Helen Howell Moorhead

Helen Armstrong Howell Moorhead was an American Anti-opium advocate who was for many years the Chair of the Opium Research Committee of the Foreign Policy Association (FPA), emerging as what historians say to be "perhaps the most important non-state actor in the formation of international drug control." She was deeply entrenched in what historians call the "technical league" of policy professionals that shaped the League of Nations, and was a key figure in creating the Opium Advisory Committee. She was the first American woman to address an international opium conference at Geneva, and attended the three of these international opium conferences under the auspices of the League of Nations. She was present at the Second International Opium Convention and became heavily involved with the Permanent Central Opium Board. She was also present for the creation of the United Nations and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

From the early days of the League of Nations, the FPA had functioned as an unofficial surrogate for the U.S. government on opium issues: conducting public relations, lobbying elite opinion, and generating policy ideas. For more than twenty-five years, according to the historian William McAllister, she “provided social lubrication, acted as a go-between among governmental representatives, floated policy options, and served as a backchannel communications conduit.” With her counterparts in the international community, Dame Rachel Crowdy and Elizabeth Washburn Wright, she is considered an "honorary gentleman" of what had been dubbed the "Gentlemen's Club" of the international narcotics control regime.

The historian William McAllister writes of Moorhead that she was the:

"Driving force behind the FPA’s Opium Research Committee and hostess with the mostest. A woman of strong but closely held opinions. Master of private negotiations. Less well known than her contemporary, E.W. Wright, but more effective in international negotiations. Her behind-the-scenes style matched both the sensibilities of drug diplomats and the gender expectations of the age. She enjoyed the confidence of her fellow-travellers in narcotics circles more than the company of her own family."

Some historians suggest that Moorhead, like the members of the Inner Circle she directed, were creating moral panic in the United States to achieve political objectives.