Introduction
The opium trade was a vital part of the political economy of colonial-era Southeast Asia. During the nineteenth century, every Southeast Asian colonial state as well as Siam taxed and controlled the opium trade through an institution known as the opium farm. Essentially, the government would auction off the right to exclusively distribute and sell opium within a proscribed area for a given time period, leaving it to the ‘farmer’ to enforce his monopoly. Southeast Asian opium farms were almost always controlled by wealthy ethnic Chinese merchants, and opium was mostly consumed by members of the overseas Chinese community, providing a steady stream of income to colonial governments—in the most extreme case, about half the British Straits Settlements' annual government revenue.Footnote 1 Scholars of the culture of opium smoking in China have identified its role as an important form of male recreation, its potential to alleviate the symptoms of some tropical diseases, and its ability to reduce hunger pangs and help workers toil for more hours as major reasons for the popularity of the habit; these factors made opium consumption very conducive to the environment of the overwhelmingly male, proletarianized Chinese overseas communities in Southeast Asia.Footnote 2
When the United States joined the club of Western colonial powers in Southeast Asia in 1898, the patterns of regional opium trade were in a process of transition.Footnote 3 The opium farm was a useful institution for colonial governments that lacked revenue, manpower, and local knowledge, but the system lacked accountability and placed a great deal of political and economic power outside the direct control of the state; discomfort with the opium trade, especially amongst missionaries and the elite in the metropole, provided further impetus for change. The government of French Cochinchina abolished its farm system in favour of a state-run opium monopoly in 1881, and the rest of Indochina and the Dutch East Indies followed suit in the 1890s.Footnote 4 Shortly after annexing Taiwan in 1895, Japan, which zealously enforced its internal prohibition of opium, issued strict licensing requirements with the goal of eradicating the habit in its new colony.Footnote 5 Britain's Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade appeared on the verge of a major victory when its agitation spurred the creation of a Royal Commission to consider the future of the cultivation and sale of opium in India; the Commission's 1895 report, however, ultimately endorsed the status quo and proved a major setback for the anti-opium movement.Footnote 6
Under American military government in 1898, the Spanish-era opium farms of the Philippines were abolished in favour of a tariff on opium imports. The Philippine Commission attempted to reverse this decision and reintroduce opium farming in 1903, resulting in a fierce backlash from missionaries and evangelical reformers, led by the Episcopal Missionary Bishop, Charles Henry Brent. Their protests were successful and, after a few years of increasingly restricted access, the Philippines became the first country in Southeast Asia to totally prohibit nonmedical opium. This victory provided the global anti-opium movement, which had previously been vocal and active but had precious few tangible results to show for it, with some badly needed momentum. Spurred partially by American actions, the governments of both Great Britain and China formally condemned the opium trade in 1906, and soon agreed to a mutual reduction of poppy cultivation in India and the Chinese interior. After extensive lobbying by Bishop Brent, the first international conference on the drug trade met in Shanghai in 1909, with subsequent rounds of drug diplomacy beginning in The Hague a few years later. Concurrently with these international conferences, domestic reformers helped pass the first federal anti-narcotics laws in the United States.
Outside the United States and the Philippines, however, the anti-narcotics movement proceeded only haltingly. The initial success of the Chinese opium eradication programme belied the apparent weakness of the Qing government, but in the years following China's 1911 Revolution, the boundless poppy fields began to bloom once again. As central authority evaporated, Chinese warlords simply could not resist the allure of financing themselves with drug money. The colonial governments of Southeast Asia also had trouble ending their addictions to opium revenues. International drug diplomacy hastened the process of transition from opium farms to state-run monopolies, and ensured that this change came wrapped in moralizing language that talked of gradual prohibition. Yet these monopolies proved to be quite lucrative, and their disestablishment was a contentious and drawn-out process.
International prohibition efforts spurred moral reformers to stamp out vice closer to home, and in this crusade they found greater initial success. In the United States, as well as in Britain and its white settlement colonies, the association of Chinese migrants with lurid, filthy opium dens which ensnared and corrupted innocent whites was one of the tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’.Footnote 7 By the early twentieth century, outrageous stories about the dangers of drug-crazed Mexicans and black Southerners were also becoming common in the United States. The professionalization of medicine also played a major role in the increasing association of drug use with criminality, as physicians and pharmacists asserted their control over the rights of individuals to medicate themselves.Footnote 8 But in the United States, the creation of drug control laws went hand in hand with broader policies that were aimed primarily at China and Chinese migrants. The first local ordinances against opium smoking were linked with the beginnings of Chinese Exclusion, and the first federal laws were prompted by American calls for international conventions on narcotics control, calls that had their root in prohibition policies in the Philippines.Footnote 9
This paper argues that behind the debate over the opium problem in the Philippines was a fundamental question of what an American-made colonial state should look like. While its administrators and most of Washington were sometimes ambivalent about how extensive and—in a certain sense—progressive the new regime should be, American missionaries and other idealistic imperialists deeply wanted to shoulder the ‘white man's burden’. In doing so, they met with initial success, using the Philippines as a springboard to international reform and shaping American colonialism and internationalism at a vital point when their nature was still largely undetermined. But their success was limited, and had unforeseen results. On an international level, the anti-opium movement only catalysed a process of systematizing and rationalizing the control of far-off colonies. The movement's efforts did affect how the opium trade was controlled in Southeast Asia, but outside the Philippines this process was not accomplished with anything more than the rhetoric of eventual, far-off prohibition as its goal. In the Philippines, prohibition was not particularly successful at stamping out the drug menace, but it modernized the power and scope of the state, and shifted the control of the opium trade from largely autonomous economic networks—controlled by the elite of the overseas Chinese community and the Sulu Sultanate in the southern Philippines—to a newly created, and much more dispersed, illicit economy with a multitude of participants.
Empire and reform
After Admiral George Dewey routed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in 1898, many evangelicals—as well as politicians—portrayed American rule in the Philippines as divinely inspired. ‘God has given into our hands, that is, into the hands of American Christians, the Philippine Islands’, stated the Presbyterian General Assembly before American troops had even landed in Manila.Footnote 10 Far more than American officials, evangelical moral reformers were insistent on making the new empire a Godly one, committed to cleaning up what the Reverend Arthur Judson called ‘the scum which is ever cast up by the advancing waves of civilization’.Footnote 11 At the end of 1898, moral reformers including Wilbur Crafts, Josiah Strong and Anthony Comstock convened a ‘National Christian Citizenship Convention’, which discussed the export of temperance and vice laws to the Philippines.Footnote 12
Missionaries in the Philippines and many evangelicals supported the ensuing war there, but not unconditionally. The Reverend Homer Stuntz, who later would take an important role in advocating opium prohibition in the Philippines, was willing to defend the American military against allegations of torture in 1902, but stressed that he could not support the army's ‘Moslem fashion’ of waging all-out war on Philippine civilians on the island of Samar.Footnote 13 However, evangelical reformers generally were more concerned about the immoral conduct of American soldiers in personal matters, than on the battlefield. Early in the conflict, evangelicals pressed for laws restricting the availability of alcohol to American soldiers and Filipinos; these measures proved far more with Congress than with the military.Footnote 14 Reformers also recoiled when the Army began a programme to perform medical inspections on prostitutes, and succeeded in abolishing what they regarded as official participation in sin.Footnote 15 Public support for imperialism was too precarious for officials to do otherwise.
