China looks ... to the fullest co-operation of all the civilized Powers in her attempt to throttle the opium evil.
T'ang Kuo-An, Chinese delegate to the International Opium Commission, 1909

The principal object of all inter-State action against the illicit liquor traffic is to arrive at an agreement . . under which each state will undertake to control the exporta-tion of alcohol to the effect that all exportation for illicit purposes be suppressed.
Wine' Voionmaa (Finland), International Conference against Alcoholism, Geneva, September 1925

In his Government's opinion, amphetamines and the other stimulants of the central nervous system possessed all the characteristics of narcotic drugs, and he therefore urged the Commission to take the necessary steps without delay ....
Dr. Rosen, observer for Sweden, CND, twenty-second session, 1968

It is in the world interest that the narcotics traffic be curbed. Drugs pollute the minds and bodies of our young, bring misery, violence and human economic waste. This scourge of drugs can be eliminated through international co-operation.
Richard Nixon, message to the UN on its twenty-fifth anniversary, October 1970.

Behind these quotations can be seen the stages of development of international cooperation in the drug field. They mark the various points in time when different countries have looked to international support to deal with what each has considered to be a serious drug predicament within its territory. The drugs involved have been different: opium in one case, alcohol in another, and manufactured substances in yet another.

The responses to these and similar appeals have varied widely. In some cases a long process of international negotiations has been initiated and a series of international control agreements reached; in others, even the principle of international control has not been accepted.

How does one account for these differing responses? We examined the large literature of historical and contemporary works, legal commentaries, and official documents relating to the subject of international drug control, and found that, while some questions had been satisfactorily analyzed, others had been overlooked. Insights into the complex control machinery itself gained through our personal encounters with it made us skeptical, moreover, of the claims which have frequently been made for the success of international drug control.

Our study begins with a recapitulation of the history of the control system and proceeds to an analysis of its goals and operations. A central concern has been to identify the chief sources of influence--individual persons, agencies, and coun-tries—and the interests which bear upon the decisions and processes in the machinery. As a technique for analysis and presentation, we selected a series of key issues in the development of international control and used them as case studies of the way in which problems have typically been perceived, the manner in which they have been handled, and the different positions which have been taken on them. From all these we have drawn conclusions regarding the successes and failures of the control system and have arrived at a set of recommendations for the future direction of its efforts. That we have offered recommen-dations at all is a reflection of our view that the international organs concerned should be an object of critical scrutiny and that their future objectives and activities should be a matter of constant public debate.

Our study also addresses a number of neglected perspectives in its attempt to:

—look behind the formal legal structure at the less overt workings of the control machinery;
—consider the League and the UN periods within a con-tinuous historical compass;
—include alcohol control attempts in its discussions;
—quantify observations where feasible.

Setting ourselves these objectives perforce implies a narrowing of the scope of our study to only the drug-centered agencies of the total international system. Quite clearly, to many countries drugs pose less of a problem than, say, poverty, the unequal distribution of wealth, and the pollution of the environ-ment. Yet, even though exaggerations of perceived drug problems often occur, the consequences of the widespread use of some drugs do provide sufficient grounds for countries to work together to devise and implement controls. Some causes of death, some illnesses, and some breakdowns in social relations are closely associated with at least some types of drug-taking. To take two examples of familiar phenomena, alcohol is involved in half the highway fatalities and homicides in the United States and is a causal factor in at least four out of five cases of death from cirrhosis of the liver in France, where such deaths number seventeen thousand annually (Martini and Bode, 1970:316-17). In Britain, over two thousand deaths by barbiturate poisoning were recorded in 1967 (Zacune and Hensman, 1971:117). However, the precise nature of the relationship between drugs and outcomes of use is still a matter of debate and ongoing research. Well-founded opinions vary and sometimes clash over the question of where the core of the problems related to drugs is to be located. The issue is complicated by the fact that drugs which entail risk and which warrant control are often widely used for their beneficial effects in medicine. Discussions concerning harmful and beneficial effects of drugs are, moreover, hampered by difficulties of measurement and the unavoidable intrusion of value judgments. Furthermore, drugs are big business and contribute significantly in some countries to the national economy. The emergence of the pharmaceutical industry as one of the most dynamic sectors of modem economy after the Second World War has greatly added to the vested interests already held in the drug field by, for example, the alcohol industry. The protection of such interests has naturally led to resistance against attempts at control.

There are additional complicating factors. Drugs occupy dif-ferent places in different cultures; across cultures, attitudes towards drugs with similar properties can vary quite considerably. Thus alcohol use is condoned in France but forbidden, as being against the religious code, in Libya; coca leaves are chewed daily in parts of Peru but not in the United States; use of cannabis leaves is permitted in parts of India but is a crime in Norway, and so forth. Likewise, within the range of pharmaceutical products significant differences exist in the extent to which society deems these products problematic. Thus drugs are not only substances affecting behavior; they have symbolic value and culturally based meanings which influence expectations of effects and, in turn, actual experience.

Some clarification of terminology is necessary. We shall use the term "drugs" to refer to what are variously known in the international vocabulary as drugs of abuse, or as dependence-producing drugs. Thus we include alcohol, the classical narcotics, and other psychoactive drugs. As regards the concept of control, we have not included within the scope of this study such types of control as the monitoring of adverse reactions to drugs, the testing of drugs for efficacy and safety, the application of procedures for the quality control of drugs with which the Wor)d Health OrganiWordn (WHO), for one, is becoming increasingly concerned. We include under the terms "control" all those factors which bear on the legal, economic, and physical (the "real") availability of drugs to the individual (WHO/FFAS, 1974); it embraces all efforts, whether penal, preventive, educa-tional, or therapeutic.* The concept of "international control" is limited to those forms of intervention which are embodied in international treaties or are dealt with by international organi-zations, or both. The term "international" refers to relations among and between governments, and between governments and international organizations; it is also used to refer to the behavior of the United Nations system. The UN system is the complex of organizations made up of the UN itself and the specialized agencies such as WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organi-zation (FAO). The UN, on the other hand, is either the body of member states acting through the principal organs, or the Secretariat (the secretary-general and his staff).

*This usage is in keeping with the stance adopted at the 1973 Helsinki meeting of the International Research Group on Drug Legislation and Programs.