1929 Britain, Hongkong Drug Reports

 

On the night of 21-22 November 1928, Shanghai police and a military garrison struggled over 1250 lbs of opium.(link) The next morning NY stock volume broke records with deep crashes and Saturday market closings.(NYT 22, 24NOV1928) The story was suppressed until 20JAN1929 (NYT 8E) but this cartoon scooped the mystery Crash the preceding day in the Berkeley paper.(link)

Opium Section member Duncan Hall, a labour unionist ingratiated with the League, archly brought up a reference, indeed, a "written statement" on consumption of dangerous drugs in Great Britain on Saturday, January 19, 1929 in Geneva. On that note Sir John Campbell (India) harrumphed and pointed to a disclaimer to the effect that no official proof had yet emerged that British drugs had been found in the legislated illegal market. Others present remembered the session four years earlier at which Mrs Hamilton Wright brandished a copy of the Indian Year Book as proof that coca shrubs were cultivated there.(link) That, too, had been scoffed away as "not official." India's "Sir" went on to emphasize "the well-ascertained and unquestioned fact"  that morphine manufactured in India and exported to Britain came under the "strictest and most efficient control" and quite certainly could not find its way into the illicit trade. None of the USA narcs and advisors present confirmed any equivalent American or Chinese view. Both countries were awash in every drug they'd banned via beheadings, torture, dungeons, forfeiture, libel and gunfire. That their prisons bulged with renegade dry snoops, customs inspectors, coast guards and revenue agents might have seemed an uncharitable observation to add. 

Great Britain's member commented on the report's mention of a new English cocaine factory only to emphasize that its output went strictly to medical and scientific uses and the reduction of foreign imports. As to codeine, which to American eyes was Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse in that it dodged Hague and League regulations, its exports, sad for Sir Malcolm to say, had been "found" to be "almost negligible."

Mr Lyall, alert Belgian watchdog for the US at these meetings, pointed to an increase of 4 tonnes of "prepared" opium at Hong Kong, but preferred to blame that on China's lackadaisical approach to sealing its borders against outward leaks. Great Britain's rep pointed out that Hong Kong had been selling opium at bargain prices precisely to undercut and ruin illegal opium dealers by making profits impossible--a strategy implemented in Formosa to the extent of "only" paying 4.3% of the island's revenue. Yet Persia's free market opium undercut even that.  Sadly, smuggled opium in Hong Kong outweighed government product by 500% to 1000%. The situation throughout China was not very different. 

Hungary, one of the belligerent components of the 1914 war against Serbian competitors, had developed an entirely new approach to narcotics from opium. Just as American wet-millers had for decades been pulping starch out of corn to digest into corn sugar glucose, a plant at Büdszentmihaly had since 1927 been busily pulping fresh poppies into a sauce concentrating all opium alkaloids! Just as American wet-millers to this day give out no specifics of their methods, just so the canny Hungarians deflected all inquiries and offered no specifics. Indeed, the existence of poppy crops in Hungary was to the Committee a complete surprise. The Philippine Islands, conquered, occupied and tortured by U.S. forces were unresponsive when it came to answering American demands for specifics. British India, a no less sorely abused White Man's burden, took the opposite approach. Indian reports diluted all relevant data in oceans of prolixity that defied efforts to distill from them any specifics useful to coercive designs. So while 108 pounds of cocaine were deemed sufficient for 320M inhabitants, well over twice that had been impounded by officials, who--by dutifully ignoring Indian Almanacs--promptly speculated out of thin air that 14x as much must surely have slipped past them undetected. 

The Chairman, noting that India's poppy acreage had fallen 40% in 1927, wondered what sort of higher prices replacement crops might be fetching--and just what was Indian dope selling for anyhow? Tobacco was mentioned as one of good, healthy and safe replacements for poppies, but no answers from which quantitative declarations could be extracted were forthcoming. Japan's alert Mr Sato took advantage of this to explain how he too had been unsuccessful in getting from his government any definite facts with which to counter suggestions Japan might have been leaking "dangerous drugs" allegedly found illegally in India. Never did he insult other members' intelligence by suggesting cocaine was a "narcotic," yet he did use that term where opiates were the topic. 