Despite the torrent of nationalism unleashed by the war with Spain, the broader relationship between imperialism and reform movements could sometimes be murky. An older generation of reformists, equating empire abroad with the loss of liberty at home, joined with various labour activists, conservative Southerners, and foes of Asian immigration to oppose the conquest of the Philippines. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union found its traditional advocacy of domesticity and peace at odds with empire-building, and only as expansion was explicitly linked with moral reform did the organization—in Ian Tyrrell's phrase—make ‘a gradual if subtle endorsement of pro-imperial policies’.Footnote 16 One historian, assessing the outlooks of colonial policymakers such as Elihu Root and William Howard Taft, concluded that they, and their policies, were fundamentally conservative rather than progressive in nature.Footnote 17 But while these men were not moral or social reformers at heart, they shared with the emerging Progressive movement a belief in bureaucratic efficiency and the need to centralize political power.Footnote 18 This set the grounds for a necessary partnership between colonial administrators and progressive reformers.
Shortly after occupying Manila, the American military government cancelled existing opium farm contracts, many of them already defunct because of the years of revolutionary upheaval, and instituted a high tariff on opium, taking issue more with the monopolistic way the drug was distributed than with the fact of distribution itself.Footnote 19 This policy initially attracted only a muted debate. Hampden Coit DuBose, an American missionary in China, wrote to Senator John McLaurin in 1899 to urge against ‘the sale of this poison to a semi-civilized people’, and in a 1900 petition to Washington, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union asked for a ban on the sale of opium—as well as alcohol and firearms—in the Philippines.Footnote 20 These initial requests were ignored with no immediate backlash.Footnote 21 A few military and civilian officials also took issue with the tariff, arguing in favour of restoring the opium farm. Brigadier General Charles Whittier, in charge of customs at Manila, argued that a high tariff on opium would ‘lead to increased smuggling’ and remarked on the ‘great revenue’ that the farming system brought to Hong Kong.Footnote 22 His successor at customs, Lieutenant-Colonel William F. Spurgin, concurred, pointing out the difficulties in patrolling an area with the ‘peculiarities and extent of the coast line of the Philippines’.Footnote 23
In response to such recommendations, Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage described the farm system as ‘foreign to our administration of the revenue’, and the Bureau of Insular Affairs informed General Otis that it was ‘disinclined to make any change in the existing system of controlling the opium traffic in those islands’.Footnote 24 As civilian administrators began to take over from the military, though, they soon found reason to be unhappy with the high tariff policy. Imports of the drug jumped from about 40,000 kilograms in 1899 to almost 130,000 in 1902, with smuggling also on the rise.Footnote 25 The end of Spanish-era prohibitions on non-Chinese use, along with the massive cholera epidemic of 1902, led increasing numbers of Filipinos to pick up the pipe.Footnote 26 Some provincial politicians, in areas with local restrictions on opium smoking, were allegedly using opium to blackmail local Chinese, leading American officials to fear that their tutees in democracy were turning to corruption.Footnote 27
Years of revolution and warfare had caused mass emigration among the Philippine Chinese community, with the population dropping from a height of about 100,000 in the 1890s to perhaps half that in 1903.Footnote 28 However, the merchants who remained behind kept an eye out for opportunities. Among them was Don Carlos Palanca Chen Qianshan, a Fujian-born merchant who reached the pinnacle of the Manila Chinese community during the Spanish period, becoming a pivotal player in a transnational economic network with investments in opium and revenue farms, the coolie trade, and various other interests.Footnote 29 Thinly fictionalized as the Chinese merchant Quiroga, Chen had a supporting role in José Rizal's nationalist 1891 novel El Filibusterismo, unwittingly assisting the revolutionary Simoun to smuggle rifles into the Philippines and storing them in his opium-scented warehouse.Footnote 30 During the Philippine-American War, Chen himself would take a role in abetting revolution, apparently offering his services as an opium farmer to Emilio Aguinaldo's short-lived Republic.Footnote 31 Although it is not clear if Chen actually closed a deal with him, Aguinaldo's government nonetheless raised funds through opium farms and other Spanish-era methods of taxation in areas it controlled, and armed itself with purchases from Chinese smugglers.Footnote 32
The onset of American colonialism had a transformative effect on the Philippine Chinese community, both superficially and structurally. As Andrew Wilson notes, ‘Consuls, corporations, and chambers of commerce supplemented or replaced headmen. . .and secret societies’; elite leaders remained powerful, but the foundations of their economic and social influence shifted.Footnote 33 The application of the Chinese Exclusion Acts to the Philippines in 1898, in particular, changed the structure of the Philippine Chinese community, diminishing the number of labourers therein and fostering networks of illegal migration. The application of Chinese exclusion laws to the Philippines, incidentally, had until 1902 the effect of banning Chinese subjects from importing opium into the new overseas American territory, briefly giving European merchants the chance to profit by legally importing opium into the Philippines, even as the Philippine Chinese remained active in wholesaling, retailing, and smuggling the drug.Footnote 34
Unintentionally, the process of community rationalization democratized the opium trade in the Philippines. The abolition of state-licensed monopolies opened up the traffic to a broader array of merchants: even small-scale smugglers could make sizeable profits. As one report noted,
small quantities of prepared opium can be concealed by passengers on incoming boats or by importers, merchants, and consumers, from scrutiny and customs and internal-revenue officers. . .undoubtedly represent[ing] a large portion of the opium actually smoked or otherwise consumed in these islands.Footnote 35
At the peak of the licit opium trade, the Philippine Bureau of Internal Revenue counted 315 establishments that sold opium in Manila, and estimated about 20,000 opium smokers to be in the Philippines.Footnote 36 Judging from subsequent arrest records, although the majority of smokers were Chinese, significant numbers of Filipinos also frequented opium dens.Footnote 37
As in the United States, restrictions on opium smoking in the Philippines were originally considered to be the responsibility of local governments.Footnote 38 Yet this approach was clearly insufficient to stop the expansion of opium consumption. By early 1903, wealthy Chinese merchants from Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong jockeyed for position as rumours flew of the imminent reestablishment of the Philippine opium farm.Footnote 39 That spring, the Philippine Commission introduced an opium farm bill, with Secretary of Finance Henry Ide arguing that ‘experience has demonstrated that this is the most effective method of dealing with this vice, if opium smoking among orientals is to be considered a vice’.Footnote 40 The proposal kept the Spanish-era caveat that only ethnic Chinese could purchase the substance, but it differed significantly from typical European colonial practices by providing for only a single opium farmer in the entirety of the Philippines, and by specifying that the revenue derived from the farm system would be spent exclusively on educational measures.Footnote 41
