To the Senate and the House of Representatives:
I transmit herewith a communication from the Secretary of State transmitting a report on the International Opium Commission and on the opium problem as seen within the United States and its possessions, prepared by Mr. Hamilton Wright on behalf of the American delegates to the said commission, held at Shanghai in February, 1909. In reference to this report the Secretary of State makes certain recommendations regarding an appropriation and other legislative action, which I commend to the Congress with my approval and the request that action should be taken accordingly.
WILLIAM H. TAFT
Note: This Message was accompanied by a letter to the President from the Secretary of State in which the latter recommended that the Congress appropriate $25,000 for purposes of international conference and investigation as to the opium evil, and that the act regulating drug traffic in the District of Columbia be applied and extended to United States consular districts and federal judicial jurisdiction in China. With his letter the Secretary transmitted to the President the report mentioned. The report observes that though the United States had steadily opposed the Far Eastern traffic in opium by treaties prohibiting Americans from engaging therein, yet by the admission of so-called medicinal opium it had unwittingly assisted the enormous growth in the manufacture of morphia; so that, despite State and municipal laws, these opium products, together with the newly discovered drug cocaine, set their noxious tentacles upon rapidly increasing numbers of people of all social ranks, producing abnormal criminality and unusual forms of violence. Citing the beneficial operation of the act of February, 1909, prohibiting the importation of other than medicinal opium, the report recommended that the triangle be completed by (a) acts (of which it submitted drafts) to govern interstate traffic in habit-forming drugs, and (b) an internal revenue law taxing out of existence manufacturers of opium products for other than medicinal use.
The results effected by the International Opium Commission were an agreement to suppress as effectually as possible opium smoking in China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Holland, Portugal, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Siam, and Persia, besides the United States; an agreement to adopt reasonable measures to prevent shipment of morphia from their ports to ports of countries which prohibit entry; an agreement that opium resorts in foreign concessions or settlements in China should be closed; and an agreement that each should apply its pharmacy laws to its consular districts in China.
