Before the 1987 Crash
Few noticed when California Governor Ronald Reagan banned LSD in 1967. An easily-transported half-thimbleful made in Austin or Prague sufficed for some 5000 psychedelic experiences anywhere. But after Reagan became President, LSD was so effectively suppressed that primitive drugs moved into its vacant market niche, making use of existing trade networks. Middle-eastern countries such as Afghanistan and Iran ramped up narcotics production, and WW2-era poppy fields in Sinaloa, Mexico, were replanted with little delay. Dollars, spies and soldiers flowed abroad, overdose death rates grew exponentially. Totalitarian socialist congregants in South American countries--impoverished by U.S.-imposed prohibition laws--made hay with the fund-raising opportunities offered by fake U.S.-bought elections. American voters whose loved ones were incarcerated or dead at the morgue meanwhile supported Libertarian Party efforts to repeal deadly and economically destabilizing prohibition laws.
Politicians of both looter parties struggled to ignore leveraged Libertarian vote clout demanding repeal. This became impossible in November 2016.
Product Comparison: In 1981 a Washington State prosecutor told reporters LSD wholesaled for 40¢ a dose.(link) Cocaine at the time cost about $1000 an ounce, divisible into 50 doses liable to provide several hours' recreation at $20 a dose. In effect, cocaine sold for 25 times the cost of LSD, and so could organize proportionally more crime, bribery, graft, corruption, kickbacks, campaign funding, blackmail and such than amateur LSD markets. Cocaine did not raise challenging philosophical questions. LSD users tended to question the proper function of government and contemplate ethical limitations on the initiation of force. Government testing of LSD as a brainwashing drug revealed the opposite effect. See Blewitt, 49m (link) When they gave it to the soldiers, the first thing the soldiers wanted to do was quit the Army. Ken Kesey was one of those test subjects.
To prohibitionist politicians and the sort of law enforcement officials that organized liquor gangs from 1920 though 1933, cocaine was a godsend! Any sharecropper with some shrubs, kerosene, hydrochloric acid and water can churn out paste using ancient methods--no chemistry degree needed. Superstitious christian coercion again set the stage for organized mischief--this time funding the very communism Congress had defined not as a party, but rather, a conspiracy against the United States in August of 1954.(link) Nixon's Quaker 2.0 Administration declared war on things that cannot surrender, thereby again wrecking the economy and electing the Dems, thanks to its international lynching of all things psychedelic.(link) With this "Psychotropics" ball set in motion, opportunity beckoned. The USSR invaded Afghanistan, Cuba shipped criminals into Florida, and young people in Nicaragua formed guerrilla bands to repel foreign usurpers just as Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick Henry had done centuries before.
Mohammedans, deeply upset by libertarian gains for women as of 1973, conveniently set fire to a US Embassy in Pakistan. In a scene from a Frank Herbert novel a new Mahdi--one Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani, soon added clout to the Billy Graham Crusade to elect Ronald Reagan and put women in their proper places.(link) This Victory of Faith unfolded like a Leni Riefenstahl movie, and the assault-rifle takeover of the Grand Mosque at Mecca, was eclipsed by the kidnapping of U.S. Embassy staff in Iran. Jimmy Carter, who had legalized nothing, was beaten like a yellow dog in the 1980 election.
On 19FEB1980, the 891st meeting of the Commission On Narcotic Drugs met in Hitler's homeland to urge all Governments to implement myriad coercive measures against mostly harmless drugs disliked by Republicans. To this end they asked the Secretariat to demand worldwide forfeiture and confiscation of financial assets (XXVIII) (link) The same mixed-economy media machine that had sprayed forth anti-LSD propaganda also went into action with documendacities against Andean country products.
On March 1, 1980, CBS' "60 Minutes" program set sights on Bolivia, alleged Arce Gomez had drug connections, and included accusations against him by then-DEA chief Peter Bennsinger and U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.(link) This same media crew that aired an attack on Illinois Power's efforts to build its Clinton reactor to generate electricity. Illinois Power filmed the 60 Minutes crew and produced its own documentary exposing lies and fabrications.(link) The important point is that U.S. civilian nuclear power plants, like peyote, marijuana and LSD, have never killed anyone. Time magazine had cocaine on its July 6 cover, disclosed it was not a narcotic and had been sold over the counter in drugstores to popes and paupers everywhere as late as 1906.(link) On a more ominous note, that linked story quoted a cop as saying that if drug money were chased out of south Florida, "the economy would totally collapse."
A recession just then took hold, which would last over a year. Without betraying a hint as to the real cause, a Richmond Federal Reserve pundit reports that "the 1981-82 recession was the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression. Indeed, the nearly 11 percent unemployment rate reached late in 1982 remains the apex of the post-World War II era."(link) To this day none of these economists dares admit that the 1929 Crash and Great Depression had everything to do with prohibitions on drugs and alcohol, or that political pressure to force Germany and Japan to give up their cocaine markets in 1930-1932 led directly to industrial funding of the Hitler party and withdrawal of both countries from the League of Nations.
Good Reading: Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles P. Kindleberger(link) The original struck me as so exploitatively overpriced that I instead invested in a translation--to incidentally help me with my blog in Portuguese.(link) Already I am convinced my first impression was wrong. Of the dozens of writers explaining away the Crash and Depression, only Peter Temin, Tobias Straumann and Herbert Hoover convinced me they understood correctly but were consciously lying--by omission or outright. Kindleberger, on the other hand, has in early chapters avoided the usual arm-waving or socialist sermonizing to which one quickly becomes inured in this field. Rather than sidestep taboo subjects, Kindleberger searches everywhere for odd and poorly-understood panics, crashes, depressions, recessions and calamities--many of which were entirely new to me. His approach is skeptical; he contrasts bad explanations so that the weakesses in one call into relief the problems with another.
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
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
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