As the colonial government led by William Howard Taft began its work of creating a viable new state in the Philippines, the vital question of what American colonialism would look like—how it would demonstrate the superiority of American institutions—still remained unanswered. Advocates of imperialism had offered great platitudes about how unique and benevolent American rule would be, but as the violence in the Philippines subsided there was still very little to show for it.Footnote 42 While administrators in Manila and Washington generally wanted to proceed slowly and cautiously on the process of state creation, many of their moral reformist allies had much more expansive ideas. Bishop Charles Henry Brent was among them. Travelling to his assigned post in Manila in 1902, he wrote in his journal:
Never before in the history of colonization has the avowed policy of the conquering country been so wholly unselfish. We fall dreadfully short of incorporating our policy into all of our national action which bears on the Philippine question. But we have set an ideal before our nation and before the civilized world that will tend to create a public conscience in every civilized nation which eventually will dominate the colonial policy of the older civilizations. We have taken a course that will leave a deep impression on the life of man.Footnote 43
The prohibitionist moment
On the night of 31 May 1903, the International Reform Bureau in Washington, DC received a telegram from one of its missionary colleagues, the Reverend Homer Stuntz. It had cost Stuntz and his fellow missionaries in the Philippines 150 gold dollars to send the brief message, but the matter was urgent. ‘Highest bidder opium monopoly bill pending’, it exclaimed. ‘Will greatly stimulate consumption.’ The revenue farming bill had already quietly passed two readings by the Philippine Commission, and needed only a third, scheduled for 15 June, to become law.Footnote 44 After attempts to persuade William Howard Taft to abandon the bill had offered ‘little encouragement’, the Evangelical Union of American missionaries in the Philippines decided to direct their appeals to Washington.Footnote 45 The Chinese Chamber of Commerce, whose members—quite likely for different reasons—had a similar interest in defeating the farm bill, helped defray the cost of the telegram.Footnote 46
Stuntz outlined a very brief political strategy in his message: ‘focus public sentiment on president secretary war’.Footnote 47 However, his decisions to appeal directly to the executive branch, and to ask the International Reform Bureau to implement this strategy, turned out to be shrewd ones. The Roosevelt administration, unlike Taft's government in Manila, could not afford to simply ignore complaints from the moral reformers who had provided support.Footnote 48 Roosevelt himself was especially sensitive to their wants, and when Wilbur Crafts’ International Reform Bureau complained about the prostitution issue in 1902, he had personally intervened to resolve it.Footnote 49 Crafts, a lecturer, moralist and ardent prohibitionist—‘famous for his attacks on popular amusements’ according to his obituary—founded the Bureau to lobby for ‘important and much needed legislation along all lines of moral reform; to defeat immoral legislation; and to arouse interest among good citizens in civic betterment’.Footnote 50 The Bureau had a long history of supporting international efforts against drugs, alcohol, gambling, prostitution, and assorted other vices; more importantly, it could reach a national network of similarly-minded churches and lay organizations, and quickly summon widespread support for its cause du jour.
The letters swiftly flooded into the White House and Elihu Root's War Department, which oversaw the American version of a colonial office, the Bureau of Insular Affairs. Charles A. Fahs, a leading member of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt: ‘However difficult the administrative problem may be in the enforcement of prohibitory laws with reference to the opium traffic in our Asiatic possessions, surely the United States is not going to duplicate the disgraceful record of Great Britain in toying with this awful curse’.Footnote 51 On behalf of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Western Washington, Margaret Platt reiterated the call for prohibition abroad, and used the opportunity to ‘also ask that you bring to the attention of the Congress, at its next session, the matter of the alarming increase of the use of opium in this country’.Footnote 52
The American missionaries and their supporters were not the only ones who tried to make their voices heard on the subject of opium, though they found far more receptive ears. In April 1903, the Chinese legation in Washington, at the behest of the Chinese Consul-General in Manila, urged the government not to re-establish the Philippine opium farm, but was ignored.Footnote 53 With the power of the most elite Chinese merchants to totally control the trade broken, the number of opium dens in Manila dramatically expanded, and a group called the Opium Merchants of Manila wrote to Taft to argue that ‘monopolies are contrary to the sublime principles of the American Constitution. And to monopolize the opium industry and commerce of the Philippine Islands would be to create odious franchises in violation of the precepts of that great document’.Footnote 54 While Chinese merchants from abroad tried—with some difficulty—to obtain visas to enter the Philippines in anticipation of bidding for an opium farm, a Manila merchant, Low Kiang How, petitioned for his ‘Chinese Temperance Society’ to oversee a state monopoly on opium.Footnote 55
The question of how best to deal with the opium problem had also generated heated discussions among the Filipino elite, who were generally in favour of prohibition; an American doctor visiting the Philippines wrote that widespread Filipino opposition to the opium trade and Chinese immigration demonstrated ‘a positively western standpoint’.Footnote 56 Critiques of opium smoking in the Philippines went back to the Spanish era. In José Rizal's novels, Capitán Tiago, a wealthy Filipino businessman, is mentioned as the proprietor of an opium farm along with a Chinese partner; ultimately, he falls victim to opium addiction, becoming ‘a smallish jaundiced man, thin and bent, with sunken sleepy eyes and muddied lips and nails, staring at people as if he does not see them’.Footnote 57 The character Basilio, to whom Capitán Tiago had been a father figure, curses opium as ‘one of the plagues of our modern times’.Footnote 58 In the midst of the debate over the opium farm bill, one Philippine newspaper, El Renacimiento, mocked the ‘opium philosophies’ of those who opposed prohibition. In a satirical faux interview, a Manila woman states her preference for the ‘open door’ for opium, stating that opium helps her ‘live in peace’ with her husband, because ‘when he lies to me and hits me when he comes home drunk, I take my pipe and smoke it, and I forget the beating’. She continues, ‘There you have my ideal dream: a peaceful home through the use of opium!’Footnote 59
Some Filipino politicians advocated a return to the farm system, which would help them raise revenues for local governments and perhaps for themselves as well. In 1901, Florentino Rallos, Mayor of Cebu City, told the Philippine Commission that while he believed the use of opium to be spreading, he thought prohibition would be unpopular and impractical, and recommended opium farming as a good way to secure needed revenue.Footnote 60 Even without the farm system around, though, Rallos tried to use opium as a means of raising revenue: in 1903, he was suspended from office for arresting Chinese businessmen on falsified charges of opium smoking in order to secure fines from them and thus bolster Cebu's municipal coffers.Footnote 61
