When prohibition laws collapse the global economy, blame tariffs!
Frankenstein's monster, like the Pure Drug law of 1906, the Hague Opium convention of 1909--even the UK/China Opium treaty signed August 1911 and the second Hague "Opium" (and much else) convention of 1912 seemed to be innocent, childlike creations. Yet the latter, signed in January 1912 brought war to the opium-producing Balkan states and political and financial turmoil to Andean Nations before the ink had dried... then caused WW1. How did all this come about?
American food and drug cranks operating within the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition Party had been galvanized into action after China's 1905 boycott caused the T. Roosevelt administration to take time out from shooting Filipinos to extend patent protection to German heroin patents in China (lest Americans be tempted to compete). Newspapers and magazines were unstinting in their production of horrifying documendacities, mostly rewrites of Jekyll-and-Hyde, Yellow Peril, Cocaine Negroes and White Girl enslavement by Oriental Tong highbinders with long fingernails--stories to indoctrinate the public into not resisting Harrison Act prohibitionism. The Qing dynasty had come to regard itelf as an Indian reservation in need of treaties and troops to exclude foreign drug bootleggers, and used other trade restrictions to enlist deadly force backed by the rest of the world. American politicians, unsurprisingly, were eager to enlist. This mania survived the revolution of 1911.(link) Yes, they, and U.S. president Herbert Hoover, called deadly prohibition laws "freedom" and "ordered liberty."
By 1931, German pharma companies were not amused, especially after U.S. theaters began running drug "zombie" movies, and officials loudly threatened to forfeit already seized German industrial assets in custody of the Alien Property Custodian since the previous war. Americans stood poised to grab additional assets and extradite Germans the way they were seizing domestic homes, factories, warehouses, ships, cars & trucks and filling prisons over beer, wine & "liquor"--all on the presumption that these things were addictive narcotics and the cause of all previous economic troubles and wars.
Discussions by the Opium Advisory Committee at the League of Nations in Geneva had in 1929 and 1930 already formulated plans, complete with absurd justifications, for hobbling and dismembering German pharma cartels including I.G. Farben--the world's fourth-largest company. The previous war, sparked by weaponized sumptuary legislation, had burdened Germany with war reparations payable to its foreign competitors in precisely those industries. Since powerful interests derive no benefit from disclosures of this sort, headlines from newspapers and official sources published at the time may convince the evidence-oriented reader that none of this is fiction.
02JUN1931: Grave
crisis develops in German affairs from withdrawal of foreign capital and loss
of gold. German bonds drop. /"narcotics" Limitation Convention affecting German
heroin, codeine, cocaine production expected to be signed in six weeks/ (NYT 12/31/31 23 recap)
Government's 2nd narcotics farm prison will accommodate 1000. (NYTi 6/2/31 60:2)
TURKEY ASKS MONOPOLY BE GRANTED TO CENTRAL FACTORY F/ MORPHINE & COCAINE in proposal that League make narcotics... (NYTi 6/3/31 10:4)
TURKS URGE LEAGUE TO MAKE NARCOTICS Ask That Monopoly Be Granted f/ a Central Factory f/ Morphine and Cocaine SHARE OF CAPITAL OFFERED Hasan Bey Says His Country Would Find it Difficult to Adhere to Any Other Scheme by Clarence K Streit GENEVA June 2 ...Turkish delegate, Hasan Bey... [to handle entire world's production; opposed, however, to restrictions on codeine as it is harmless, supports Argentine proposal f/ attacking the narcotic evil through the addicts themselves; Richmond Hobson recommends traffickers be treated as pirates, Madeleine Dotty makes pitch; G Dequidt f/ French antinarcotic org; Mgr Beaupin of Catholic Union of Int'l Studies] (NYT 6/3/31 10)
03JUN1931: Germany announces drastic tax increase, budget cuts. (Hoover 1931 1976 662) The Herbert Hoover papers are intermittently online.(link) With regard to the German crisis that coincided with the signing of the 1931 Geneva Convention on the Limitation of Narcotic Drugs, the President said: (footnote 1) "On July 13 and 14, 1931, the German Government closed all stock exchanges and all banks except the Reichsbank. The holiday ended on July 15, but reopening was accompanied by
stringent restrictions on withdrawals and foreign exchange transactions."(link) Observe that America's Dry Hope Hoover makes no mention whatsoever of German politicians being pressured with American help into signing a financial death sentence for their pharmaceutical industry. With this kind of bald-faced elision standing in for transparent honesty, is it any wonder disclosure of these omitted coincidences comes as a surprise to readers educated in government schools? To add to the confusion, the online edition linked is NOT paginated like the 1976 edition I bought from the Hoover Museum in Iowa.
