ABSTRACT
Global efforts to curb illegal traffic in dangerous drugs are front-page news and televised features in most lands. In 1906 the United States did set in motion the global anti-narcotic movement. In that year the United States extended invitations to a meeting in Shanghai that would consider ways to help China in its campaign against opium. The disengagement of the United States from the crusade it had started and promoted with moral fervor detracted from any global plan to curb production, manufacture and consumption. The United States spends billions of dollars annually in an attempt to interdict opium and opiates from Asia and cocaine and marijuana from South and Latin America. The multiple motivations of the United States for inviting other powers to convene in Shanghai—and of the nations that accepted—can be found again with variations and shifting emphases over a history of drug policy extending more than eight decades.
