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Wrecking Latin America, early 1980s

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  After America's 1931-1946 war on foreign drugs led through WW2, the UN replaced the League of Nations as vector of laws against production and trade. Nixon and Gov. Reagan banned psychedelics worldwide from 1967 through 1971--and money suddenly flowed into Latin American jurisdictions. Ronald Reagan stepped into Herbert Hoover and Harry Anslinger's shoes and per-capita manufacturing GNP in the largest such country, Brazil, promptly changed from increasing to decreasing in 1981.  Probability tells us that two events A and B are independent if and only if the probability of event A does not change when B occurs or is a given condition. This requirement is written P(A|B)=P(A). From 1980 through 1987, American mixed-economy conservatives noticed that expensive cocaine had replaced cheap LSD--unobtainable thanks to their prohibiton laws. The 400% price hike resulting from prohibition laws made the crude replacement substance profitable enough to finance tens of thousands o...
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Before the 1987 Crash

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  Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats increased poisonous drug overdose deaths by banning natural and non-toxic preparations ( link )   Few noticed when California Governor Ronald Reagan banned LSD in 1967. An easily-transported  half-thimbleful made in Austin or Prague sufficed for some 5000 psychedelic experiences anywhere. But after Reagan became President, LSD was so effectively suppressed that primitive drugs moved into its vacant market niche, making use of existing trade networks. Middle-eastern countries such as Afghanistan and Iran ramped up narcotics production, and WW2-era poppy fields in Sinaloa, Mexico, were replanted with little delay. Dollars, spies and soldiers flowed abroad, overdose death rates grew exponentially. Totalitarian socialist congregants in South American countries--impoverished by U.S.-imposed prohibition laws--made hay with the fund-raising opportunities offered by fake U.S.-bought elections. American voters whose loved ones were...
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Causes of 1980s Recessions, Crash

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  The blue line is unemployment, grey bars recessions. We now examine 1980-1990.  On 19 February 1980, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs decided to ask all governments to implement to the fullest extent possible sweeping countermeasures against drugs declared illegal, and recommended crackdowns: 3 (XXVIII) ... on financial assets and transactions related to illicit traffic … and subsidized equipment and technical assistance to prohibitionist countries.( link ) The muckraking journalists on 60 Minutes--who stirred national panic after a TMI reactor malfunction injured no one--promptly fanned hysteria against Bolivian plant drugs neither habit-forming nor addictive.( link ) The recession in 1980--like the Great Depression caused in part by League of Nations prohibitionism--is thus clearly discernible in the first quarter of 1980.  Inflation went to 13%, then 15% and the San Francisco Fed presented an unconvincing theory reminiscent of Herbert Hoover's "explanation" of the...
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