Chinese and Filipino opinions on the opium farm bill could be, and were, ignored by policymakers in Manila and Washington, but the wave of evangelical hostility to the measure caught the attention of the Roosevelt administration very quickly. On hearing of the issue, Roosevelt demanded a delay on the bill's final passage and sent his Secretary of War a terse note, asking: ‘What is this proposition, to grant a monopoly for opium selling in the Philippines?’Footnote 62 At first, Taft, and Root to a lesser extent, defended the measure as a practical matter. Even as Root wrote to a complainant that only by ‘practical regulations that recognize its existence’ could the Philippine government ‘decrease this evil’, he warned Taft to take ‘no course which either in substance or appearance will promote such traffic’.Footnote 63 As public pressure mounted, Root urged Taft to give in. ‘Your proposed bill [is] in many respects admirable’, he cabled the Governor-General, ‘but it does not seem to meet very widespread and active feeling here’.Footnote 64
‘It is rare that public protest ever changes or leads to a withdrawal of a measure’ before the Philippine Commission, wrote one American observer, but ‘a conspicuous exception is found in the case of the bill for the regulation of opium smoking’.Footnote 65 In the public hearing on the matter, Reverend Stuntz reiterated his opposition, arguing that restricting opium use to the Chinese community would not ‘save the Filipino people from the debauching influence of this drug’. Bishop Charles Henry Brent, who cultivated a close relationship with Taft and other leading American political figures in the Philippines, argued that unlike tobacco or alcohol, there could be ‘no unvicious use’ of opium ‘otherwise than on medical order’. Some of the commissioners were sceptical, arguing that ‘men can neither be legislated nor terrified into virtue’. Speaking in favour of the bill was Cheah Kee Ee, a member of a prominent Straits Chinese family and former opium farmer in British Borneo, who had come to Manila to bid on the opium farm. He argued that ‘opium smoking as compared with the drinking of alcoholic liquors and tobacco smoking is comparatively harmless’, and that the ‘principal object’ of the farmer would not be to spread the opium habit, but to stop smuggling and keep prices high.Footnote 66
Taft remained unmoved by the missionaries’ arguments during the debate. Filipinos, he privately argued, were incapable of using opium ‘without great excess’, but the Chinese were ‘hard working, quiet, law abiding people’ who were generally ‘temperate in smoking it’.Footnote 67 American public opinion, Taft complained, conflated opium smoking, ‘however moderate, with those awful pictures of the horrible opium dens in which its victims are stretched out in helpless stupor and drunkenness’. Nonetheless, he remarked ‘we cannot afford to forfeit the sympathy and good opinion of the right thinking people of America which have been of such aid to us in the past, without an effort in good faith to do that which they think ought to be done’. Taft recommended that a commission ‘investigate and report’ opium policies around the region ‘before adopting prohibition’ in the Philippines.Footnote 68 Roosevelt and Root shared his personal preference simply to forbid opium sales to Filipinos and impose high licensing fees for Chinese wholesalers and retailers, but concurred that a commission was the most viable option in the light of public opinion.Footnote 69
The composition of the Philippine Opium Committee reflected Taft's intent to put the opium matter to rest. The inclusion of Charles Henry Brent, who had spoken forcefully against the bill to reintroduce opium farming, was a nod to the influence of missionaries in creating the group and ensured that its conclusions would favour prohibition. Major Edwin C. Carter, Commissioner of Health for the Philippines, added an element of medical expertise to the group, as did José Albert, a Filipino physician and leading member of the pro-American Federalista Party. Sharply contrasting the plodding British Royal Commission of the 1890s, the Philippine Opium Committee was small, highly itinerant, and conducted its work over a relatively short period of time. Studying various forms of opium policies and their consequences, the Committee travelled to Japan, Formosa, Shanghai, and then throughout Southeast Asia, concluding its business in Manila.
The Committee's final report contemptuously argued that the Chinese ‘people will, against all remonstrances, injure themselves by this habit’, and that the Chinese government was not making ‘any earnest effort to diminish the use of opium’.Footnote 70 Its members held Japanese prohibition in the highest regard, finding it:
worthy of more than passing attention that Japan, which is a non-Christian country, is the only country visited by the committee where the opium question is dealt with in its purely moral and social aspect.Footnote 71
Japanese prohibition, the Committee argued, ‘shuts the door completely against transgression’ and kept out ‘an undesirable class’ of Chinese immigrants. In Burma, in contrast, the policy to restrict access to only ethnic Chinese was labelled a ‘complete failure’.Footnote 72 This was an important lesson for the Philippines, where if Chinese residents were allowed to smoke, the habit would inevitably spread to Filipinos, with results ‘as dangerous to them as fire to the forest’ because of their ‘relatively low degree of vitality’. The notion that opium presented a special danger to Filipinos was premised on a hierarchical idea of race: the Committee argued that opium would reduce a Chinese smoker to the intellectual and physical level of ‘the Malay. . .who by the same vice reduces his vitality in the same measure but in doing so touches the bottom of worthlessness’.Footnote 73
Concluding its research in the Philippines, the Committee sent questionnaires on local opium usage to various Filipino provincial officials. Most of the respondents were inclined towards prohibition, and held opium smokers in various degrees of contempt. ‘Absolute prohibition of the use of opium, without distinction of races, would be a very violent measure for those already addicted to the vice’, wrote Policarpio Vano of Leyte. ‘Nevertheless’, he continued, ‘it is practicable and expedient’.Footnote 74 Most officials reported low numbers of Filipino opium smokers in their districts; however, one respondent alarmingly claimed that opium addiction had spread so rapidly under American rule in some towns that ‘it is impossible to find any one eligible to a municipal office, since they are all opium habitues and incapacitated through lack of moral and physical energy’.Footnote 75
The Committee also attempted to talk to the Manila Chinese community about the opium trade, but found only one merchant willing to be interviewed. Even the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Committee's report said, refused to comment ‘except under conditions such as no government committee could accept’.Footnote 76 The single forthcoming Chinese merchant, who requested anonymity, estimated that about 20 per cent of Manila Chinese smoked opium, and told the Committee that ‘most of the Chinese here despise its use, although they continue to take it’. Informing the Committee that a large portion of the Chinese community shared his views, the merchant was adamant that ‘no monopoly should be given to the Chinese’, and recommended the gradual prohibition of opium in the Philippines.Footnote 77
With the state-run monopolies in Java and Formosa its closest short-term models, and Japanese-style prohibition its goal, the Philippine Opium Committee ultimately favoured the immediate creation of a government monopoly on opium in the Philippines, giving adult male addicts three years to break the habit before complete non-medical prohibition went into effect.Footnote 78 William Howard Taft, now Secretary of War, quickly asked Governor-General Luke Wright ‘to approve the report of the opium committee and to adopt an act enforcing it and this at once’.Footnote 79 Because of uncertainties over the extent of the Philippine Commission's legal power to restrict trade, Congress passed a law prohibiting the import of opium into the Philippines after 1 March 1908. The Philippine Commission restricted access to opium for the intervening period, but—to Bishop Brent's chagrin—did not go to the trouble of instituting a monopoly.Footnote 80
To change the conscience of the world
