Henry Charles Russell, the grandson of the sixth Duke of Bedford, and his wife, Leila Louisa Millicent Willoughby, the daughter of the eighth Baron Middleton.
[1] As the director of the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau (CNIB), Russell Pasha became an anti-drug campaigner when he realised that opium, heroin, cocaine and hashish were being smuggled into Egypt in great and increasing quantities.
He served later as inspector, in every Egyptian province, acquiring great knowledge of local officials, while directing police activities of all kind.
Had the damage been confined to the upper and educated classes of the cities I don't think that I should have been so stirred, but when I had collected what reliable figures I could obtain and calculated that out of a total population of fourteen million possibly half a million were now slaves to the drug habit, and they the backbone of the land, I realized that here was a job worth doing and one that, with the Prime Minister's support I felt capable of tackling[6]While his main focus was on drug related crimes, in his 44 years of police work he also dealt with a large collection of other crimes.
They included: many common murders (happening an average of eight times a day in Egypt, mostly committed by fellahin in compensation of their business or personal feuds), as well as the clarification of some big political assassinations in Cairo.
It's the latter, chemical ones that he determined as a "major danger to the country"[5] and expresses his decision to "for a time ignore the black drug traffic, if doing so would get us on to the white".
I was to be the Director, with the right of selecting my own specialized police staff, with direct access to all Egyptian Government Departments and foreign public security authorities, and to have at my disposal a budget of £E10.000 a year for which I need account to no one.
[8] In response to British pressure, Greece increased their prohibition efforts and Syrian and Lebanese suppliers took over the trafficking of hashish, moving it to Egypt through Palestine.
[8][12] According to D'Erlanger, Russell considered legalising the drug, turning it into a revenue-producing good, thus preserving national funds, which would be spent on home-grown products rather than importing from abroad.
Nahas writes that British officials, and particularly Russell, did not care enough about the drug because they saw hashish intoxication as "one expression of oriental languid and dreamy temperament".
[8] Russell Pasha writes in his memoirs: It was in 1916 that cocaine began to make its first appearance in Cairo, to be followed later by the pleasanter and more potent heroin, but there was little that we could do at that time when trafficking or possession was a mere contravention with a maximum penalty of £EI fine or a week's imprisonment.
The heroin on the market was still fairy pure and therefore strong, and the Bulaq settling-pit quickly filled with the human debris of every class of Egyptian society.
[15]As described by Russell Pasha in his memoirs, one of the traits of the drug addiction in Egypt was the pitiful desire of many addicts to be cured: I had hopes in the early days of our campaign of persuading the Government to establish treatment centres outside Cairo on the lines of the Lexington Farm in America, but I was not successful and one can understand hesitation to attempt the reformation of, literally, thousands of sufferers from a disease which could only be cured by the ministrations of a specialist in each individual case.
All one could do was to consider addiction and possession as a penal offence and condemn the victims to terms of imprisonment sufficiently long to break them completely of the habit before they returned again to their old life and temptation.
[17] Russell Pasha's reports on drugs and hashish to the Home Office in London were passed around the League of Nations Advisory Committee in 1929.
It is easy to be carried away by optimism and to see things as one wants to see them, but still, under the coldest douche of strict reality, I am convinced that drug addiction among the fellahin of Egypt has fallen by 50 per cent.
[5] In an obituary written following Russell Pasha's death in 1954, it is said of him: For everybody connected with the control of narcotics, Russell Pasha was not only a legendary figure but a man well known from the days of the Advisory Committee of the League of Nations where, ever since his first appearance in January 1930, he impressed all those who had the honour and the pleasure of working with him with his great intelligence, his profound knowledge of everything connected with narcotics and his keen sense of humour which showed a deep understanding of human nature.