Encircling Germany, March 1931

 

In March 1931, Republican judges again declared that beer would remain a felony, even if tens of thousands had to be robbed, jailed and/or shot to attain this noble ideal. Prisoners now exceeded the entire populations of three States. What, then, of German hopes to keep codeine and cocaine unregulated so as to pay war reparations with export profits? The clipping below, from when one American penny was worth six-and-a-quarter-MILLION paper marks, explains how other drugs boomed as beer was banned.

“Obviously the creation of a world sentiment against dope is the tremendous task upon which our government has embarked.(link)” Smuggling submarines were photographed in the Hudson river 8 months later.(link) The same Norwalk paper on p.4 tells of Connecticut patrons pelting narcotics agents with brickbats.

By 07 February 1931 the League of Nations Opium advisory Committee had wrapped up its 44 meetings. Only two of which were closed to the public. To this day the League is not very forthcoming about what specifics were discussed. However, the 1930 sessions are amply documented and detail all plans for worsening an existing global market crash, chain-reaction of domino-effect banking panics and liquidity collapse of fractional-reserve banking systems. All was made possible by existing legislation banning beer, wine, liquor, opiates, entheogens, stimulants and all manner of surgical analgesics, thereby increasing their selling prices fourfold. What was now afoot was a plan to export violent Chinese fanaticism and once again so upset the economies of central Europe as to guarantee a second World War. The same process that made WW1 inevitable as of 1912 was shuffled and redealt in 1931–now worsened by lawfare, rent-seeking competitors and efforts to throttle ALL potential competition from Germany and elsewhere.

On 01MAR1931 the Chicago Tribune reported actual civil war in cocaine-exporting Peru, with four dead in the first battle. Germany was an important customer to Peru, whose market had been dwarfed by huge coca plantations in the Dutch colonies of Java and Sumatra. The Dutch replaced addictive narcotic crops with coca shrubs beginning in the 1890s–as a Christian reform measure. The island of Formosa, now Taiwan, was then under Japanese control; there too were plantations of both types of cash crops. Only after alcohol was banned in Georgia did a coca wine company change products, adding a pinch of coke to a non-alcoholic soft drink called Coca Cola. Prohibitionists who enacted the wine ban now insisted the violence of law be inflicted on this replacement soft drink. Officiousness cascaded into a general witchhunt by frustrated prohibitionists looking for new things to ban. Past crusades to have people handcuffed over cigarettes and Sunday baseball were not resonating with voters.

The Hoover administration pressured the League of Nations to export American bans on cocaine, hence the disorder in Peru. Britain’s Indian opium cartel and Egyptian revenue office wanted cannabis banned because it was cheap non-addictive; cocaine, they feared, would cause a trade imbalance such as ruined China in the Opium Wars. Salt the Brits admired as habituating enough to declare a government revenue monopoly in India and many African colonies. Revenue officers gleefully arrested Gandhi and Arab traders for collecting and transporting naturally-occurring salt!

As March headlines blared news of mostly Russian Bank Of United States officers’ criminal indictments, Soviet Russia was balefully regarded for drug-related reasons. Dziga Vertovs’ 1929 movie, Man With A Camera, showed Soviet barmaids popping bottlecaps off of foaming bottles of beer, a passenger snorting a huge packet of white powder at a train station and flashes of stashes of layouts that could only be narcotics (this in the uncut version). Technically-trained Americans disillusioned with religious hatred of laissez-faire started a wave of emigration to the Soviet Union.

New York Russians owned the Bank of United States Milton Friedman imagined to have failed because of anti-Jewish discrimination. The BUS specialized in major narcotics defendants, convicts, bought judges and dead witnesses as depositors and loan customers. Its failure coincided with federal agents staking out a half-ton of morphine unloaded nearby off the French liner Alesia. Friedman and Schwartz might profitably have considered officious confiscation in addition to ku-klux plotting. Indeed, a January 7 NY Times piece described Prohibition and Soviet bigotry as pretty much the same thing. A March series in the Berkeley paper glumly outlined the Bolshevik dictatorship while Treasury agents arrested Russian nationals over counterfeiting, while banks all over failed. Daily news coverage popularized the BUS bank fraud case and tax charges against Capone outfit members. German misgivings increased each time those articles appeared on the same page.

To Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger’s delight, President Hoover on 02March sent Congress a Supplemental Estimate of Appropriation of $35,000 in gold to fund U.S. Participation in the League of Nations Conference on Limitation of the Manufacture of Narcotic Drugs. Former Reichsbank president Schacht the following day demanded revision of all war debts and restitution of Germany’s former colonies in Africa.(link) March 7 & 8 Chicago papers reported that Europeans owed $29 billion to the USA–which had lost another $4 billion trying to enforce prohibition laws. Russia, unrecognized and acting miffed, threatened to boycott all goods made in America. Hoover’s envoys to the Geneva antidope convention, set for May 27, 1931, were Harry Anslinger and John Caldwell, of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a eugenicist in charge of “farms” for narcotic reconcentrados and yet another narcotics commissioner.

Reefer madness “awareness” propaganda suddenly poured from newspapers; Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone assured readers that “that prohibition is a good thing” and that “the alleged depression is the result of dishonesty.” German National and International Socialists took to shooting each other down in Germany and convicts set fire to a crowded Illinois prison. A tiny article in that issue reported renewed research on mustard gas.(link) As a wake-up call to Americans and Germans alike, Dr Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia U. told Californians prohibition laws had created a tax-free $4-billion industry and suggested repeal. Americans reflected that untaxed evangelists had started prohibition, while Germans recalled how American tax liability for illegal profits had, in May of 1927, suddenly impoverished most European securities markets.(link) With the 1930 drug extradition treaty in place, German pharma moguls in America could not escape prohibition’s jurisprudence by returning to Europe.

Already a third of all suicides in Europe were Germans, so, to turn up the pressure, a propaganda movie in German and English, “The Seas Beneath” was released as a nostalgic WW1 flick. A deck-gun armed decoy Q-boat tows a hidden U.S. submarine to lure and ambush a U-boat.(link) Over 95% of all alcohol consumed in America was by 1929 made from corn sugar glucose. By 1924 reporters knew that cocaine and narcotics were delivered to hovering Rum Row ships to augment that one-twentieth of the liquor market share. After all, a German submarine brought drugs to the neutral USA in 1916. There were hundreds of European submarines afloat and able to deliver additional drugs to Rum Row vessels, even if the Hudson River was now off-limits.(link) *-*-*

Good reading: CONVENTION FOR LIMITING THE MANUFACTURE AND REGULATING THE DISTRIBUTION OF NARCOTIC DRUGS OF JULY 13TH, 1931. Geneva, October 1937. I bought this from a seller in Holland about 15 years ago. It gives a paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown of this internationalization of the Harrison Act the U.S., China, and League of Nations struggled to fasten onto Germany and Japan. Andrew Jackson would have quipped: “Well, they’ve got their convention; now let’s see them enforce it.”
INTERNATIONAL NARCOTICS CONTROL by L.E.S. Eisenlohr is a Reagan-era “informative” breakdown of history and background for efforts to salvage Comstock and Prohibition legislation following ratification of the 21st amendment and Libertarian voting. Both tomes blankly ignore the possibility that laws seizing banks, warehouses, ships, real estate, homes and other assets could in any way affect securities markets, fractional-reserve banking, and monetary stability–to say nothing of causing World Wars!

The Forbidden Game—A Social History of Drugs, by Brian Inglis, fills this gap.(link) Brian also wrote The Opium War, relating how Chinese prohibitionism versus British Indian rent-seeking caused economic collapse and war.(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)

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form