Message to the Congress Recommending Legislative Action for the Suppression of the Opium Evil

To the Senate and House of Representatives:

In my annual message, transmitted to the Congress on December 7, 1909, I referred to the International Opium Commission as follows:

The results of the opium commission, held at Shanghai last spring at the invitation of the United States, have been laid before the Government. The report shows that China is making remarkable progress and admirable efforts toward the eradication of the opium evil, and that the Governments concerned have not allowed their commercial interests to interfere with a helpful cooperation in this reform. Collateral investigations of the opium question in this country lead me to recommend that the manufacture, sale, and use of opium and its derivatives in the United States should be, so far as possible, more rigorously controlled by legislation.

Since making that recommendation, I transmitted to the Congress on February 21, 1910, a report on the International Opium Commission and on the opium problem as seen within the United States and its possessions, prepared on behalf of the American delegates to the commission, and I gave my approval to the recommendations made in a covering letter from the Secretary of State regarding an appropriation and the necessity for Federal legislation for the control of foreign and interstate traffic in certain menacing drugs, and requested that action should be taken accordingly.

The Congress has so far acted on the recommendations as to appropriate $25,000 to enable the Government to continue its efforts to mitigate, if not entirely stamp out, the opium evil through the proposed international opium conference and otherwise to further investigation and procedure.

I now transmit a further report from the Secretary of State giving cogent reasons why the opium-exclusion act of February 9, 1909, should be made more effective by amendments that will prohibit any vessel engaged in trade from any foreign port or place to any place within the jurisdiction of the United States, including the territorial waters thereof, or between places within the jurisdiction of the United States, from carrying opium prepared for smoking, and that would make it unlawful to export, or cause to be exported from the United States and from Territories under its control or jurisdiction or from countries in which the United States exercises extraterritorial rights where such exportation from such countries is made by persons owing permanent allegiance to the United States, any opium or cocaine, or any derivatives or preparations of opium or cocaine, to any country which prohibits or regulates their entry, unless the exporter conforms to the regulations of the regulating country.

The Secretary of State further points out a defect in the opium exclusion act of February 9, 1909, in that smoking opium may be manufactured in the United States from domestically produced opium, and the pressing necessity for remedying that defect by an amendment to the internal-revenue act of October 1, 1890, that would place a prohibitive revenue tax on all such opium manufactured within the jurisdiction of the United States from the domestically produced material; and he further urges the enactment of legislation which will control the importation, manufacture, and distribution in interstate commerce of opium, morphine, cocaine, and other habit-forming drugs.

I concur in the recommendations made by the Secretary of State and commend them to the favorable consideration of the Congress with a view to early legislation on the subject.

WILLIAM H. TAFT.

The White House, January 11, 1911.