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Thursday, October 22, 2026

Conspiracy fears at 12th 1929 League Opium meeting

1900-1931 Google word frequency Ngram for conspiracy & plotting

On the morning of 24JAN1929 the League Opium Advisory Committee at Geneva opened on an ominous note with item 307. Danger of Misrepresentation in the Press Regarding Sales of Drugs: Statement by the Swiss Representative. At issue was an article in Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail.(link) The paper detested by George Orwell--had two days earlier insinuated a connection between illicit traffic and a Swiss firm in southern Germany. To this end the Mail fabricated "formidable and sensational figures" so as to invite readers to imagine ten tons of morphine irregularly shipped to Greece with Swiss complicity and pantopon peddled by the shovelful. Dr Carrière corrected the dosage math--off by four orders of magnitude--and explained that no Swiss morphine whatsoever had been exported to Greece in 1927, so that the claims made in the Daily Mail were "far from being an accurate rendering of the position." The good doctor wanted the facts on record lest fictitious assertions give rise to "legendary assumptions." Nor was he alone in his preoccupation with conspiracies against noble League efforts to forcibly redirect human activity into more altruistic channels.

American prosecutors, newspapers and court reporters had in 1928 used "conspiracy" to describe activities revolving around sumptuary legislation practically every week, and more often since. Most of the stories had to do with congressmen, federal officials, state officials, judges and municipal police organizing into outfits profiting from the price differentials introduced into commerce by the violence of prohibitory laws. Yet recent cases involved lawbreakers using counterfeit badges to impersonate narcotics agents and even Coast Guard personnel. The Arnold Rothstein murder at election time in New York had triggered a host of unsavory and distracting revelations and market crashes. Nightmares of journalistic coverage had been worrisome since early 1925, when the Central Board was enjoined--in Article 27--to make sure drug movement information received "shall not be made public in such a manner as to facilitate the operations of speculators or injure the legitimate commerce of any Contracting Party." This concern became pressing, even sinister, during the day's examination of Seizures of Drugs in Italy, (Documents O.C.773 (a) to (g))

Swiss and German-label drugs had been intercepted in Italy, whose Senator on the Committee boasted that supervision there was strict and the dope, foreign. Merck stimulants were mentioned by name, prompting the German delegate, following custom, to insist the labels be examined as possible forgeries. Elsewhere in the Italian report was gossip of considerable interest to U.S. and Allied prohibitionists. Sino-American waves of moral panic had by 1906 led to precisely the economic chaos and political instability every government in the region calculated would occur if opium production and trade were suddenly curtailed. The predicted result of the sudden economic collapse and impoverishment resulting from Chinese blockage of all opiate imports plus overlapping comparable U.S. prohibitions was extreme violence among religious tribal collectives, especially egregious against women and children--the weaker inhabitants. The Armenian massacres begun in boycott-year 1905(link), and the post-Chinese-revolution Balkan Wars were the exact opposite of what the WCTU promised: that banning drink and drug would protect women and children by keeping husbands from squandering family income at saloons. The demolishing of that revealed faith, and consequent possibility that impoverishing trade bans might be seen as the real culprit created strong demand for a League Social Section explanation exculpating the USA and China from having triggered the violence. Italy's saucy report was just the ticket.

Great Britain's delegate called attention to passages asserting connections between underworld drug traffic, prostitution, and traffic in "white slaves" other than the cigarettes Henry Ford denounced and sought to have banned as "little white slavers."(link) Page 2 of document O.C.773(d) made it appear that cocaine was used for "ruining young girls" in Italian brothels, so it was suggested that highlighting those stories "would be of great advantage." The Secretary, Rachel Crowdy, awarded the title of "Dame" for her war work (link), broke neutrality to thank Senator Cavazzoni and persuade him to let her release part of his report to the Traffic in Women and Children Committee and the Child Welfare Committee. Surely this would exculpate prohibitionist zealotry from the Armenian genocides and escalating violence that followed their every campaign "over there."

