Opium smokers, China, c.1880. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.Last month, the United Nations General Assembly held a Special Session to review its current drug control system. But few people realise that the system actually has its origins in China, over a century ago. In 1909, an international conference proposing to prohibit opium and its derivatives was convened in Shanghai. Three years later, the first drug control treaty was signed at the International Opium Convention of the Hague. It was the cornerstone of a global ‘war on drugs’ which is still unfolding today.
At the time of the 1912 Convention, China was widely understood to be fighting a huge addiction problem, caused by an obnoxious trade in opium started by Britain during the 'Opium Wars' in the middle of the nineteenth century. China was seen as 'Patient Zero', an ancient civilisation in the grip of a drug plague that threatened to contaminate the rest of the world. China became the founding case for concerted international efforts to enforce increasingly draconian measures not only against opium, but against all illicit drug use in America, Europe and Asia.