The success of the missionaries in the Philippines helped to make 1906 the annum mirabilis of the global anti-opium movement.Footnote 81 In 1906, after a winning electoral landslide, Britain's Liberal Party resolved that the Sino-Indian opium trade was ‘morally indefensible’, and vowed to bring it ‘to a speedy close’. The resolution's sponsor, Theodore Taylor, contrasted the ‘long and full inquiry’ of the Philippine Opium Committee with the ‘one-sided’ conclusions of the Royal Commission of 1895. Twisting policies rooted in domestic xenophobia into indications of benevolence towards the Chinese, Taylor noted that Australia, New Zealand, and the Transvaal had all recently prohibited non-medical opium. If they, the United States and Japan, were all restricting the use of opium, he asked, ‘how much longer should we foster it?’ John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, expressed some scepticism about the resolution, citing the American report's view that the Chinese government was incapable and unwilling to end opium cultivation or usage. However, he acknowledged that earlier British policy ‘had failed to satisfy public opinion in this country’, and ultimately threw his support behind ‘that civilizing mission of the regeneration of the East’.Footnote 82
The Qing court, which had grown dependent on revenues provided by domestic opium cultivation after its attempts to prohibit the trade in the mid-nineteenth century proved disastrous, paid close attention to the rising fortunes of the anti-opium movement. The indemnities demanded by Western powers after the Boxer Rebellion made China more dependent than ever on opium revenues, but the government's appalling weakness in the conflict's aftermath also made eleventh-hour reforms seem like a necessity. With the growing influence of Western anti-opium campaigners, demonstrated by the Philippine Opium Committee's report (which had been quickly translated into Chinese and circulated around the Empire)Footnote 83 the Chinese government was convinced that it had to take decisive action. In September 1906, the Empress Dowager issued an edict calling for the gradual prohibition of opium use and cultivation over a ten-year period. After a year of negotiations, London and Beijing agreed that Indian opium exports would be similarly reduced over the same time period, with the caveat that China would have to follow through in its pledge to end domestic cultivation.Footnote 84
American missionaries and moral reformers praised the Ten-Year Agreement, seeing in it their goal of reforming the old, corrupt colonial powers through American example. The International Reform Bureau called itself the Blucher to the British activists’ Wellington in the war for the ‘emancipation of China from British opium’.Footnote 85 But Bishop Brent was not content with a supporting role; as one colleague later put it, ‘he is about as cold-blooded a proposition as I have ever known, unless he can only see some chance to be a star actor’.Footnote 86 Keeping his colleagues in China and England apprized of his plans, Brent wrote to Theodore Roosevelt: ‘Now that we have the responsibility of actually handing the [opium] matter in our own possessions, to promote some movement that would gather in its embrace representatives from all countries where the traffic in and use of opium is a matter of moment’.Footnote 87
Roosevelt agreed that such a conference ‘would do far-reaching good’ and pledged to discuss it with Root and Taft.Footnote 88 These two were apparently less inclined to the idea: a meeting of Roosevelt's cabinet concluded it was not ‘wise to interject the opium business into our international relations’, and that the ‘good example in the Philippines’ was sufficient.Footnote 89 But Roosevelt was of a different mind, perhaps believing that leadership in the anti-opium campaign could boost American prestige and influence in China, restoring the myth of a ‘special relationship’ after Chinese nationalists had reacted to exclusion laws with an anti-American boycott in 1905.Footnote 90 He pressed ahead for an international conference on narcotics, but the British government, wary of losing its autonomy in shaping its China and colonial policies, agreed to join only after ensuring that such a meeting would only be a nonbinding commission.Footnote 91 The government of China was also initially reluctant to agree to international negotiations out of the fear that, like so many previous rounds of diplomacy, it would lead to a loss of Chinese sovereignty;Footnote 92 at the Shanghai Commission itself, the Chinese negotiators tried to reverse this trend, arguing that unequal treaties with the West impeded the anti-opium campaign.Footnote 93
A string of victories for the anti-opium campaigners, large and small, preceded the opening of the International Opium Commission in Shanghai in 1909. Half a year after the anti-opium edict was issued in China, the Australian journalist G. E. Morrison noted the campaign's progress to be ‘more than satisfactory’: opium smoking was ‘becoming unfashionable and the growth of that feeling is extraordinary’.Footnote 94 In 1907, the government of the British Straits Settlements launched an inquiry on opium there and in the Federated Malay States, directing it to make a recommendation on how ‘to minimize and eventually to eradicate the evils arising from the smoking of opium’.Footnote 95 The same year, Siam abolished its opium farms and instituted a state-run monopoly, with King Chulalongkorn denouncing the ‘evil effects’ of the drug and pledging that ‘the spread of the opium habit among Our people shall become gradually lessened until it shall be entirely suppressed’.Footnote 96 With morphine increasingly flooding into China as opium became less available, the nations participating in the International Opium Commission agreed to end the export of nonmedical morphine and needles to China prior to meeting in Shanghai.Footnote 97
As opium smoking became an international issue, reformers lobbied to make it a domestic one, too. Hamilton Wright, an ambitious and enterprising appointee to the American delegation to Shanghai, reported to Theodore Roosevelt that the ‘pernicious habit’ of opium smoking ‘has spread to our own American population, to the negroes especially’, as well as to the ‘criminal and other abnormal classes’ of whites.Footnote 98 The lack of federal anti-narcotics legislation in the United States posed a potential embarrassment as it called for international drug control, and Wright was determined to change the situation. He had no qualms about pandering to racial fears or dramatically overstating the evidence of drug addiction: despite his claims of a drug epidemic, opiate use in the United States had probably actually peaked around the 1890s. In early 1909, Congress passed the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, banning the import of opium prepared for smoking, and saving face for the American delegation to Shanghai.Footnote 99 As the American representatives prepared for this meeting, however, they discovered that their purpose would be as much to save their prohibitory policy as to spread it; as opium prohibition was enacted in the Philippines, the unceasing export of the drug from neighbouring colonies to the Philippines would make international cooperation to prevent smuggling a focal point of the American agenda.Footnote 100
Enforcement begins
As prohibition went into effect in the Philippines, thousands of opium addicts were forced into treatment in overcrowded or makeshift hospitals. In Manila, the unwilling patients ‘fought, screamed, threatened, and sulked’, for opium until they accepted treatment and were ‘cured’ after a few weeks without it.Footnote 101 In Cebu, the best efforts of health officials and the Episcopal missionary H. E. Studley ‘failed to overcome the indifference or active opposition of the opium victims of that province’; only 42 days after opening, the hospital founded to rehabilitate opium addicts there closed down.Footnote 102 In the following years, the opium trade in the Philippines would continue, driven underground but never buried. Concurrently, as the anti-opium movement tried to transform condemnations of the drug trade into tangible actions to end it on a global scale, it met with only a modest amount of success.