The World War brought such immense profit to U.S. banks, exporters and weapons industries as to offset--or at least postpone--the cost of hobbling the American economy with the Income Tax & Prohibition Amendments--plus the China-boycott-motivated avalanche of additional substance prohibitions. When Volstead Act Prohibition took effect in 1920, American industry lost 507 distilleries producing 286 million gallons of distilled spirits, 1217 breweries and 175 thousand saloons--but was charging repayment of $21 billion, 751 million in intergovernmental war debts from Europe. But another item in the Italian report--mentioning "a firm named Ferrari"--pushed the economy toward the September 1929 tipping point into the Crash and Depression when it hit the news in late June.(link)

Newspapers available in Geneva (other than the Daily Mail) that day carried these sorts of stories:
23JAN1929: Gladstone indicted f/ embezzlement. (NYTi 1/23/29 4:7) Bankruptcy lawyers absconding with assets as in the Steinhardt/Pinner cases...
23JAN1929: The Montreal Gazette p1. NO RESULT LIKELY FROM CONFERENCE—Not Anticipated Ottawa Will Pass Legislation To Help Enforce Volstead Act—Ottawa, 23Jan... (link)
Same page: INCREASED DUTY ON MAPLE SUGAR ASKED… /all maple syrup soon went to distilling/
p5=7. JAPAN CURBS NARCOTICS—Makes Production In Korea Government Monopoly—Geneva January 22—Japan today notified the League of Nations that manufacture and distribution of narcotics in Korea had been taken out of the hands of private companies.(link) /narcotic is an undefined expletive/
23JAN1929: BERKELEY Daily Gazette temp max 49.5 min 40.5 p1. USE OF FUNDS TO GIVE REAL DRY TEST MAPPED—by Cecil Owen--… (link)
PLEADS GUILTY TO SMUGGLING CHARGES—SAN FRANCISCO—Jan23—William L Rosa, former clerk at the Honolulu Federal Court, pleaded guilty today to violation of the Harrison Narcotic Act before Federal Judge Kerrigan. Rosa and 3 Chinese were indicted yesterday for smuggling opium from SF to Honolulu…(link)
PITTSBURGH Post-Gazette p1. US DRY AGENTS MOP FAULKNER'S DISTRICT IN RAIDS—TWENTY SQUADS HIT SIMULTANEOUSLY ON NORTHSIDE—32 ARRESTED—Close 20 Alleged Bootlegging Dens in Raids by 100 Enforcers—100 Federal prohibition agents swept through the wide-open Northside district today…(link)
FOREIGN NEWS—JAPAN ABSORBS DRUG INDUSTRY—Government Takes Manufacturing Of Narcotics Out Of Hands F Private Companies—Geneva, Jan22—Japan today notified the League of Nations the mfg&dist of narcotics in KOREA had been taken out of the hands of private companies and made a govt monopoly.(link)
DRYS' INTERNAL ROW BECOMES OPEN WARFARE—Bishops Throw Down Gauntlet To Anti-Saloon Executive—M'BRIDE FACING FIGHT—Dinwiddie As Legislation Director Step In Proposed Shake-Up—WASHINGTON Jan22-F Scott McBride...(link)

Reading: The Witling, by Vernor Vinge. This delightful story puts fellow mathematician Larry Niven's Theory and Practice of Teleportation through its paces in this relativistic galaxy thirteen millennia hence. Angular momentum is conserved, but the pair of human protagonists stranded on a planet whose inhabitants operate via teleportation are the dull-witted endangered species. I found this gem through the Estante Virtual, Brazil's online new & used bookstore.(link) Upcoming: John Paulson; Lords of Finance.

Expats right-to-vote: American Citizens Abroad (link) sent me useful information on registering to vote by getting a Federal Post Card Application, filling it out and sending it in. It is an absentee ballot request form, with instructions, you get from VoteFromAbroad.org (link)

Get the big picture in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how laws against production and trade wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the Political Asylum instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

Comment at Libertariantranslator or LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the adventures of a Rio de Janeiro man-about-town and the beautiful daughter of an elderly scientist–touting alcohol prohibition, eugenics and racial collectivism. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, plus my own blogs using U.S., Australian, Canadian, Chinese, English, European and South American historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or www.amigra.us and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

This financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.criseeconomica.com (link)

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

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Background and context for the U.S.-caused 1931 Panic that raised Hitler to power in Germany

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Opium meeting 11: Tolerances for Intolerance 23JAN1929

The Border once protected Mexico, Canada and Europe from U.S. initiation of force... but that changed.

