1929 League Opium Meeting, afternoon of 24JAN

 

Florida newspaper story on a leaf that was unfamiliar in USA until President Harding signed a tariff treaty with China on 20OCT1920.   

The afternoon of 24JAN1929 was pretty lackluster. The Secretary reminded the Committee that they had asked the Secretariat to draw up a blacklist of names of companies often mentioned in connection with drug seizures. The rest of the meeting was spent poring over two-year-old reports of searches and seizures. America only imported "gum" opium, an amber version from which poppy leaves have been filtered out, and illegal drugs were packaged in "bindles." Gum opium would become famous in connection with an August raid and a November suicide and bank failure later that year.

 Item 324 covered seizures in China in most of 1927. The report was shot through with glaring errors, and this prompted the Opium Board observer to comment that since the establishment of the Nationalist Government, the Committee had received no details whatsoever of any seizures that had occurred in China. This prompted the Chinese participant to promise to do everything in his power to see that the Nanking Government gave serious consideration to Mr Lyall's remarks. 

Item 326 told of a large quantity of contraband seized in Brooklyn, New York, 14JUL1927, but that story had been in the news at the time. The Times reported that "The authors of the dime novels of a generation ago worked more easily.  They lived in times denuded of smugglers because there were no laws to create smugglers, either under Volstead or the narcotic laws... "

Good Reading: The Cocaine Salesman, by Conny Braam, translated from Dutch by Jonathan Reeder, Haus Publishing, 2011. The story begins Tuesday, 31JUL1917 during WW1 in British troop trenches in France where soldiers, including enlisted schoolteacher Robin Kirkpatrick, are issued pills labeled Forced March before attacking the enemy trenches. Robin is injured in an explosion and becomes one of the wounded veterans with a mask for half a face. Lucien Hirchland is meanwhile a sales rep for the Nederlandsche Cocaine Fabriek, Ltd. supplying pharma companies with product refined from cola leaves grown in Java, an equatorial island NW of Australia.  Other actors include Parke-Davis, Burroughs-Wellcome & Co. Merck and the Dutch member of the Opium Advisory Committee of the League of Nations. This is NOT a pro-stimulant or pro-narcotic novel; lurid product descriptions are taken from the writings of True Believers in prohibition laws and resemble huge doses of amphetamines, caffeine and Dramamine all taken together. The Cartoon above depicts this mindset a decade after the Armistice. The book enables the reader to visualize a world in which war and prohibition laws are both everywhere evident. But what would happen if trade bans were to cause economic collapses? Could those lead to wars?
The author is aware of most of the history of drug trade repression efforts, yet sweetly innocent of the series of Panics, Crashes, Recessions and Wars that accompanied them in exactly the same historical timeframe. To this day British historians cast about for ways to convince people that the Opium Wars had nothing whatsoever to do with Qing Empire efforts to prohibit production of and trade in poppy sap. The Arrow lorcha--its license expired--was boarded at Canton by officious Mandarin inspectors. THAT outrage against British sovereignty--NOT sovereign China's 1836 reaction against the millions of pounds of Indian opium hovering offshore to supply native smugglers--was the casus belli explaining all Wars between Britain and China, then France and China.
By similar logic, the ratcheting of prohibition laws started with opium smokers in conquered Filipino territory, then back-flooded into the USA to soothe China's trade boycott. Bans were then repackaged for export to likewise cripple American pharma's European competitors via encroachment upon The Hague, but historians tell us those did NOT cause the Balkan wars or escalate them into WW1.
The trick is to ignore how the Panic of 1837 followed China's efforts to deport East India Company traders. Then came Britain's rearmament by selling off their American improvement bonds. The Silent Panic followed 1903 opium control snooping in Asia, and 1906 Pure Food and Drug laws loosed the Panic of 1907. Soon China's 1912 import bans and the US Harrison Act combined to kindle Balkan Wars escalating into WW1 in efforts to prevent ratification of the Hague Opium Convention of 1912. Sound farfetched? 

Here's a writer whose work Conny Braam consulted while researching her engaging novel: 

Observe the way Berridge presents World War One as having sprung, fully formed, out of nowhere precisely while pharmaceutical companies were struggling to prevent ratification of the Hague Convention calling for worldwide coercive regulation of their--and Germany's--production and trade.  To her, prohibition, crashes and war share no causal relationship. Other prohibition buffs use similar phrasing. In 1969, Arnold H. Taylor wrote in American Diplomacy and the narcotics traffic, 1900-1939: 

The conference on opium smoking failed, as had previous conferences, to attack the traffic in and use of this type of opium, but out of this failure came the impetus for a concerted effort to deal with the drug problem at what the United States regarded as its source, that is, by limiting production of raw materials. Much progress on a draft convention along this line had been made by the League and the interested states by the time the whole international movement was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. (Taylor 1968  331)  

See? Everything was going just fine, we were pointing guns at people and telling them what they could eat, smoke and drink... and ANOTHER pesky war broke out right in the middle of our good work! 

AI is programmed to give exactly that same answer in 2026: "Prohibition laws cannot directly cause a major economic depression or a war."

The two premises are: 
1. Using force to do good is the solution that will bring peace and prosperity. 
2. Enforcement of laws making a crime of production and trade bring economic prosperity, NOT panics, crashes or War. 

The logical conclusion, if both are true, is that liquor and drug law enforcers with guns can safely fan out indefinitely in all directions. This is because prohibition laws expanding across borders entail no risk whatsoever of economic disaster escalating into war. 

However, if--on checking those premises--one of them is discovered to be false, the conclusion is no longer valid. The Opium Wars proved conclusively that deadly prohibition of voluntary trade does indeed lead to economic depression and international war. It is also is a likely cause of internal revolutions, such as China's silver famine when her laws forbad "dirty" silver paid for opium to return to China. Today we have money laundering and asset-forfeiture confiscation laws.

Observe that Hitler's platform and speeches never advocated drug prohibition; rather, his party consistently called for repeal of the Versailles Treaty, including its Article 23. Soon after Germany was forced to sign a prohibition convention and the economy crashed on 13JUL1931, that party rose to power.(link) 

17APR1947: While Nazi war criminals were being hanged another author wrote: "For a practical definition, if men merely agree that no man or number of men have the right to initiate the use of force against any human being (and that includes the forcible seizure of his property), that they have no such right for any purpose whatsoever, at any time whatsoever—that would be all we need, that would achieve a perfect Utopia on earth, that would include all the moral code we need." 

Ten years later she finished writing her book, which said: 
"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade..." Ayn Rand, 1957 (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?

Está procurando tradutor ou intérprete credenciado?

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.  (NYT 23/JAN/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 of Private Companies—Geneva, Jan22—Japan today notified the League of Nations the manufacture and distribution 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?

Está procurando tradutor ou intérprete credenciado?

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)

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?

Está procurando tradutor ou intérprete credenciado?