ambassadors and congressmen, Hamilton Wright had managed to pull this meeting out of the hat in spite of resistance from almost everybody else involved.  His style—overstatement, bluster, and manipulation—infuriated the British.  They accused him of misrepresenting the Shanghai agreement and exaggerating the dangers of opium in his report to the U.S. Congress.  The State Department was alarmed.  Afraid that Wright’s heavy-handed approach could blow the whole deal, they asked him to find some other line of work, but he was now armed with the terrible swift sword of moral truth and he wasn’t about to be deflected by a mere bureaucracy.^[24]

Once again Wright confounded his critics.  The British eventually calmed down and the Americans managed to get an agreement at The Hague that more or less formalized the document signed in Shanghai three years earlier.  The Hague Opium Convention called for each country to exercise absolute control of the cultivation, manufacture, and distribution of cocaine, opium, and its derivatives.  In his zeal to set an example for the less enthusiastic representatives, Wright made a sweeping promise. Without bothering to run it past the folks back home, he single-handedly obligated the United States to pass a federal anti-narcotics law. And when he got back to Washington, of course, he used this promise as a double-edged sword, telling Congress that this new treaty gave them no choice but to enact such a law. 

Eighteen months later there was a follow-up meeting at The Hague to iron out the kinks, and this time Wright took the reins as head of the U.S. delegation.  But this was to be the apex of the doctor’s amazing arc.  Though his relentless arm-twisting had created enemies around the world, it was not his enemies who would undo him.  It was Demon Rum.  Dr. Wright may have been a dauntless foe of the opium poppy, but it seems he couldn’t keep his hands off the bottle.  Alcohol at that moment in U.S. history was an evil equal to opium, and people were starting to talk about Wright’s drinking habits.  When Secretary of State