Geneva, Switzerland was inundated in January 1929 with stacks of reports on the violence of victimless crime laws plus fictional tales of taxed, licensed, permitted and legitimate drug imports and exports from countries whose politicians were unevenly eager to stick heads into the prohibitionist noose. "Discrepancy" is repeated ten times on the first page of the minutes of that afternoon meeting, and much sputtering and spilled ink finally resulted in a Holy Trinity of instructions:
1. The League Secretariat must examine all discrepancies
2. All governments concerned must be scolded, and
3. Every 5 years the Committee must examine an international table of statistics for accuracy...
and sub-instructions (b) concluding: "In the annual statistical returns, both provisional and final, any figures in regard to which discrepancies arise will be marked with an asterisk." (*)

In physics, chemistry, statistics and even the machining of high-quality government service pistols used in enforcing the laws of God's Own Prohibitionists, tolerances are the allowance made for deviations from theoretical or ideal standards; in a word, discrepancies. One logical consequence of the ritual aspersion of smuggling, shipment and seizure reports with asterisks signaling discrepancies was the gallons of ink the League's Fourth Committee--in charge of budget and financial accounting--would have to account for were tiny tolerances to require asterisks proportional to the comical absurdities contained in the country reports. The dilemma was resolved by adding one additional sub-instruction under (b) to wit: "Discrepancies involving no more than the following quantities will be ignored:
Raw opium 500 kilos
Morphine 100 kilos
Heroin 10 kilos
Cocaine 10 kilos.
Under the "cartels only" rules then being developed, half a tonne of opium one way or another is handled as a rounding error.

To soothe yet another Italian outburst the Serbian Chairman referred to the League Covenant as lending support to the distinguished colleague's tirade. The Covenant's American-authored Article 23 mirrors part of the Versailles Treaty Article 23, putting the League in charge of that noble Prohibition which--under The Hague management--had run aground on a reef of Balkan and World War hostilities. Both documents were routinely cited as the legal authorization for unlimited initiation of force and endless addition of items to the list of "drugs" to be restricted worldwide--economic results be damned! The entire Versailles treaty and all its fittings also been targeted for denunciation by the political platform of a German Socialist party, small enough to be safely ignored, since February of 1920.

Some articles cleared for export in 1927 by the French Sûreté had been seized in China, which, according to League documents, had not applied the system of import certificates for drugs. This dereliction made those shipments to China legal by European standards. Up leapt "Kinky"--a Chinese delegate whose name is spelled differently in different League documents--to deny all knowledge of additional facts. Kinky then claimed the Chinese government "in principle" adopted the system, but if the Interior Ministry had not acted, it was because China was "bound hand and foot by unequal treaties" and local foreign big shots answered no queries--all of which which morally obligated foreigners to change the facts and correct the French document for them. When informed the list was compiled by the League, not France, Kinky cited where France had quoted the list and demanded the Committee fix things so he could point to that as proof the Committee had done something to help China. Comprehension dawned, and Europeans understood the man to mean that whatever went wrong was, by definition their fault, not China's. China's Kuomintang government had been in power for one year, and was anything but comfortably settled in.

News from the Americas was handed to predawn New York newsies at about lunchtime in Geneva. The previous day's papers were all the delegates had for news from The West. Under DECISION IN BORDER ARREST IN FEW DAYS-- The 22JAN Montreal Gazette reported U.S. Customs and Immigration officers had grabbed and arrested a Canadian citizen about 3 feet into the Canadian side of the border. The fellow was accused of smuggling undocumented Greeks into the USA, and stepped past the door of a store located right on the border before being tackled, cuffed and dragged Stateside.(link) On the same page, FOREIGN POLICY IS REVIEWED BY JAPAN PREMIER relates a sobering interview with Baron Tanaka on international issues, most importantly the Japanese presence in Manchuria.(link). Lawrence of Arabia was burned in effigy in Afghanistan, and Canada's representatives to the League of Nations were thanked for their service.

Page 2 related US DRUG ADDICTS BECOMING FEWER--Report To League Urges Control In Foreign Countries To Stop Smuggling... and revealed that one in a thousand Americans were believed to be "addicts."(link) On p29 NEW YORK MARKET CLOSE IRREGULAR means, in Wall Street American, SHARP BREAK WITH 4,897,500 SHARES SOLD (with nary a whisper of the Japanese gentleman giving "strong support to the American idea that there should be limitation of the manufacture of narcotics" 27 pages earlier.) And finally, PRESSURE ON REICHSMARK--Pressure against the German mark, which resulted in a fractional decline in the exchange rate today, was attributed to the easy money rates in the Berlin market. If present conditions should continue for any length of time, many believe that withdrawals of foreign funds from Berlin would develop in considerable volume... By skillful elision this formula transmits the idea that the USA and League threatening to gang up and legislate limits to and regulations hampering production from Germany's pharma industry could have no economic or financial effect whatsoever. After all, it such a consideration were important as a cause of crashes, recessions, unemployment and wars, surely the fact would be included as part of any honest analysis, right? Wrong. Any and all contrarian hypotheses were airily waved away by reference to hypothetical gaps between graphs of interest rate differential equations nobody but the elect would understand even if explained in detail. The same gimmick is successfully applied to this day.

