In the early years of the 20th century Egypt was a forerunner in the international drive to ban trade in hashish, writes Roger Owen A new book, Cannabis Britannica, by the British author James Mills throws interesting light on the key role played by the Egyptian government in placing cannabis -- otherwise known as Indian hemp or hashish -- on the League of Nations list of banned drugs in early 1925, almost 80 years ago. This small triumph for third world diplomacy was largely the work of Egypt's chief delegate to the second international opium conference in Geneva, Mohamed Abdel-Salam El-Guindi, a diplomat who was the secretary to the Egyptian legations in Paris and Brussels. El-Guindi began his campaign with a powerful speech on the second day of the conference in November 1924 which contained an impassioned plea that hashish be considered at least as harmful as opium. He repeated the same plea two days later with sufficient force to gain support from a number of other delegations including the American, as well as to overcome British objections that the matter was not on the conference agenda. And this, in turn, led to his presentation of an official proposal to ban hashish, backed up by what seemed like an impressive display of Egyptian medical evidence linking the persistent use of hashish to insanity. El-Guindi ended his presentation with a powerful appeal for international support to prevent international trafficking in the drug. Sensing that most of the countries represented would not then have had much experience of hashish-use themselves, he tried to engage their concern by arguing that not only had it the power to replace the use of cocaine once that was no longer available but also that its exclusion would seriously undermine the authority of the League in the non-European world. "I know the mentality of Oriental peoples", he asserted, "and I am afraid that it will be said that the question was not dealt with because it did not affect Europeans." El-Guindi's final intervention was as the author of a draft resolution asking the conference to ban the use, sale and trade of hashish except for medical purposes. And although this was later much watered down by several of the other delegations led by the British and the Indian, he still ended up with a general ban on the export of hashish to countries, like Egypt, which had prohibited its use. The presence of hashish on most countries' list of banned narcotics continues, of course, until the present day. Mills also provides valuable insight into some of the factors facilitating El-Guindi's success. He shows how many members of the international community represented at Geneva had their own reasons for raising the issue of hashish. And he also suggests ways in which some of the British officials inside the Egyptian government had a motive for obtaining international assistance in their attempt to curb its import, for example as a way of putting pressure on states like France with capitulatory privileges in Egypt which made it difficult for the Egyptian authorities to prosecute French nationals and others engaged in drug smuggling. A final point concerns Mills's discovery of the use made by El-Guindi of statistics collected by John Wainright, the British director of Egyptian lunatic asylums from 1895 to 1923. These seemed to demonstrate a correlation between hashish- taking and lunacy even though, as Mills rightly notes, the link Wainright made between the two was based largely on his own very uncertain diagnosis of what had served to trigger the lunacy among the patients in his charge. Nevertheless, there are some important aspects of the matter which Mills manages to miss. One is the very obvious influence of Egyptian nationalism on El-Guindi's performance. Not only had the elections of 1924 provided the country with its first independent government under Saad Zaghloul and the Wafd Party but that government had also been forced to resign in November the same year following the punitive measures taken by Britain in response to the assassination of the British commander of the Egyptian army, Sir Lee Stack. Hence when El-Guindi told the members of the second opium conference that this was the first time Egypt had been represented at a conference organised by the League of Nations by two "purely" Egyptian delegates, he was calling attention to Egypt's newly independent status in world affairs at a time when its freedom of action was under British attack. It may also be that he, like many in Egypt, looked to the League for help against the British at this difficult time. Mills is also wrong to give the impression that all the British officials in Egypt were of one mind. There was in fact considerable disagreement about anti-drug policy, with some, like Thomas Russell Pasha, the influential head of the Cairo police, quite tolerant of the peasants' use of hashish, particularly as a supposed antidote to bilharzia, and much more concerned to stamp out Egyptian use of the so- called "white" drugs, opium, heroin and cocaine. As for the British director of the European Department of the Ministry of Interior, it seems that his concern stemmed more with his embarrassment at his ministry's failure to stop foreign hashish smuggling than with the harmful use of the drug itself. Finally, Mills misses several important aspects of the international context which had much to do with El-Guindi's ability to advance his case. It is true that he notes the way in which the American delegation was only too happy to obtain Egyptian support for its hard-line position on opium by giving El-Guindi a helping hand over hashish. But this was all part of the larger picture in which, with America's decision not to join the League still under possible review, it was in the interests of many European states to try to humour America as far as possible in the hope that this might encourage the Congress to change its mind. Just as important, the 1920s was a peak period for attempts to create a system of international cooperation to ban traffic in many harmful products including, most significant of all, privately produced armaments. Still, none of this should be allowed to diminish El- Guindi's achievement as we approach the 80th anniversary of his remarkable success. For better or worse, it must be rated as one of his country's major influences on human well-being throughout the modern world.
