Medicine: Dutch Monopoly

“So far as we in the U. S. are concerned, the grip of that quinine monopoly has just been broken,” declared Dr. Julius Klein of the U. S. Bureau of Foreign & Domestic Commerce last week. There was exultation in his voice: “Up until recently the European quinine manufacturers, working under an ironclad agreement with the producers in the Indies, had things going very much their own way. The trust regulated precisely the amount of the drug that was to come upon the markets of the world. It allocated certain definite quantities to each of the consuming territories. Its dictates were imposed inflexibly. It controlled the disposition and price of the quinine even after it had passed out of its hands.”

Dr. Klein’s satisfaction was natural. Two years ago his bureau had stirred the U. S. Department of Justice to bring an anti-trust suit against 27 Dutch, British, Japanese, German, French, Swiss and U. S. firms who were restraining the quinine trade in the U. S.

There exist other foreign monopolies of natural products which hamper where they do not constrain U. S. business—British rubber, French-German potash, Chilean nitrate and iodine, Japanese camphor, Brazilian coffee.

Scientists in some cases have been able to offset such monopolies by substitutes—nitrates from atmospheric nitrogen, rubber from carbohydrates, camphor from coal tar, coffee (Postum) from barley and wheats. There are no substitutes for potash or iodine. Yet chemists are already getting a little potash from the U. S. low-grade deposits along the Mexican border, iodine from seaweed and kelp.

It might be possible for chemists to synthesize quinine to break up the Dutch-led international monopoly of natural quinine. An easier way was for the U. S. Government to bring the suit. The prosecutors could not subpoena the foreigners. So they confiscated great quantities of quinine stored at Manhattan. To get back the goods the monopolists last week, through their U. S. lawyers, promised to cease their practices in so far as the U. S. was concerned. So the suit was nolled and withdrawn “by consent.”

William J. Donovan, assistant to U. S. Attorney General Sargent and intimate friend of Nominee Hoover, hastened to the White House to tell President Coolidge the news so good to U. S. businessmen, chemists, doctors.

The reason why quinine is important is that it is a specific against malaria. It is useful also as a tonic, its bitterness causing the secretion of saliva and gastric juices. When quinine gets into the blood it causes beneficent sweating. It is a bactericide also, slightly stronger than the same strength of carbolic acid, yet not exceptionally powerful. Bacteria are low-grade vegetable organisms. The thing which causes malaria is animal—plasmodium malariae—introduced into the human blood stream by a breed of mosquito. Quinine in the blood kills the plasmodium in the blood.

The Dutch monopoly is important because 95% of the cinchona bark from which quinine is refined comes from Java and other oriental Dutch cinchona tree plantations. The British have small plantations in India. The northern Andes, particularly in Ecuador, where the trees are native, now produce little of the bark. The Indians, who must chop their paths through jungles to reach the isolated cinchona groves, find the labor too hard for profit. Consequently the Dutch have been able to regulate the world cinchona bark and quinine trade very much as they pleased.