Connecting Prohibition, Crash, War dots

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 Wealth of Nations.(link) As Smith cannily observed "We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen."

So ingrained by conditioning is blindness to the prima facie obviousness that banning trade brings Panics, Crashes, Depressions and War that the very suggestion that Prohibitions on commerce--be it of liquor, drugs or books--elicits an almost instinctive skeptical reaction worthy of the attention of the son of a deputy opium inspector second-class. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was in fact just such a son and in 1930 wrote a book the publication and sale of which was soon banned throughout the British Empire.(link) This blog mostly unfolds a tale of the whys and wherefores of this censorship. You and I are examining the facts it conditions people to ignore by methods proven to sell liquor and cigarettes.(link)

The chart above claims that German production of morphine fell in 1930 to a level lower than the previous five years of rapid population growth. Nobody mentions that American prohibition laws urged ahead by Chinese trade boycotts as of 1905, had expanded internationally via the Hague until war exploded in morphine-exporting Europe. The Versailles surrender treaty operated by the League of Nations took over drug cartel prohibitionism--in its Article 23--and also demanded Germany pay war reparations to the European victors. German morphine found its way to the USA as a replacement for alcohol, but those clandestine exports were hampered by the establishment of the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs on 15DEC1920, the day before liquor was banned by U.S. law. The subsequent  Jones-Miller Act of 26MAY1922 creating Federal Narcotics Control Board soon played a role in wrecking the German economy.(link) Government schools elide these laws and focus instead on French incursions into Germany's Ruhr region and the horrors of hyperinflation.(link) 

America's War On Beer and Gin led to enforcement of the Prohibition Amendment via the Income Tax Amendment. This method leaked over into so-called "narcotics" as of 16MAY1927, and all German industrial output fell sharply, as the 1927 morphine bar shows on the League of Nations chart above. That same politician, Wesley Livsey Jones, wrote a law making even beer offenses a felony in March 1929, one month after the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meeting in Geneva spent two weeks in lively discussions of ways to enforce prohibitions on the "illicit" traffic in what it called "dangerous drugs." 

The word CRASH described the U.S. financial situation in Time Magazine in its 21APR1929 edition.(link) But the word CRASH soon returned to journalistic vernacular, for the Opium Advisory Committee turned its report and recommendations over to the League of Nations which met on 02SEP1929. These came complete with Chinese recommendations that drug manufactures be limited by government fiat and that China be given a world monopoly on producing opiates. Three days earlier, talks on war reparations payments at the Hague were concluded. Check any interactive chart and you can see that stock prices changed from rising to falling on 03SEP1929. There are lots more of these examples. 

Good reading: The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs, Kindle Edition, by Brian Inglis. This brilliant Irishman assembled a fluent and readable history of the way prohibitionism extended its reach throughout all global trade and production. (link)

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the 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)

Behind the Scenes in 1929

 

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 that confessed to being a cocaine producer--for which non-addictive stimulant there was a "huge black market" all over Asia. That same Advisory Committee met again January 20th to February 14th 1930, this time entertaining suggestions that China ought to be given a global monopoly on production of opiate narcotics. Is it any surprise that Japan and Germany were the first countries to abandon the League of Nations and join together as allies against all who supported the global exportation of Sino-American prohibitionism?

The mechanism was similar to that of the Panic of 1837. China in 1936 sent away the British dealers and Britain liquidated American bonds to finance the Opium Wars. Similarly, the Crash of 1929 turned into an avalanche in 1930, the year , and the export of violent prohibitionism blew up the German economy with the Convention on the Limitation of "narcotics", i.e. EVERYTHING, which hit in June-July 1931. Wars are born from that. See what a Republican congressman published that month: 

See 16JUN1931, Germany in collapse (link)

Government Control of Narcotics Urged as Crime Deterrent--by HAMILTON FISH JR., 43, former NY assemblyman elected to Congress for NY District 26 in 1919, and has been returned each term since. 

"The illegitimate drug trade should be out in the same category as piracy, calling for the full exercise of naval, military and police powers of all nations to combat its spread as was done against the slave traffic. 

In spite of pious pronouncements by civilized nations, the main difficulty in combatting the illicit traffic in narcotic drugs is the apparent willingness on the part of certain nations to produce or manufacture narcotics many times the amount required for the legitimate use of science or medicine. The flow of dangerous, habit-forming illicit narcotics of Europe and Asia into the United States continue in spite of international agreements and pious pronouncements. 

There are a number of large international drug rings operating in the United States, backed by ample capital and guided by shrewd and unscrupulous minds. The profits are so enormous that the underworld crooks do not hesitate to take any kind of risk to smuggle narcotics, easily secured from factories in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Turkey and Japan, into the United States and then through well-developed operations to deliver those evil drugs into every state and city in this country. 

The crime wave which has assumed such terrible proportions in the United States is largely attributable to smuggled heroin and cocaine and other vicious drugs. One-third of all the inmates of our federal prisons are addicts or violators of our narcotics laws. It is estimated by reliable authorities that 50% of the crimes of violence can be traced back to some form of drugs. 

Every available weapon must be brought into use against these smugglers in habit-forming drugs, particularly against the higher-ups in the big international dope rings, who are worse than murderers. /meaning worse than prohibition agents/ We have remained silent and have tolerated their insults and their criminal activities far too long. 

The narcotics traffic is world-wide and it is essential that there should be unity and cooperation among the great nations, in order to secure enforcements and control the manufacturer of habit-forming drugs in all nations of the world by their own governments. [this while the Narcotics Limitation Convention is riveted onto Germany, the world's largest exporter of heroin, now in demand thanks to the prohibition of beer and wine as narcotic liquor. Fish made a similar speech over the radio May 28. Hitler met Baron August von Finck and raised 13 million Reichsmarks February 3.] 

This hit the news while the Convention on the Limitation of Narcotic Drugs was targeting Germany, the world's largest exporter of heroin, a product for which there was an exaggerated demand thanks to the prohibition of beer and wine as narcotic drinks in the USA. Fish had delivered a similar speech on May 28, and throughout the Hoover administration he had been agitating in Congress and in meetings with the America's first Quaker President. 

Almost a year earlier, the US signed an extradition treaty with Germany, clause 7 of which provided for extradition for piracy and 28 for crimes or incidents of drug trafficking. Bigwigs, even millionaires from Germany's chemical and pharmaceutical companies could have been dragged off in handcuffs to the fanatical United States if Deputy Fish had been taken at his word. 

Hitler had a meeting four months earlier, in February, with Baron August von Finck (of Merck) and raised 13 million Reichsmarks for his election campaign.(link) The Baron's son was one of the biggest backers financing the current German party of positive Christianity during the rise of Donald Trump. (link) Germans refer to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as a Nazi-fascist party, and rarely miss a chance to embarrass the U.S. Libertarian Party--infiltrated since May 2022 by the prophets of von Mises---whose institute is also funded by billionaires descended from Nazis.(link) U.S. meddling had some really unexpected consequences then, and now. 

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Good reading: The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs, Kindle Edition, by Brian Inglis. This brilliant Irishman assembled a fluent and readable history of the way prohibitionism extended its reach throughout all global trade and production. (link)

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the 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)