1931--Germany at the Brink

 

Enormous propaganda efforts were invested in making making it appear the financial collapse of the world's largest pharma and chemical industries just happened to coincide with the 1931 League of Nations dope convention throttling Germany's production and output (link)

On 12JUL1931, German officials realized the failure of the Damstadter und Nationalbank could not be concealed. Fortunately, the press refrained from linking the Nordwolle wool mills collapse with the tons of morphine loaded into packed woolens aboard the USS Milwaukee at the nearby port of Hamburg, just as they mentioned no such link with the Bank of United States and Alesia dope cargo. Still, the news article announcing US READY TO ASK BIDS FOR 11 WAR VESSELS could hardly have been reassuring.(link) Experienced observers had to realize their current fix had grown out of China's bid for U.S. assistance enforcing prohibition worldwide after witnessing the way Teddy Roosevelt's gendarmes struggled to dry up Filipino dope dens and saloons. But where was the gratitude the Filipinos owed Uncle Sam for striking off the come-alongs after th' crool hand iv Spain forged man'cles f'r their limbs? American prohibition violence had after 32 years only outraged the locals. This much was clear from reading the papers:

STONES HURLED AT AMERICANS--Filipinos Attack Soldiers As Manila Stages Independence Demonstration, hollered the headlines! Two U.S. Senators busily making speeches in favor of Filipino independence were spared the indignity of dodging brickbats.(link) Yet on that same page Miss Minnie Fox swears by the Natex nostrum she got from her local drug dealer.(link) When the 1905 China boycott hit These Sovereign States, President Teddy and his partisans went into high gear. Magazines cranked out Yellow Peril opium gangs and patent medicine advertiser intrigues. As a warning to Americans counterfeiting Bayer drug labels, he proclaimed the USA would stoutly defend German patent rights... IN CHINA! (link) Treaties established tariffs and restricted a laundry list of drugs and liquor strengths in European colonies scattered across Africa. Then came a law poisoning industrial alcohol, followed by the 1906 Food & Drugs law that caused a Panic and recession as of 1907. The list of  examples of how violent prohibition laws had only led to crime, crashes and banking panics was, by 1931, growing uncomfortably long. To Germany, the League's lust for lawmaking demands was by now looking pretty insatiable.(link) 

In the past couple of years Germany had, by way of appeasement:
Passed the Law on Traffic in Narcotics of 10DEC1929, two months after Harry Anslinger was made assistant prohibition commissioner. 
Decreed addition of a long list of "narcotics" nine days later, 
Added two more drug enforcement decrees 01APR1930, 

Added yet another raft of drug enforcement measures 14APR1930,
Imposed a voucher tax on suppliers of "narcotics" 10DEC1930--three months after elevating Harry Anslinger to head the brand new Bureau of Narcotics.(link) 
Issued strict drugstore regulations limiting prescriptions and sales of anything containing "narcotics," a characterization Americans appeared bound to apply to beer, wine, schnapps and cigarettes any day now!

That year, irritated German voters made Hitler's anti-Versailles Treaty nationalsocialist party the second-largest in the land--and still there was no letup in U.S. and League of Nations pressure for added restrictions on comparatively harmless hemp.  Worst of all, the same coalition of prohibitionists was now, in July 1931, threatening to demand strict regulation and reporting on codeine--an actual addictive narcotic opiate made from morphine. But after looking at the rest of the list, Germans refused to believe even that. So here it was, July 12, the economy crumbling, and Herbert Hoover was baiting a trap with a King's-X moratorium that might postpone the $15 million reparations installment falling due three days hence. Something was abut to give...

Good reading: The Book of Why, The New Science of Cause and Effect, by Judea Pearl.(link) One of the characters appearing as a sort of villain is Francis Galton(link) who also appears in my translation of Monteiro Lobato's classic novel of racial clashes.(See below) Causality, it turns out, has only recently begun to obtrude upon the notice of ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls. Prohibitionists found in statisticians a horde of allies eager to elide under oath in furtherance of murder and robbery under color of law. Their mantra, "correlation is not causality" is the smokescreen intellectuals of the looter persuasion obligingly generate by way of licking the hand that feeds them. Behind it, Republicans and Democrats airily dismiss all evidence of your senses by waving toward mystical and imaginary "business cycles." Those cycles, they explain, make crashes, banking panics, hyperinflation, recessions and unemployment, inevitable, natural manifestations of the inscrutable will of God. All financial ruin and poverty that has invariably sprung up in the wake of officially sanctioned licenses to kill over plant leaves and corn squeezings since the invention of sumptuary laws is, by their lights, mathematically proven to be sheer coincidence. Any misapprehension on your part is a mistake that could land you in the poorhouse, in jail, languishing in purgatory or regretting forever in the lambent flames of Hell, say the pundits of prohibition. If you like curve-fitting and Bayesean approaches to probabilistic inference--or if you occasionally feel the temptation to question ad baculum authority--this book's for you!

 

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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