within their own borders.  It was easy for the British to go along with this idea—in fact they proposed it—because it had no effect on the international drug trade.  It was simply a way of saving face while the Americans held their feet to the fire.  But in the hands of Hamilton Wright, Resolution 5 would become a sledgehammer to fashion his dream of world-wide narcotics prohibition.

In the spring of 1909, Wright returned to Washington triumphant, energetic, and fired with a sense of mission.  His first job was to convince his bosses at the State Department to demand a follow-on conference in spite of British and Dutch opposition. And to embarrass the rest of the world into going along with his idea, Wright planned to transform the United States into a shining beacon of drug morality.  For the next two years he was a one-man Washington pressure group, pitching to Congress, threatening and cajoling foreign ambassadors, twisting arms, and drafting model narcotics laws for the people of the United States.

Despite his relentless enthusiasm, Wright faced a couple of daunting problems.  For one thing, there was the U.S. Constitution.  A national drug law would call for a national police force—an idea discouraged by the Tenth Amendment.  After a year of trying to work his way around this obstructionist document, he complained to his boss, “it has been a difficult business...  The Constitution is constantly getting in the way.”^[13]  But the Supreme Court had recently opened the door to a possible way around the Founding Fathers when they ruled that the government had the right to regulate anything it was taxing.^[14]  Perhaps, thought Wright, the narcotics law could be disguised as a tax act.  By the winter of 1909, he had drafted a model bill that would require anyone who dealt with drugs—doctors, druggists, manufacturers—to register, pay a license fee, and keep scrupulous records.  And since the revenue men could refuse to license anyone they didn’t approve of—addicts, for example—the government would have absolute control over the distribution of narcotics. But despite his certainty about everything else,