most of the last century the British East India Company had been forcing China to accept Indian opium in payment for Chinese tea and silk.  The Chinese fought a couple of wars over this issue, lost both times, and wound up giving the British the port of Hong Kong along with a burgeoning opium trade that began to disgust even the English.  Though the Americans arrived late in the Far East, the opportunity to help carve up China’s commercial markets—“one of the greatest commercial prizes in the world,” according to future president William Howard Taft—had U.S. businessmen of every stripe lusting after a slice of the pie.^[4]

Using the opium issue as a wedge, Teddy Roosevelt saw a chance to soften up the Chinese with diplomacy instead of gunboats,  and it would be virtually cost-free since the U.S. was not a player in the opium trade.  The State Department began agitating for an international conference and the other great powers were soon shanghaied into signing on.  The meeting was set for January of 1909, fittingly, in Shanghai.  The Americans would send three delegates.  The Episcopal Bishop of the Philippines would head the mission, the number two man would be from the American Legation at Peking, and the third slot was up for grabs.  And on that windy morning in Washington, Cal O’Laughlin advised Hamilton Wright to talk to the White House right away.  Wright got there “shortly thereafter,” and eight weeks later he was named as the third U.S. delegate to the International Opium Commission at Shanghai.  And though his career at the State Department would end in disgrace, he would leave a profound imprint on the Twentieth Century, for Dr. Hamilton Wright is personally responsible for shaping the international narcotics laws as we know them today.^[5]

When Wright first began wading through the state department files on the opium problem, he assumed he was dealing with some distant plague like yellow fever or leprosy.  He had no