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Connecting Prohibition, Crash, War dots

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Typical drug manufactures chart, 1930 No American schoolbook mentioned the Opium Wars until Brian Inglis published The Opium War in 1976, the election year the Libertarian Party ran its second slate of candidates demanding repeal of drug prohibition laws. The audiobook version is now available.( link )  Brian's other drug book, the Forbidden Game, gives further insights into how prohibitionism developed as a cudgel with which pharma cartels wielded government laws as marketing tools and double-edged weapons once the colonial harnessing of addiction was out of the bag.( link ) The link between the dragooning of political States into marketing tools and weapons of economic warfare is not the sort of thing those political states extoll with pride. Enormous effort goes into disguising the fact made plain by Adam Smith in 1775 that wars prohibiting production and trade necessarily wreck national economies, just as purging the violence of law from trade relations gives rise to the Wealt
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Behind the Scenes in 1929

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  Off with their heads! Qing prohibitionism On the 17th of January, 1929 , the League Of Nations' coryphaeus of opium prohibitionism met in Geneva to deliberate on the initiation of deadly force in furtherance of prohibitions outlawing production and trade. On September 2, this Opium Advisory Committee recommended that the League organize gangs to kill, imprison and confiscate throughout the entire planet, as the Republicans had done in the USA. As of March 2, 1929, beer and wine made one liable to five years in jail and a fine of about 14 pounds of gold.( link ) Stock markets shriveled and interest rates climbed steeply.  All that remained was for Europe to withdraw investments from the USA, as England had done when China, in December of 1836, invited the East India Company opium dealers to leave.  Germany--the world's premier heroin producer even before the First World War--stood threatened by the Christian fascism of compulsory abstinence. Japan was the only Asian country t
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1987 Crash: Naming Names

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What happened after a Republican fanatic was reelected, 1986. Reagan Speech : There've been some real champions in the battle to get this legislation through Congress: Senators Bob Dole , Robert Byrd, and Strom Thurmond ; Congressmen Bob Michel, Jim Wright , Benjamin Gilman, Charles Rangel, and Jerry Lewis. I'd like to single out Senator Paula Hawkins in particular. She took this battle to the public and has been a driving force behind the effort to rid our society of drug abuse. Like Nancy, she made her commitment to fighting drugs long before it was the popular thing to do. This kind of honest, hard-working leadership is what makes all the difference. And now, Paula, if you and your colleagues will join Nancy and me, we will get on with the signing of that bill, making it the law of the land.  Here are the names given "it," "the" law of the land.  Signed by President . 10/27/1986: Became Public Law No: 99-570. TITLE(S): (italics indicate a title for
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Prohibition laws, the 1987 Crash and Recession

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Bush notices the difference between his prohibitionism and freedom of production and trade Ronald Reagan published an autobiography in 2007 bragging about how he and Nancy had seen to it that only people willing to pee into a Drug Czar sample cup could hold jobs in the federal bureaucracy. All others would be fired.  Onto this bandwagon hopped a Texas congressman with ambitious plans to spread enforcement tentacles around the entire planet, invade other countries, choose foreign politicians and assassinate or jail any who balked.  A year after Reagan's biography revealed--bragged about--what had gone on in the hustings, Texas President George W Bush blinked at teevee cameras as the economy crashed around him.  Bush was absolutely baffled that "the market" Reagan, Bush Daddy and he himself had coerced at gunpoint with prohibitionist zeal and faith-based asset-forfeiture highway robbery, had "stopped working." Let's look at the record.  The following materi
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Prohibition, Financial Crisis, WAR

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  Who was Germany's ally in WW1? (Amounts in kilos) If you guessed Turkey , you identified the German ally These United States exempted from a declaration of war in 1917 and shielded from accountability for genocidal extermination of Armenians. The graph does NOT tell you that the 14.1 tonnes of opium China shipped to Germany in 1912 came in large part from confiscated shipments after the 1911 revolt that ousted the Qing Empire and ended foreign dumping of opiates. Prohibition zealots are good at eliding inconvenient facts, but to understand how prohibition wrecks national economies it helps to understand that the freer the trade, the wealthier the nation. Does that mean that adding coercive meddling via deadly force impoverishes an economy? Let's find out.  My government-mandated History classes at UTexas thrilled at the showdown between banker Nicholas Biddle and President Andrew Jackson over the primitive national bank and were given to understand the Panic of 1837 result
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