Making Germany Prohibitionist, June-July 1931

 

Both the USA and Germany looked for third parties as alternatives to Prohibition Crashes.

Newspapers struggled to ignore the pro-repeal Liberal Party and focused on Fabian Socialist insurgents. German papers tried to ignore the Nazis. But as foreign prohibitionist pressures resumed and economic recession deepened, Hitler's truculence found larger audiences. Here are some highlights:

11JAN1929: On the day "Narcosan" was shown not to cure opiate addiction, a League Health Committee Secretary General circular letter demanded that any manufacturer that had produced benzoylmorphine--or any other black market ester of morphine--be stripped of its license to operate. This became official in February 1931. 
15JAN1929: League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meeting opens in Geneva, mail-order drugs crackdown demanded worldwide by the USA. Before the 1929 Geneva meeting ended, Francisco Ferrari's company was named as a source of some seized cocaine. Ferrari was dead 2 days before the Opium Advisory Committee session closed February 2. Ferrari's acquaintance, wealthy physician Charles Brancati, vanished ,and the "City Trust" scandal was in New York news for the next several years. 

02SEP1929: China paid $100,000 into the League of Nations for dues in arrears as the major session opened, and supported the Jan-Feb Commission decision to press for limiting drug production worldwide. Stock markets began falling that same week as League of Nations prohibition plans were unfolded. To deflect suspicion that violent sumptuary laws making a crime of voluntary production and trade might weaken the "capitalist market economy," screeching criticism of proposed changes in tariff regulations (not rates) blared in headlines as one of many convenient distractions. 
24SEP1929: The League of Nations Assembly adopted the resolution to limit production of some drugs to amounts needed for scientific and medical purposes. Hand-wringing over countries victimized by the drug traffic was added for effect, but thanks to leaks, all U.S. markets had from from rising to falling 3 weeks prior. Nazi riots promptly broke out in Berlin; Goebbels' car was attacked and the Nazi representative saved by police. Newspapers were full of stock market drops the following day.  Oddly, Heimwehr Nazis had scuffled with Austrian adversaries 21FEB1929, shortly after the League Opium Advisory Committee called its Geneva meeting to order. 

23OCT1929 a bank-financed smuggling syndicate was busted at Atlantic Highlands, stock prices plummeted, and federal agents became keenly interested in encrypted references to drug deliveries off Rum Row. Senator Millard Tydings meanwhile called attention to the 800 people killed by police in prohibition enforcement. December 2 papers showed a sharp break on German stock exchanges, then on 10DEC1929 Germany meekly passed a tough-on-drugs law banning harmless marijuana at Egypt's insistence. Germany imported heroin from anti-pot Egypt, so the German drug bill was re-drafted to placate that heroin supplier. 

All through 1930 Herbert Hoover's army of drug dragoons maneuvered to infiltrate the League of Nations Opium Advisory Board. Of the twelve members, seven were from opiate-producing nations. In February, 1930 a movement took shape to pack the committee with members representing "victim" countries. A year later, 07FEB1931, an altered Committee packed with "victims" and U.S.-funded infiltrators made its move after a year of snooping. The snooping used paid snitches to rat on cartel practices. The 423-page volume for 1930--also a record year for Hitler speeches, incidentally--took scurrilous aim at competent firms like Sandoz of Switzerland to taint with insinuations. The fact that Sandoz had acted openly and in compliance with Swiss law only convinced D.C., Mississipi and Alabama Baptists that they--not Swiss voters and legislators--needed to rewrite those foreign laws to conform to America's gangster-driven prohibitionism. Client Naarden had acted in accordance with Dutch law. At the 1931 session Dutch Chairman van Wettum was replaced by a gentleman from Portugal. Committee membership increased 40% from 15 to 25 not including alternates. Advisors, L Arthur Lyall and a blacklisting Rotterdam police chief name of Sirks, functioned as shrill prohibition moles installed way back in 1927. 

Drug producers missed no opportunity to shift the subject away from addictive narcotics by dragging the coca or hemp herrings across the thread of discussion. Bulgaria was surprised, yet scolded nonetheless, for not recording marijuana--known to be perfectly healthy and harmless especially in contrast to the gin and tobacco nobody mentioned nor discussed. Most instances of irregularity were alleged to have occurred in the mid- to late 1920s, and usually contained no clue to reveal if alleged "narcotics" were truly stupefiants, relatively benign non-habituating stimulants or simple hemp. Germans participating in the meeting smelt multiple rats by the second week of June, 1931. 

Cocaine production had shifted from Dutch Indonesia to Formosa--now Japanese Taiwan--and UK authorities feared a trade imbalance should that pesistalsis-inducing stimulant find footing among millions of constipated opium eaters in British India. Brits had for years assured Indians that eating opium was not habit-forming! Therefore Japan was, in 1931, suddenly blamed for the currency drain. Naturally, Japan's delegates likewise smelt a rat. Rising economic panic fanned by suspicion and recrimination is palpable in news items. 

