The Harrison Act provided that any person who was in the business of dealing in drugs covered by the act, including the opium derivatives morphine and heroin, as well as cocaine, was required to register annually and to pay a special annual tax of $1. The statute made it illegal to sell or give away opium or opium derivatives and coca or its derivatives without a written order on a form issued by the commissioner of revenue.
People who were not registered were prohibited from engaging in interstate traffic in the drugs, and no one could possess any of the drugs who had not registered and paid the special tax, under a penalty of up to five years imprisonment and a fine of no more than $2000. Rules promulgated by the Treasury Department permitted only medical professionals to register, and they had to maintain records of the drugs they dispensed.
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National efforts against opiates (and cocaine) were part of a larger campaign to regulate drugs and the contents of food substances; in 1879 a bill was introduced in Congress to accomplish national food and drug regulation. These efforts were opposed by the Proprietary Association of America, which represented the patent medicine industry.
The medical profession was more interested in dealing with quacks within the profession than with quack medicines, and the American Pharmaceutical Association was of mixed mind: Its members, in addition to being scientists, were merchants who found the sale of proprietary remedies bulking large in their gross income.
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Until the sixteenth century, China was a military power whose naval fleet surpassed any that the world had ever known. A fifteenth-century power struggle ultimately led to a regime dominated by Confucian scholars; in 1525 they ordered the destruction of all oceangoing ships and set China on a course that would lead to poverty, defeat, and decline.
In 1626 a British warship appeared off the coast of China, and its captain imposed his will on Canton (now Guangzhou) with a bombardment. In response to the danger posed by British ships the Emperor opened the city of Canton to trade, and Britain granted the British East India Company a monopoly over the China trade. Particularly important to this trade was the shipping of tea to England. By the 1820s the trade situation between England and China paralleled trade between the United States and Japan. Although British consumers had an insatiable appetite for Chinese tea, the Chinese desired few English goods.
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At the end of the eighteenth century or early in the nineteenth a German pharmacist poured liquid ammonia over opium and obtained an alkaloid, a white powder that he found to be many times more powerful than opium. Friedrich W. Serturner named the substance morphium after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams; ten parts of opium can be refined into one part of morphine. It was not until 1817, however, that articles published in scientific journals popularized the new drug, resulting in widespread use by doctors. Quite incorrectly, as it turned out, the medical profession viewed morphine as an opiate without negative side effects.
By the 1850s morphine tablets and a variety of morphine products were readily available without prescription. In 1856 the hypodermic method of injecting morphine directly into the bloodstream was introduced to U.S. medicine. The popularity of morphine rose during the Civil War, when the intravenous use of the drug to treat battlefield casualties was rather indiscriminate.
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