These discussions made it clear that each nation was worried by trade-unbalancing, tariff-evading imports which decreased the revenue obtainable from government sales of those exact same drugs which--when their sales were backed by the deadly force of revenue-seeking Political States--shed the usual associations with such descriptors as traffic, evil, menace, scourge, enslavement, addiction, abuse, poison, venality, corruption, peril, threat, crime, danger, vice and of course helplessness of women and children. Yet those descriptors at that very moment applied to weak beer and watery wine in God's Own United States of America. Lest that seem an exaggeration, here is a schmear of then-current news articles:

20JAN1929 NYT: China: national and Shanghai governments at odds over seizure of 20,000 ozs [1250 lbs] opium; cargo of 770,000 ozs reported landed near Ichang. (NYT 1/20/29  III-8:3)

20JAN1929: NYT--WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 (AP)-- President Coolidge today signed the Porter bill for the establishment of two United States NARCOTIC FARMS for the confinement and treatment of Federal prisoners addicted to the use of habit-forming drugs. (7x as many as imprisoned for alcohol)
20JAN1929: ATTACH FUNDS IN 3 BANKS  Federal Judge Acts in Case of Alleged Illinois Rum Syndicate  CHICAGO, Jan 19  Federal Judge George A Carpenter today issued attachments on $65,000 held in 4 banks at La Salle and Peru, Illinois, by Ugo Ferreni, alleged ringleader of a gang operating a liquor syndicate in La Salle County...

20JAN1929: NYT: Three dry leaders challenge Mellon on $25M dry fund. 2

Chicago gang wars take toll of 125 in 9 years. 16

Martial law proclaimed in Guatemala. 13  

Good Reading: Herbert Hoover memoirs. These are three volumes worth reading to understand the Crash and Depression.(link) Bear in mind that following this analysis of League meetings, Bert Hoover, whom Republicans currently struggle to evade, will on 14MAR1929 be sworn in as President and Great Dry Hope. When I first read them, we had to spend money for these paralelepipedal objects called "books," but you can download the searchable pdfs and go wild looking into the self-deluding mind of the first of two Presidents who were trained engineers. The first volume narrates Hoover's youthful adventures, then travails as the specter of Bryanist Communism, the Income Tax Crash and Depression threatened the sumptuary soil of Young Baron Trump. Hoover was under fire in China during the so-called Boxer revolt, then watched German artillery pound the Allies as a neutral observer behind enemy lines--this before he led housewives in Hooverizing against the Hun! 

Cool stuff: Mellow Mood Imports has clothes 'n stuff you can dance in.(link) Charleston, North Carolina was where attorney Manly Sullivan was charged with violating the National Prohibition Act. He appealed and won on the argument that forcing him to declare and pay taxes on illegal income was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Charleston promptly became America's signature popular dance. This is a family-owned and operated small business in the spirit of American free enterprise. 

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 Libertariantranslator or 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. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, 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 and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

This financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.criseeconomica.com (link)

Go ahead and comment. 

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1929 drug report discussions: Formosa/Taiwan

 

America's parade float self-image, 1929

The League Opium Advisory Committee meeting of 19JAN1929 turned to the drug report for Formosa, then under Japanese control. All participants leaned eagerly forward as Japanese representative Mr Sato disclosed that this report included, for the first time, production of coca leaves and manufacture of crude coca paste. If grown from Javanese coca shrubs these leaves would be twice as strong as Andean coca. Great Britain's representative pointed with puzzlement to the claim that no coca paste, cocaine or coca leaves were exported. Mr Sato assured him that transfers from Formosa to other Japanese Islands weren't exports at all. India's representative congratulated Mr Sato on the drop in opium imports to that island, and others poured on gushing praise. 

