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)