THE DRUG TRAFFIC

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 220, 13 June 1936, Page 8

THE DRUG TRAFFIC

What the League of Nations Is Doing About It

A WORLD-WIDE PLANNED ECONOMY AT WORK

(By

U. Duncan Hall. )

The author o£ this article, who teas lately In New Zealand as Dress Liaison Otllcor ot the League of Nations Secretariat, was formerly promlirently identified with the League’s work in regulating the drug tnirHe, anil was in large part responsible tor building the organisation which he describes here.

When people think ot the League of Nations and the drug traffic, their natural tendency is to call up pictures of desperate gangs of illicit traffickers, fighting battles with police and customs officials in the underworld. And it is true that there is a toe of this sort of drama in the work of the .League ’n this sphere. Not that League officials have any direct contact with traffickers. That is the work of the national police forces.

The officials at Geneva, however, hare sometimes received visits from mysterious strangers, who have offered information for a consideration, or sometimes for none at all. One of the most famous of the traffickers, in fact, once visited the secretariat. It was not discovered till some time after that he himself was a trafficker. He gave information which led to the seizure of enormous consignments of heroin. He said he ran an organisation of espionage on the traffickers; he himself, of course, had nothing to do with them. He was leading an honest life —that of blackmailing bis fellow traffickers, as we discovered later. He was out to get the handsome rewards paid by the police of different countries to the informer. But he had a little problem. What if the police wouldn’t pay up? He hoped to make quite sure of those rewards by telling not only the national police officials, but also Geneva.

Sometimes, too, there were anonymous letters, which in some cases led to very important seizures. One letter told us that two hundred kilogrammes of heroin was on a certain ship from the Levant, on route for Hamburg. We telegraphed to the police of seven countries and the ship was watched all along the route. The police of Rotterdam stole a march on the Hamburg police, who were waiting all ready for a seizure, by going on board quietly and inspecting the casks of so-called bicarbonate of soda. They found that the contents did not correspond with the ship’s manifest, being in fact, heroin. The Dutch law being contravened by a false manifest, they seized the lot. . One could go on for hours with stories of this sort.. The seizure documents of the Ixiague published each quarter at Geneva are full of them. A Generation Ahead. But to the officials at the Secretariat, this part of the work was really rather dull. There was something much more exciting happening. Can you imagine yourself out ahead of 1936 and working away at a job in, say, 1970—a whole generation ahead. Well, that is what the officials engaged on this part of the League’s work have been doing. On this narrow but important front, the League has been able to break right through the general line of international development, and to advance, as it were, deep into the future. Perhaps there is no more advanced position in the whole front of international government, than the dangerous drugs position.

Here you have the only example o£ a complete system of planned economy embodied in a general international treaty and operating day by day with extraordinary smoothness over the whole of the surface of the inhabited globe. Thus from the beginning of 1934 the operations of the legitimate drug trade of the world for some 12 dangerous drugs have been conducted on the basis of a world plan drawn up in advance under the auspices of tlie League. This world plan consists of tlie "Statement Containing the Estimates” of drug requirements for the ensuing year issued by a body at Geneva called the Supervisory Body. This statement is issued each year on November 1. It contains the whole plan of the world trade for the next year; in fact, it really determines the amounts which may be manufactured, imported, exported, consumed, or held in stock in 1930. This plan is legally binding on all parties to the international drug convention, both in their relations with each other and with States non-parties.

A Widely Ratified Convention.

Although the convention came into force only two years and a half ago, no fewer than 57 countries are parties to it. It is more widely ratified by far than any other League convention. For practical purposes it may be regarded as operating with complete universality, because, even although a few countries have not yet ratified, they are applying It in practice. The system of estimates which forms the basis of the convention is in fact, operating with complete universality. The Supervisory Body, which deals with the estimates, is under the obligation to make the statement of estimates issued by it absolutely complete for every country and territory in the world. If a country has not finished an estimate, the Supervisory Body must frame one for that country. If the country is a party to the convention, this estimate is binding on it. Even if it is not a party, the estimate is binding from a practical point of view, since no non-party itself manufactures and none of the manufacturing countries (all of which are parties) can supply it except within the limits fixed in the estimate. As the League Assembly itself has pointed out—the estimates system is the only literally universal piece of international administration so far undertaken by the League, since it applies actively, day in and day out, to every single State and separate administrative unit in the world.

The working of this whole system of planned economy is subject to close supervision and control both national and international. Governments watch the trade closely and Geneva watches it closely. Each government supplies a control body at Geneva, the Permanent Control Opium Board, with statistics of all trade operations—manufacture, imports, exports, consumption, and stocks. These statistics form an interlocking international system of statistics unique in its completeness and the degree of accuracy attained. For the whole world the in comings and outgoings of dangerous drugs in the legal trade are accounted for down to a few pounds—probably with a greater degree of accuracy than the movement of goods in and out of

a large grocer’s shop. On the basis of these statistics it is possible to keep a close watch on the working of the convention and to detect any serious leakage in the illicit traffic. The board has the duty of seeing that if the amounts imported into a country exceed its estimates, and the excess is not counterbalanced by corresponding re-exports, an embargo must, be imposed on further exports to that country. These very far-reaching powers have not remained a dead letter, but have been very freely used. Tlie Imposing of such world embargoes formed a new precedent In the history of international law.

The magnitude of the work involved in building up a world-wide system of this kina can hardly be realised. When the League faced the problem 15 years ago, it seemed completely insoluble. It was only by persistent hard work, day by day, without relaxing, for 16 years, that the result nas been achieved. Practical Results. You may ask, what are the practical results of this well-piled and smoothly-running piece of world machinery. They are briefly these: Only five or six years ago, the illicit traffic was being supplied by leakages from the legal trade. Now the illicit traffic can get supplies only from the entirely clandestine factory, set up without the knowledge of the Government and suppressed by the police as soon as they discover it. The legal trade is now water-tight. It furnishes many tons of drugs to the medical profession all over the .world. The trafficker and the addict strive desperately but without success to direct these supplies into the illicit traffic. If the drugs could be got out of the chemist's shop into the waiting taxi-cab of the trafficker outside, their value would be multiplied by a fantastic figure. Yet so stringent is the control now, all over the world, that such leakages are practically non-existent. Clandestine factories in certain parts of the world, where administrative control is weak, constitute a new and serious danger. But that must not blind our eyes to the immense achievemen involved in confining the legal trade to consumption for medical purposes. All this just shows what can be done in the matter of international cooperation, if there is only the will on the part of governments and peopi<s to co-operate. It is not the technical solution of some of our most serious problems which is the real difficulty. It is rather the political factors. Given real agreement among the governments, even the intricate problems, involved in the manufacture of and trade in arms, can probably be solved without very great difficulty. In fact, it is generally agreed that the experience gain ed in connection with dangerous drugs may be invaluable in helping us to solve this bigger and more dangerous question. If we can only build up a strong collective system, a rule of law under the covenant, we can hope to reach a solution of the problem of armaments. If we cannot get a collective system, "if we are forced back again to an era where the sword and not law dominates, then It is doubtful whether even this kind of vital world service of a non-politlcal character can survive unimpaired; a distant countiy such as New Zealand, which hits, no problem of drug addiction, would get one soon enough, if the world-barriers against such addiction, as described above, were allowed to fall into disrepair.