Good reading: Books by Frederic Bastiat, free to download from Project Gutenberg.(link)

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)

Comment at Libertariantranslator or LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

This financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.criseeconomica.com (link)

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Saturday, October 3, 2026

1929 League Opium Meeting 10

Committee members are examining the annual drug reports sent in to the League of Nations, almost all of them from 1927

Geneva, Switzerland, 23JAN1929: Swiss delegate Dr Carrière set the tone by admitting the Swiss figures for morphine were missing, and the Chairman responded by giving the wrong date for the Geneva Drug Convention having come into force as ratified. France's man admitted that there were errors in their figures for heroin imports and blamed it on stocks left over from 1926. Amounts were also misreported in figures for drugs sent from Switzerland to Japanese Kwantung holdings inside China inherited from the Germans as part of WW1 settlements of accounts, but the Japanese representative assured his colleague the figures were correct when viewed from the proper perspective. On the heels of the previous meeting, at which discrepancies large enough to be humorous had come to light, these exchanges led to item 302, namely, speculation as to how the League Secretariat ought to react to clearly incorrect figures in reports handed in. The formula worked out in 1925 did not seem to be working.

Italy's pedantic and excitable Senator took this as his cue to distribute criticism and backed a colleague's suggestion that explanatory footnotes be added by way of interpretation, explaining that he did not wish to bring any reproach upon the Secretariat, then added that qualified technical statisticians ought to be resorted to lest incorrect figures reflect poorly on the quality of the League's work--this while airily endorsing the wisdom of the American-invented Central Board's approach to these measurements as an example worth emulating. Kibitzing for the Opium Section, Prof. Hall pointed out that the discrepancies documents were not publicly circulated, so adverse publicity of some thirty cases was not a pressing concern, and protocol was being followed. Yet Senator Cavazzoni now worried that it would take until 1929--six years from when the Committee had begun its work--for further light on the statistical tables! When India's representative pointed out that Italy's statistical report had arrived several months late, the Senator became sulkily petulant at the very idea that his country might share some of the blame for discrepancies he'd been harping on.

1929 was in fact confirming what everyone conversant with trade in pharmaceuticals had pointed out in 1924! Netherlands representative Van Wettum had been called upon to produce an analysis of the problems confronting coca and cocaine--which the Netherlands had switched to as less exploitative and less harmful than opium the previous century. His plan called for a 10% reduction of production (to humor rabid Americans) but with a European-style cartel and no competition from synthetic cocaine--a regular Adam Smith form of mercantilism. Europeans who drafted alternative plans did not expect coercion to elicit honest statistics. Other Europeans drew up plans and draft treaties, all of which fell shy of American demands.

On 25MAY1923 Bishop Brent addressed the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee and said: "In this or any other matter pertaining to human welfare, if the question of revenue or financial profit is allowed to play any part whatever except that of the lowly servant of science, morals and religion, it becomes a debauching influence, corrupting men's minds and perverting their morals. … Money is indeed a root of all evil. As with individuals, so with Governments." This was his way of warming up the room in preparation for the American pitch to cure Europeans and Asians the way American waterboarding cured the Filipinos... Europeans understood that fanatics were in charge of America. On 05FEB1923 the Opium Advisory Committee 4th Session report containing talk of limitation of production was approved by the League Council. The 4th Session had begun 04JAN1923 and German hyperinflation accelerated the entire time before Brent's ravings had removed all doubt. Germans recalled that since passage of the antidrug Jones-Miller Act of 26MAY1922, Versailles Article 23 was being weaponized the way the Hague Convention was weaponized after the antidrug Harrison Act of 1914--then came World War One.

Interesting reading and media: Opium to Java by James Rush I read long ago. Google now has it posted as a Google book.(link) I was surprised to learn that colonial Dutch became disillusioned with revenue opium as a "reproach to a Christian nation" and switched to coca shrubs transplanted from South America as a replacement crop. National Geographic covered Netherland Indies coca production and Balkan opium farming all the while Sino-American prohibition campaigns caused economic and political crises escalating into World War 1. This included articles by Herbert Hoover. Yet search engine bots are programmed to feign incomprehension and sideline searches on the subject. I finally queried "Was any coca ever grown on Java?" The spell was broken and revealed this Youtube video:

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)

Comment at Libertariantranslator or LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

This financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.criseeconomica.com (link)

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

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