Rampant corruption and smuggling accompanied the onset of prohibition in the Philippines, as opium dens, their suppliers, and their patrons learned to adapt to the new conditions, even as the rapidly increasing price of opium drove their numbers down. Morphine and cocaine use, virtually unknown in the Philippines before opium was prohibited, increased dramatically.Footnote 103 Opium dens became more secretive and guarded, changing locations frequently, maintaining tight security, and keeping only small stocks of opium that could quickly be disposed of in the event of a police raid. Official corruption also became commonplace. One report noted that municipal police officers could be bought off for only a few pesos, while traffickers could easily bribe poorly-paid detectives of the Internal Revenue Service or Customs agents to turn a blind eye to drug shipments.Footnote 104 Major Louis T. Grant, an American Army Officer, was convicted of attempting to smuggle 20,000 pesos worth of opium into Manila, conspiring with a Chinese merchant to hide the shipment in machinery consigned to the Philippine Gold Dredging Company.Footnote 105
Corruption was notably widespread in Cebu, where nearly all Chinese firms were rumoured to participate, to a greater or lesser extent, in the opium trade. As these firms cornered the market in hemp and rice, Filipino and European merchants complained that drug profits let their Chinese competitors undersell them.Footnote 106 But the traffic was also lucrative for members of the Filipino elite. La Democracia reported that opium was being blatantly smuggled into Cebu City, and accused municipal officials of being involved in trafficking.Footnote 107 In 1919, Governor Manuel Roa was linked to a smuggling ring, but maintained enough distance to avoid prosecution.Footnote 108 Yet it was Estefania Chiong Veloso, daughter of a Cebu opium farmer and wife of Assembly Speaker Sergio Osmeña, who best personified the marriage of Chinese economic networks and Filipino political power: she was personally involved in moving illicit goods, using her authority to intimidate Philippine Constabulary officers and amassing a fortune in the process.Footnote 109 Rumours of her involvement in the opium trade percolated up to American officials, but were dismissed.Footnote 110
Among the Philippine Chinese merchant elite, though, rumour could be a powerful weapon. Both the leaders of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and rival merchant factions were conspicuously helpful in supporting opium prohibition: pointing the figure at competitors helped them to gain the trust of the authorities and consolidate their own clandestine control of the opium trade.Footnote 111 In 1909, the Manila police and American authorities deported, without trial, 12 men accused of being involved with drug dealing and other nefarious activities. Chief amongst them was Agapito Uy Tongco, a rising member of the Manila Chinese elite. Agapito's Fooking Merchants Benevolent Association competed for wealth and influence in Manila with the merchants who dominated the Chinese Chamber of Commerce; after Agapito made an unsuccessful bid to take over the Chamber, the rivalry worsened. The Chamber's leaders adroitly used their political connections to accuse him of running a criminal organization, and as the colonial regime became a tool in an inter-factional dispute, scandal erupted in Manila. The Philippine Legislature passed a law retroactively justifying the deportations, which the United States Supreme Court later upheld.Footnote 112
American officials also sought to integrate the Muslims of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago into the broader political realm of the Philippines, and in this they faced an even larger task. The Sulu Sultanate, through trading in opium, firearms, slaves, and maritime and jungle commodities, became a strong polity by the late eighteenth century with footholds in northern Borneo and Mindanao. Spain gained nominal sovereignty over the region after a series of military expeditions in the late nineteenth century, but the Sultanate's economic authority remained nearly autonomous, facilitated by increasing numbers of Chinese migrants to the region. In the first years of American occupation of the Philippines, the military continued a similar sort of relationship. After fighting in Luzon and the Visayas began to subside, the American regime attempted to impose its authority in the southern Philippines, keeping the area under military occupation until 1913. Before long, many Muslim elites—like the Chinese merchants of Manila and Cebu—refocused their visible efforts on trading in licit agricultural commodities, and exchanged traditional forms of authority for the visage of modern political structures.Footnote 113
Stamping out the opium trade in this region, where Moro elites had consumed and traded the drug for over a century, proved an impossible task, although the attempt played a significant role in defining the once-ambiguous maritime boundary between the Philippines and British Borneo. Small boats would leave from the North Borneo port of Sandakan or quiet neighbouring islands under cover of night, arriving in the southern Philippines with cargoes of firearms, opium, and illegal Chinese migrants. The American colonial regime was, at first, unable to sufficiently respond to the illicit activity. Its maritime patrol was inadequate, and British authorities, while professing their good intentions, were initially unwilling to make a meaningful effort to stop Chinese merchants in Borneo—opium farmers chief among them—from participating in the trade.Footnote 114 ‘If things are to remain as they are now at those neighboring [sic] ports’, wrote one customs agent, ‘I see no hope of peace ever being declared in the war against opium’.Footnote 115
Narcotic diplomacy
As the International Opium Commission convened in Shanghai in 1909, the smuggling problem gave American delegates an issue on which to ask for concrete action; ultimately, the call for export control was the only significant American position that the Commission fully endorsed. The American platform asked for ‘the total prohibition of the manufacture, distribution and use of smoking opium’ worldwide, with licit distribution only permissible ‘for the express purpose and no other of stamping out the evil of opium smoking in the shortest time possible’.Footnote 116 With China and the Philippines in mind, it called upon states to strictly regulate opium as it left their borders, banning its export to any countries which prohibited its use. Finally, the platform called for a future, binding conference to create ‘strict international agreements’ to confine the trade in opium and its derivatives to medical purposes.Footnote 117
The American position was quickly dismissed by the European powers at the Commission. ‘To be entirely frank’, remarked Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, ‘the British Delegation is not able to accept the view that opium should be confined simply and solely to medical uses’.Footnote 118 The French representatives were similarly quick to defend the very profitable opium régie in Indochina, arguing that ‘a growing revenue derived from opium’ meant that taxation was so high that it ‘practically takes the drug out of the reach of the native population’.Footnote 119 The Commission concluded with only broad and vague resolutions, praising China for its recent success and finding opium ‘to be a matter for prohibition or for careful regulation’, with gradual suppression to be applied ‘as opportunity offers’. It urged nations ‘to adopt reasonable measures’ to prevent the export of opium to prohibitory countries, but adjourned without calling for any subsequent conventions that would put its recommendations into force.Footnote 120