[30] The indictment was returned June 5, 1931, and after counsel appeared for appellant [Al CAPONE] he pleaded guilty on June 16. The cause was first continued until June 30, and again to July 30, on which last date the court informed appellant that he would be subjected to all proper questions, whereupon, on motion of his counsel and by consent of the court, appellant withdrew his plea of guilty and entered a plea of not guilty, and the cause was continued to September 8, and on September 10 it was set for trial on October 6. (Capone v. United States, 2/27/32; 32)
06JUN1931,
Berkeley Daily Gazette p.1. CAPONE MAY FACE DRY LAW CHARGES (link)... REDUCTION IN
REPARATIONS SOUGHT BY GERMANY (link) Note also the opium seizure in SF on the same page.
06JUNE1931: Hoover
claims Bruning in London states Germany needs help. (Hoover 1931 1976 665)
6/6/31: Hoover entertains Rev & Mrs Billy Sunday. (Hoover 1931 1976
751)
07JUN1931: HITLER speech Chemnitz. At the
Südkampfbahn in front of around 16,000 brownshirts and Hitler Youth boys.[20]
Hitler was recorded for the first time on sound film. /AP movie 36 days before drug convention signing gives short snatch/
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38zAGP85UnI)
Next issue will cover more news ading up to the funding of Christian National Socialism in response to U.S. pressure to export prohibition laws all over the globe in June-July 1931.
Good Reading: Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, by Robert Greenfield. This descendant of a Kentucky governor and self-taught chemist produced the LSD that made the Monterey Pop Festival such a world-shaking event. The author's careful research produced a panoramic story, deep and wide, of the man behind San Francisco's Owsley acid legends. Unmentioned is the fact that to this day there is not a single record of anyone anywhere having died of an LSD overdose. America's overdose epidemic began after Nixon-Reagan laws and the 1971 drove the colorless, odorless, nearly invisible entheogen off of world markets. Nixon's 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, signed at Vienna, Austria coincides with the geometric increase in deaths from addictive narcotics that to this day still plagues America and many other parts of the world.(link) But it is a good book, definitely worth reading and a valuable contribution to the recorded history of Woodstock Nation and the formation of the Libertarian Party.
Get the big picture in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.
Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)
ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the Political Asylum 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)
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the adventures of a Rio de Janeiro man-about-town and the beautiful daughter of an elderly scientist–touting alcohol prohibition, eugenics and racial collectivism–in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
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...
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...
Herbert Hoover tosses Moratorium Bait to Europeans The Great War of 1914-1918 resulted in the Versailles surrender treaty and several Armistice agreements, all of them bristling with references to chemical drugs and narcotics nobody ever mentions. The Versailles treaty also demanded that Germany pay for damage done by WW1. The US refused to charge Germany reparations but did expect repayment of loans taken by many European nations during that war. Those worthies in turn demanded the German reparations out of which they imagined they'd pay those loans outstanding. Thirteen years later Germans and everyone else were trying everything to get out of those payments. Herbert Hoover "seen his chance" to fasten on another narcotics convention building onto seldom-mentioned narcotics limitation plans advanced in 1929 and 1930 within the League of Nations. On 22APR1931 the Hoover Administration roped Germany into an Extradition Treaty not very different from one en...
Comments
Post a Comment