Beyond the role of individuals, the democratic, representativity, and health-focused characteristics of the Office were dubious. The OIHP was not composed of members acting in their personal capacity as independent experts, but by Government representatives. Worse, the weight of each member’s vote was indexed on the financial contribution of his country to the Office (OIHP, 1938). Within the Office, the broadly-shared vision of an international sanitary action limited to the “minimum hindrances to commerce compatible with the protection of public health” (Howard-Jones, 1979, p. 32) probably contributed to gather sympathy, among governments, for maintaining the politically-docile OIHP independent from a Health Committee of the LoN which may have been inclined to put health first.
Heir of an international trade order recently established on the basis of colonial trade wars, and direct continuation of the eurocentric, coercitive, trade-oriented, and morally-tainted “civilising” mission that characterised international public health in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Howard-Jones, 1979; Huber, 2006; Lin and Birn, 2021; Paillette, 2012; Sinha, 2001; Tworek, 2019) the OIHP represented a continuation, in the early twentieth century, of an
“international health diplomacy [which] proved how vulnerable global health governance was to the machinations of states and the volatile dynamics of international politics” (Fidler, 2001 p. 847).
This was far from unfamiliar to the development of drug control treaties. Politics, trade, and (opium) trade wars are also the genesis which led to legal drug control instruments that, although claiming to protect health, ended up regulating commercial activities.

Organisational structure of international drug control in 1935

This rugged landscape of international health organisations resulted in the administration of drug control by a large number of organs interacting in a complex fashion, not uncommonly at the time (Fig. 2; Grandjean, 2017; Howard-Jones, 1979, pp. 30–31; Paillette, 2012). Dozens of interlinked, overlapping, sometimes “do-nothing” sub-, joint-, or interim- committees, commissions, boards, and bureaux, shared a piece of the cake of drug-related treaty mandates, rarely reaching efficiency (Ghebali, 1972).
Nonetheless, the basic structure Secretariat-Executive Council-Assembly was generally retained (as is still often the case today with international organisations). Within the LoN, the “Health Committee” represented an organ that could nowadays be assimilated to something in-between the WHO’s Executive Board and World Health Assembly (Fig. 3). Under the C25, the Health Committee was mandated by Articles 8 and 10 to decide on the addition of new preparations to, or withdrawal from international control (Lande, 1945).
The Secretariat of the LoN (equivalent to today’s UN Secretary-General’s office) had a dedicated Health Section (the main roles of which are nowadays assumed by WHO Director-General, and for some drug control functions, by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime).
Together, Health Committee and Health Section of the Secretariat formed the upper part of the hierarchy of a very-theoretical “Health Organisation” of the LoN (Fig. 2).
Below the Health Committee, within the LoN (1945b, p. 61) was the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and other Dangerous Drugs: the central policy making body where State Parties to the drug control treaties convened –an ancestor of today’s CND (Bayer and Ghodse, 1999; Boister, 1997, p. 16). Within the Advisory Committee was eventually created a Sub-Committee on Cannabis (officially “Sub-Committee to study Questions in regard to Indian Hemp and Indian Hemp Drugs” where tumultuous political discussions recurred; Kozma, 2011b) and a Sub-Committee on the List of Drugs to keep track of inclusions and exemptions of preparations from control (“Sub-Committee of Experts to draw up the List of Drugs and Preparations coming under the Hague (1912) and Geneva (1925) Opium Conventions and the Limitation Convention (Geneva, 1931)” (LoN, 1945c, p. 61), a task nowadays assumed by the INCB with its regularly-updated “Yellow List” and “Green List;” INCB, 2021a; 2021b), among others.
Within the Health Organisation (but outside of the LoN!) and in Paris, was the OIHP –or, as they preferred to call it in Geneva, the “general advisory health council” (LoN, 1945c, p. 64). Under Articles 8 and 10, C25, the Office was tasked with providing scientific advice ahead of the decisions of the Health Committee. Differing from the classical Secretariat-Board-Assembly structure of the LoN, the OIHP had a single plenipotentiary decision-making body called “Comité Permanent,” whose president was ex officio vice-president of the Health Committee (LoN, 1945c, p. 63). Within the Comité Permanent was a “Commission de l’Opium” which eventually discussed drug control matters.11At the time, the Commission de l’Opium was chaired by Swiss representative Henri Carrière and integrated by the ambassadors of Egypt (Dr. Shahin Pacha), British India, and United States. Because Governments tabled every week new demands for the exemption of preparations under Article 8, the OIHP had developed an internal process and “constituted, to enlighten its decisions, a Committee of Expert Pharmacologists, currently composed of six members” (OIHP, 1933, p. 61,author’s translation ). This “Comité des Experts Pharmacologistes” (CEP) is the ancestor of today’s ECDD. To assist the OIHP’s advising role to the Health Committee, the same six individuals met within the CEP from its start to 1935:
The CEP was not always the body tasked with drug assessment: that role was sometimes held by the Commission de l’Opium (OIHP, 1933b, p. 26).
Finally, separately from the Health Organisation, two organs were monitoring and controlling the application of the drug treaties:
the Permanent Central Opium Board, established under the C25, partially operated within the LoN system as of 1935;
the Drug Supervisory Body (Organe de Contrôle), established under the “Limitation Convention” of 1931, remained independent from the LoN system (McAllister, 2000, pp. 73, 96).
With the adoption of the Single Convention of 1961, both Permanent Central Opium Board and Drug Supervisory Body were merged into a single body: the INCB (Fig. 3). Notably, one of the four members of the Drug Supervisory Body was appointed by the OIHP (Lande, 1945, p. 410; LoN, 1945c, p. 22) which is reflected nowadays by the fact that WHO appoints 3 of the 13 Members of the INCB.