it had less to do with drug control than selling shoes.  The object of this mission was to ingratiate ourselves to the Chinese in hopes of opening up their markets.  By helping them with their notorious opium problem, we might be able to impress them with our moral concern, and simultaneously pull the rug out from under the British who had created the problem in the first place.  For