17JUN1931: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: NARCOTIC CASE SUSPECTS HELD, CABINET IN AUSTRIA OFFERS RESIGNATION, THREE PLANS OFFERED TO CURB NARCOTICS18JUNE1931; Berkeley... US CONSULATE at LEIPZIG IS STONED, Turkish Archives Are Sold As Waste Paper, Curb Depressed on Sluggish Trading. 100 German marks worth $23
17-18JUN1931: NY Times: Increased narcotics traffic activity reported on Pacific coast. German trade in May drops to new low levels.

19JUN1931: SAYS GERMANY FACES NEW CRITICAL PERIOD
20JUN1931 Berkeley Daily Gazette p.1 Year Moratorium in War Debt Payments Debated By Hoover--TWO BILLION INCREASE IN NY STOCKS FOLLOWS PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT (This red herring is the Moratorium on Brains described in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand)

22JUN1931: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette p.1 GERMANY ACCEPTS HOOVER'S PROPOSAL FOR DEBT HOLIDAY

22JUN1931: Unreported, American officials discussed progress of heroin prohibition (link) Some headlines look familiar in 2025: IMMIGRATION PLOT CHARGE TRAPS 13, mostly Japanese (link)

Concealed until end of year: Reichsbank reports $84 million loss of gold for week, making outgo $232 million in 3 weeks. (European investors were not fooled.) 

27JUN1931 Berkeley Daily Gazette: SAYS HITLER LOSING--(link) (American journalists were whistling in the dark, and the NY Times shifted attention to the Atlantic Highlands liquor and drug smuggling trial--some of which is classified to this day)

The German situation suddenly worsened 2 weeks before the League's pharma surrender document would be placed in front of German leaders. Berleley: SF STOCKS DECLINE... BERLIN RIOTERS PROTEST DECREE. Behind the scenes U.S. bureaucrats totted up prohibitionist gains.(link) Dems contemplated with horror the possibility of a second Hoover term.

Practical information: American Citizens Abroad is a pressure group trying to influence politicians into not stomping on Americans living outside These States.(link) They even have two books out on Amazon.(link) As in 1932, and 1972, many Americans unimpressd by Christian National Socialist sumptuary legislation today constitute a new global diaspora. The problem is that realists see Hoover, Nixon, Reagan, Bush² and Trump NOT as free trade champions of individual rights but as girl-bullying Comstock prohibitionists eager to enslave women as breeding dams, and youth as armed crusaders attacking and invading other countries to make the world safe for gin, cigarettes and the DEA. Since boycotts are the normal reaction to nationalsocialism, as in 1933, the Republican branch of the Kleptocracy had to either drop its agenda or use force and finagling to stop money from leaving the USA. I joined ACA because of this, and because by joining I qualified for an account at the State Department Federal Credit Union. With that I could open an account and use a SDFCU debit card to make withdrawals at ATMs much like a Charles Schwab debit card. It's worth looking into. 

Good reading: The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Ben Steil. How many times have you been buttonholed by faith-addled republicans eager to have you believe the Marshall Plan was a joyous declaration of libertarian laissez-faire freeing trade and saving Western Europe from communist starvation? Since my freshman year that lie was repeated to me 413 times in divers formats and platforms. Yet there is some truth to it--provided you define laissez-faire as shooting or jailing queers, pot smokers, women, doctors, youth, beatniks, hippies, brown people and folks of evidently foreign ancestry, and free trade as millions of laws with fines, imprisonment and gunfire backing them--to make everything except and including  gin and cigarettes banned, taxed or subsidized. Compared to interwar Europe, it established a mixed rather than totalitarian command economy, thereby drawing the boiling wrath of all Soviet socialists and a substantial cohort of Tennessee Baptists. The book--so far... it's very long--presents with admirable terseness and objectivity the swampy, clueless morass in which the struggle took place. It is an important slice of history less exciting than the adventures of Sgt. Rock of Easy Company--leaping under a Tiger tank to blow off its treads with a grenade--in adventures that so tingled early childhood. It is the story of the armies that chased, caught and worried German pharma's reaction to Hoover-Anslinger prohibitionism once the damage was done.  I.G. Farben's Golem, the NSDAP, slipped its leash and showed the world what total committment to deadly reprisal force really looks like--and it was not a pretty picture. Warning: Like all such books, this one struggles to convey that the rise of Hitler had nothing to do with America's Christian National Socialist 1931 efforts to coerce German pharma because Demon Rum, Beelzebub's beer, cocaine negro pugilists, opium Chinamen and reefer madness had displaced all notions of reality as she is. But it IS better than other tomes burdened with similar false premises, goodthinkful illusions and slavish conformity to fairy tales and conventional lore. That is the grain of salt with which the book may be safely perused.  

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)

Comment at LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

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)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or www.amigra.us

My financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, is LIBtranslator, readable at libertrans.blogspot.com

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