While the Shanghai Commission deliberated, the Straits Settlements Opium Commission published its report, finding that ‘the vast majority of smokers’ indulged in only moderate amounts. However, the report recommended that opium farms be abolished in favour of a government monopoly, arguing that ‘the circumstances surrounding the use of opium justify the government in maintaining a closer and stricter control over it’.Footnote 121 The farm system, so useful when the colonial government's ability to control and monitor its subjects was weak, had become antiquated. Moreover, it was a liability: in the previous decades, defaults by opium farmers who had submitted enormous bids, as well as attempts by syndicates to collude by keeping farm bids low and sharing profits, led to the unreliable collection of revenue in the Straits Settlements. The harassment of travellers by revenue farm police was another strike against the system. After a state monopoly was instituted in 1910, annual revenues collected from opium quickly stabilized and began to expand, peaking in 1920.Footnote 122 Even while the colonial government professed a desire to end the traffic at some point in the indefinite future, it remained deeply dependent on the revenue it generated. In response to an American suggestion that state opium monopolies become revenue-neutral, James Thomas, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, retorted that such a move ‘would have the worst possible effects on our relations with the rulers and people of these States’ and merely be ‘a sop to ill-informed American and other prejudices’.Footnote 123
A similar process occurred across Southeast Asia, as central governments in Siam and the colonial states sought to enhance the scope of their authority. The anti-opium movement provided part of the stimulus for the region-wide switch to state opium monopolies, but colonial officials were slow to translate rhetoric about gradual prohibition into action. As the farm system was abolished, central authorities were increasingly empowered to dictate the terms of internal security and trade. Boundaries drawn on maps became increasingly reified as borders, and Chinese merchants—accelerating a process that was already underway—were forced to shift their focus towards the production and export of commodities in a competitive global market, backed by modern financial markets.Footnote 124
The prohibition of opium in the Philippines and state control of its sale elsewhere were policies that entailed dramatically different social and fiscal results, but they both systematized the power of the state by eroding autonomous sources of economic and social power. Smuggling and corruption contradicted these new terms of trade, of course, but the claim and reality of state power are separate things. Another American innovation in its Southeast Asian colony, the exclusion of Chinese labourers, similarly undermined the autonomy of Chinese migrant and economic networks. This practice, too, eventually spread throughout the region, with even the free-trade bastion of Singapore restricting Chinese immigration in 1930.Footnote 125
As the opium trade came increasingly under state control, the anti-opium movement forged ahead with calls for its internationalization. Bishop Brent, who had presided over the Shanghai Commission, remarked that while England's ‘conservatism and obstructionist tactics made the way doubly difficult’, the unanimous, if tepid, resolutions of the Commission were ‘a very marked advance’.Footnote 126 He lobbied the US government, along with religious figures and government officials in Britain and the Dutch East Indies, for another meeting at The Hague which would conventionalize the resolutions made in Shanghai, forming the basis for drug control as a part of international law.Footnote 127 Theodore Taylor, the British MP who had introduced the 1906 anti-opium resolution, announced in a 1910 speech that he was optimistic that such a meeting would soon take place, and proclaimed an ambitious agenda for it: ‘the movement against Opium smoking’, he announced, ‘has developed into a crusade against the unauthorized use of all dangerous drugs’, everywhere in the world.Footnote 128
The proposal to expand the scope of the conference actually made it more amenable to the British government, which was initially sceptical about attending. Britain sought to divert attention from its trade in opium, and perhaps help its domestic pharmaceutical industry, by adding morphine and cocaine to the agenda of substances to be controlled.Footnote 129 As drug diplomats convened in The Hague in late 1911, Germany, which led the world in the production of morphine and cocaine, was anxious not to be put at a competitive disadvantage by voluntarily curtailing its pharmaceutical industry only to see another producer take its place. Consequentially, while The Hague Convention established a fairly wide-reaching drug control regime—curtailing treaty port rights in China, asking that nonmedical opium be everywhere prohibited ‘as soon as possible’, forbidding exports to prohibitory countries, and requiring strict control over the manufacture and trade of medical opium, morphine, heroin, and cocaine—the German delegation insisted that the provisions would only become valid when universally recognized.Footnote 130
Even as the implementation clause became a major stumbling block to their international efforts, anti-drug activists in the United States, led by Hamilton Wright, moved ahead to enact strong domestic prohibitory legislation. Wright's brusque manner may have damaged his diplomatic efforts—the British delegation's report from The Hague characterized him as ‘singularly wanting in. . .qualities of clear-mindedness, moderation, and respect’—but his domestic agenda found success.Footnote 131 Although Wright's first attempt at a comprehensive narcotics law was sidelined by the pharmaceutical industry, by 1914 he had successfully guided the Harrison Narcotics Act through Congress, boasting that ‘the whole business has been worked out almost exactly as I planned. . .in the summer of 1908’.Footnote 132 Deriving its constitutional authority as a nominal taxation measure, the Harrison Act required all parties dealing in certain enumerated drugs to keep detailed records of their transactions, restricting retail sales to individuals possessing a prescription. The law's ambiguous language left it to the court system to ultimately decide that physicians could be prosecuted for prescribing drugs to addicts for the sole purpose of maintenance.Footnote 133
Francis Burton Harrison, the sponsor and namesake of the Act, was appointed Governor-General of the Philippines in 1913 with a mandate to accelerate the devolution of power to Filipinos. Upon arrival in Manila, he gained firsthand knowledge of the extent of smuggling in the Philippines, as a shipment of opium was found hidden in his luggage. While Hamilton Wright privately mocked him as ‘the arch opium smuggler of the Far East’, Harrison complained that, through an ‘ingenious bit of rascality’, a ‘clever rogue put his smuggled opium among the baggage of our party’. Harrison noted that ‘of all the places in the world this is one of the most difficult’ to stop opium smuggling in, and in a handwritten postscript, he asked that Wright take up ‘one of our worst troubles’ at the next Hague Conference: ‘Cannot something be done to stop the North Borneo source of supply?’Footnote 134
