and when people began to realize their favorite nostrums were laced with addictive drugs, the ones who could stopped using them.

But for Hamilton Wright it was no longer possible to be objective about the facts.  Having persuaded himself that opium addiction was a global scourge, he set out to eradicate it personally.  Handsome and imposing, tall, square-jawed, with his hair parted in the middle and a trim little handlebar moustache, he looked like a well-preserved Yale quarterback and he had the ego to match.  His tendency to go for the jugular, to overstate the case and stretch the numbers, proved to be a powerful weapon in the opening volley in the war on drugs, but his bulldozer style infuriated a lot of people.  Chastened by the Secretary of State’s warning to watch his step, Wright sailed for the Orient in October of 1908 aboard the steamship Siberia.^[11]  

The Shanghai Opium Commission was a smashing success for U.S. diplomacy.  The Chinese were deeply impressed with the American effort. This was the first time they had been treated as an equal partner in an international conference, and it was the first time in memory that the folks who called the meeting did not walk off with a piece of Chinese real estate.  But the impact on the drug trade was negligible.  The delegates at Shanghai were allowed to exchange information and make recommendations but that was all.  Nobody was obligated to follow through.  And some of the key players—England, France, the Netherlands—did not share the American delegation’s horror of opium.  A British study had recently concluded that opium addiction was no worse than alcoholism, and maybe not as bad. As one public health official put it, “There is more violence in a gallon of alcohol than a ton of opium.”^[12]  Most of the countries involved thought this conference had gone far enough, and when the Americans proposed a second meeting, the British torpedoed the idea.  But Hamilton Wright and his colleagues had managed to get agreement on a few resolutions, and that would make all the difference.

The sleeper was Resolution 5, which called on all the signatory governments to clamp down on opium and its derivatives