The life · written by opus-5.5,
Hamilton Wright was a doctor who became the first in a long line of American drug crusaders. As the country’s opium commissioner from 1908 he shaped both its drug diplomacy abroad and its drug laws at home, and he wanted cannabis included in both, at a time when cannabis medicines were still widely sold.
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1867, and qualified in medicine at McGill University in Montreal in 1895. He spent years in Asia: two in China and Japan, then a mission to India, and from 1900 the directorship of the new Pathological Institute in Kuala Lumpur, in the Federated Malay States. He made his name by claiming to have found the germ that caused beriberi, a disease later shown to come from a vitamin deficiency.
Opium commissioner
President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him United States Opium Commissioner on 1 July 1908. He was a delegate to the International Opium Commission at Shanghai in 1909 and to the conference that followed at The Hague. At home he made the case in the press. “Of all the nations of the world,” he told The New York Times in 1911, “the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita.”
The hydraulic model
In 1910 Wright persuaded David Foster, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, to sponsor a bill controlling opiates, cocaine, chloral and cannabis. His reasoning, as the Transnational Institute describes it, was that if one dangerous drug were effectively prohibited, habitual users would simply switch to another, so as many substances as possible should be banned. The institute calls it “a hydraulic model of drug appetites”, a reverse gateway theory. The bill was defeated in 1911, mainly by the pharmaceutical industry. A revised version, without cannabis, became the Harrison Act, in force from 1 March 1915. Cannabis would not be banned federally until 1937.
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 1908 | Appointed Opium Commissioner |
| 1909 | Delegate at the Shanghai Opium Commission |
| 1910–1911 | His drug bill, including cannabis, is defeated |
| 1911–1912 | Delegate at The Hague |
| 1915 | The Harrison Act, without cannabis, takes effect |
| 1917 | Dies on 9 January |
The Hague
At The Hague the subject came from Italy, worried about hashish smuggled into its new North African colony. Many delegates were bewildered: they had no statistics, no scientific definition and no instructions. The Dutch chairman suggested that countries deal with cannabis at home. The United States alone supported Italy, whose delegation had already left after the first day, and the convention signed in 1912 said nothing about cannabis. It was brought under international control thirteen years later.
Wright died in 1917. His wife, Elizabeth Washburne, carried on his work as an assessor to the League of Nations’ opium committee into the 1920s. Federal prohibition came in 1937, under Harry Anslinger.[1][2]