Startling facts relating to the dope traffic in- China and Western Europe are revealed, for the first time, in a pamphlet by Mr, Basil Mathews (editor of Outward Bound"), and issued by the League of Nations. During 1919. enough morphine was smuggled into China, he states, to give at least thre: hypodermic injections to every man, woman, and child of China's 400,000,000 ~—population The total amount smuggled in during that y was 28 tons, as compared with 54 tons in 1911; the amount estimated by medical authority as adequate for the medical needs of China per annum is two cwt. of morphine.
"To stop' the smuggling," adds Mr. Mathews, "you would have fo take to pieces the boots of everyone who lands in the country, for much opium comes between the soles and uppers; you would be forced to unmake countless wadded waistcoats and belts, and cut in two each cake of imported soap, for they are opened, hollowed out, stuffed with opium, and reclosed. Soldiers' bottles, loaves of foreign bread, cakes, seaweed, picture frames, double-bottomed © cooking pans—the list- could be stretched on till the crack of doom and still be unexhausted."
The supplies for this enormous traffic in- morphine. come from Great Britain (factories in London and Edinburgh), Germany, America and Japan. Crude opium from the fields of Turkey and Persia -are exported to these countries and. manufactured into crystalline powder, or crystals. morphia. It is exported by Western merchants through Japan to the smugglers.
The financial interest involved are the greatest obstacle to the reduction in the dope traffic, Mr. Mathews points out. The whole picture is worthy of a Holboin's brush or the acid pen of a Heine or a Swift," he says. "The civilized people of the world, Britain and America, with Japan, have enriched themselves by many millions of pounds through the moral and physical corruption of millions of the Chinese, with the tragic yet nature] retribution that the populations of Britain, Wes-'\tern Europe, and the North American Continent are now finding themselves menaced by tho-same drug. Not only in China Japan, but in the West, young men and, women of brilliant promise are in the grip of the vice." is based on the premise that 3 per nent.-of alcoholic content, although prescribed by the Volstead act, is ron-intoxicating and therefore constitutional. "A' preliminary draft of the measure has been made and a. large' amount of supporting data. has been collected. Wine will not be coupled-with the beer proposal.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.