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Showing posts from August, 2024

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...

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 cou...