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1931 Prohibition Crisis in Germany

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  Readers saw in Prohibition and The Crash how U.S. Call Money rates skyrocketed when Congress decreed beer and wine felony drugs with the 02MAR1929 Five & Ten law.( link )   Once the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee recommended, and the League itself adopted replacing markets with meddling on a global basis in its 1929-1930 sessions , the largest and most competent pharmaceutical companies in the world understood they had again been singled out for rough handling. I.G. Farben was--despite the prior restrictions that brought on WW1--the world's fourth-largest corporation of any kind in 1931. All through 1930, Committeemen from opiate-producing nations waved reports of drug seizures like bloody shirts as rhetorical openings for the heaping of scorn and opprobrium. What changed in 1931 was packing the committee with violently prohibitionist "victim" members to draw up regulations to forever ban laissez-faire markets from the face of the planet . Fanatical pr...
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Making Germany Prohibitionist, June-July 1931

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  Both the USA and Germany looked for third parties as alternatives to Prohibition Crashes. Newspapers struggled to ignore the pro-repeal Liberal Party and focused on Fabian Socialist insurgents. German papers tried to ignore the Nazis. But as foreign prohibitionist pressures resumed and economic recession deepened, Hitler's truculence found larger audiences. Here are some highlights: 11JAN1929 : On the day "Narcosan" was shown not to cure opiate addiction, a League Health Committee Secretary General circular letter demanded that any manufacturer that had produced benzoylmorphine--or any other black market ester of morphine--be stripped of its license to operate. This became official in February 1931.  15JAN1929 :  League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meeting opens in Geneva, mail-order drugs crackdown demanded worldwide by the USA. Before the 1929 Geneva meeting ended, Francisco Ferrari's company was named as a source of some seized cocaine. Ferrari was dead 2 ...
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Besieging Germany, June 1931

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  When prohibition laws collapse the global economy, blame tariffs! Frankenstein's monster , like the Pure Drug law of 1906, the Hague Opium convention of 1909--even the UK/China Opium treaty signed August 1911 and the second Hague "Opium" (and much else) convention of 1912 seemed to be innocent, childlike creations. Yet the latter, signed in January 1912 brought war to the opium-producing Balkan states and political and financial turmoil to Andean Nations before the ink had dried... then caused WW1. How did all this come about?  American food and drug cranks  operating within the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition Party had been galvanized into action after China's 1905 boycott caused the T. Roosevelt administration to take time out from shooting Filipinos to extend patent protection to German heroin patents in China (lest Americans be tempted to compete) . Newspapers and magazines were unstinting in their production of horrifying documendacities, mostly rewrites of ...
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