The smuggling corridor from Sandakan to Sulu remained a constant problem for Philippine officials. Although the authorities in Hong Kong and Singapore took some action to stop opium exports to the Philippines shortly after the Shanghai Commission,Footnote 135 the British North Borneo Company only sluggishly changed its policies. The opium farms in North Borneo were dismantled in 1912, but the Sandakan farmer, Chee Swee Cheng, continued to be closely involved with the ensuing state monopoly, and was actually able to sell opium bound for export at discounted rates until American authorities complained to the North Borneo government. North Borneo officials also pledged that customs officers in Sandakan would rigorously search outbound ships, but small boats—crewed by Philippine and Bornean Muslims and occasionally assisted by corrupt Filipino revenue agents—continued to traffic opium, and to a lesser extent firearms and Chinese migrants.Footnote 136
Harrison wrote in his memoirs that while
the struggle to prevent the debauching of public office and the spread of the [opium] vice itself is one of the liveliest tasks of the Philippine Government’, [it would have been] ‘fairly successful in that endeavor [sic] were it not for the British North Borneo Government Opium Monopoly.Footnote 137
While the smuggling from Sandakan was certainly a major factor undermining opium prohibition in the Philippines, it is possible that Harrison had good reason to downplay corruption: admitting its extent might have damaged his broader policy to Filipinize the country's government. As Filipino politicians gained increasing authority, they too put far more emphasis on smuggling in the southern Philippines than on official corruption, with members of the first Philippine Assembly urging the Philippine Commission to upgrade the country's fleet of revenue cutters in order to suppress the traffic.Footnote 138 The enforcement of prohibition in Manila remained erratic until Harrison ordered a crackdown in 1919, a process which continued in force as Leonard Wood, who was considerably less sympathetic to Filipinization, was installed as his successor.Footnote 139
This crackdown proceeded on the seas as well as on the land. As American ships returned to the region after World War I, they patrolled close to the Borneo coast—far too close, in the eyes of some British officials—and had some limited success at decreasing smuggling. In 1919, Harrison requested that the Turtle Islands, located off the coast of Sandakan, be transferred to Philippine jurisdiction as a means to better monitor and curtail the traffic.Footnote 140 British authorities were at first reluctant to do so, but as any hint of official connivance in the illicit opium trade became more and more stigmatized throughout the 1920s, they acceded to American demands, allowing a customs post to be established on Taganak Island in 1923 and ceding it outright in 1930.Footnote 141
The follow-ups to the first Hague Convention, which Harrison hoped would help solve the smuggling problem, made almost no forward progress for the anti-drug movement, and soon after the third meeting in June 1914, European diplomats became preoccupied with more urgent matters. In the following years, as war raged in Europe, drug control in East Asia began to disintegrate. The collapse of a stable government in Beijing led to poppies once more being cultivated across the fractured Republic, and Japan—once the darling of anti-opium activists—was accused of turning a blind eye as its nationals smuggled opium and morphine, much of it produced by a rapidly expanding pharmaceutical industry, into China.Footnote 142 The anti-opium movement, however, got swept up in the wave of internationalism that followed the close of World War I, as Article 295 of the Treaty of Versailles bound its signatories to ratify The Hague Convention, setting the stage for an international drug control regime.Footnote 143
Conclusion
In 1920, the League of Nations established an Opium Advisory Committee, leading to an international conference in Geneva in late 1924 to create a more comprehensive, enforceable framework for international drug control. The American delegation, led by Bishop Brent and Stephen Porter, the anti-League chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, insisted on an ambitious agenda in Geneva, calling for a rapid transition to global opiate prohibition. Britain and the other powers that sanctioned opium smoking in Southeast Asia, fearing the loss of revenue and the inevitable smuggling that such a policy would entail, balked at immediately restricting access to opium. They maintained that, as long as unchecked production continued in China, they would continue to run their monopolies unhindered; only after the threat of smuggling subsided would they begin to embark on a course of suppression over a period of 15 years. Disgusted by this stand, the American delegation withdrew from the conference, followed by the Chinese.Footnote 144
Opium monopolies in Southeast Asia were originally established to consolidate the authority of the state, and political authorities were reluctant to cede power to a criminal underground for the sake of moral expediency, even if the export of drugs to unwilling countries was becoming an international taboo. Yet the defenders of these monopolies at Geneva were ultimately fighting a rearguard action. By the 1930s, a combination of economic depression, demographic and cultural shifts, and incrementally restrictive policies began to reduce opium consumption across Southeast Asia. Opium smoking in Malaya would triumphantly be prohibited by the exiled British in 1943, while Indonesian revolutionaries sold off the small stocks that remained of the opium régie to finance their post-war fight against the Dutch.Footnote 145 By the end of World War II, the global currents of the drug trade had completely reversed to those a century earlier: opium was no longer a tool for powerful states to gain predominance over weaker ones, but a commodity seeping out of anarchic regions of the world to undermine political authority and neighbouring borders.Footnote 146
Opium prohibition in the colonial Philippines was a policy born from a brief confluence of certain forms of imperialism and idealism, but it left a long legacy, both in terms of how it affected Philippine society and how it influenced events abroad. Prohibition in the Philippines was premised on a dual policy of assimilation: of Muslims and Chinese migrants into the community of Filipinos; and of Filipinos to the moral and social standards of the United States. Enforcing prohibition required international cooperation, which conveniently harmonized with the internationalist aspirations of the anti-opium movement. Outside the United States and late-Qing China, however, governments only slowly and grudgingly accepted drug prohibition as a necessary policy, even if moralizing rhetoric provided a convenient façade whilst opium farms were being replaced with state-run monopolies. But given the very contingent factors that made drug prohibition a viable cause in the American colonial context, and the reluctance of European governments to fully embrace it, the anti-opium movement won a shockingly large victory: their moralizing, irreconcilable stance towards recreational drug use ultimately became a nearly-unshakeable cornerstone of international law and domestic criminal codes around the globe.
