Use of Opium and Traffic Therein. Message from the President of the United States transmitting the Report of the Committee appointed by the Philippine Commission to investigate the use of Opium and the Traffic therein, and the rules, ordinances, and laws regulating such use and traffic in Japan, Formosa, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Burma, Java and the Philippine Islands… (U S Senate Document 265. Washington, D.C., 1906) 283pp. 1folding chart. Disbound, removed from larger volume, library tape at spine, US Government stamp at top-edge.
Early US colonial administrators of the Philippine Islands had to confront the growing use of Opium, once a government monopoly under Spanish rule, both among the Chinese population and by native Filipinos. In 1903, future President William Howard Taft, then the US Governor at Manila, appointed a committee to investigate how other Asian nations, from China and Japan to the French and British colonies of Vietnam, Singapore and Burma, dealt with the problem. After traveling throughout the Far East, committee members – a US Army Doctor, a prominent Philippine physician, and an Episcopal missionary Bishop – submitted their findings (including the scandalous disinterest in the Opium trade by the French rulers in Saigon) and recommendations –to allow temporary government sales of Opium only to registered, adult Filipino males, while closing Opium dens, prohibiting poppy cultivation, discouraging drug use among the young, and eventually banning Opium use entirely in the islands except for medicinal purposes. This scarce document has special historical value as a survey of Opium use throughout Asia at the start of the 20th century.