Formosa opium imports dropped by more than 90% 

Sato bragged that despite there being no medical cure for opium addiction, the number of Formosan addicts fell. No new habitués were added as old registered addicts died off, and the younger generation had no interest in opium. Discussion then turned to the report from France with not a soul uttering another word about coca or cocaine on the Taiwan that was then Formosa.

France's committee member, aptly named M. Bourgois, whipped out an additional document (O.C.23(m).13), harrumphing that since the French report, new regulations requiring import certificates and licensing for the innocent few had been passed. The Swiss representative wanted to know why there was no mention of heroin and morphine imports. After all, the British representative knew large amounts of good British heroin and morphine had been shipped to France. Here again, technicality swooped to the rescue in that morphine properly doped with acetic anhydride became DIacetylmorphine, that is, heroin--not acetylmorphine as misspelled on customs forms--highlighting the difficulty of getting good help these days. Coincidentally, the same misspelling had vitiated a previous report, as the Swiss gentleman inconveniently pointed out. This would, the Frenchman opined, require adjournment to get his story sorted out. To make matters even more awkward, the Japanese gentleman noticed that, per the new document, France had exported to Japan 50 kilos of pure cocaine, 35 kilos of morphine and 15 more of heroin, yet no such imports showed in any Japanese records. The British representative proceeded to notice that of the 309 kilos of pure English morphine shipped to France, none showed on French import records. The Indian representative noted that the same new document recorded 302 kilos of French heroin sent to Turkey, which kept no Hague and Geneva-approved records--and another 432 kilos to China, where any such imports were forbidden, and wondered why... This scene was playing out in Geneva a full 44 years before the "lawyer" in a Cheech & Chong comedy skit would try to convince a judge his client had simply found a huge pile of dope on the sidewalk and was taking it to the police station!(link) 

The sophisticated Balkan States Chairman suggested this was a good time to examine the British report, giving France's representative some time to come up with a better story. 

That same day's newspapers had nothing to say about the Opium Advisory Committee in Geneva. The NYT reported: Rise expected in federal income tax collections; German Finance Minister Hilferding, discussing Reich budget, warns of deficit. Alien Property Custodian, Howard Sutherland, had turned over to the Rockefeller committee proxies for about 12,000 shares of Standard Oil of Indiana stock
The Rochester paper, under Test Your Poison, announced that pocket tests for liquor are now available… Postmaster Harry S New article about new international airmail, with no mention of drugs sent via mail. ADMIT LIQUOR SALES‑‑12 CLEARED BY JURY‑‑Acquitted of Conspiracy Despite Court's Charge that Hiring Bartender Constitutes Plot...

The Sydney Australia paper bleated of THE AFGHAN REVOLT… JUGO-SLAV DICTATORSHIP...
The Chicago Tribune revealed Federal dry agents find trunk containing 19 bottles Scotch, 6 of gin, 18 of assorted liquors in office of Rep. Denson in Washington, D.C. 
The Berkeley paper announced a future War Reparations Meeting in Gay Paree(link) and TROOPS MARCH ON GUATEMALA REBEL FORCES as that economy collapsed.(link) Even more interesting was a p4 editorial on how the next war would last only minutes: "… Someone in Chicago mentioned a new poison gas… in the possession of all the great nations… so deadly it could wipe out whole armies or cities within minutes. … so easy to wipe out nations and races.(link) Speaking of which...

Good Reading: Expanded Universe by Robert Heinlein.(link) Published back when nuclear survivalism and protection against attacks were finally replacing prayer, abstinence and shocked amazement as defense strategies, Heinlein tells of and reprints a story he wrote as the League prohibitionism FDR inherited from Herbert Hoover was starting WW2. Heinlein had, in youth, seen how Woodrow Wilson inherited Theodore Roosevelt (and Qing China) Hague prohibitionism just as those policies were starting WW1. The story most resembling the above Berkeley paper editorial is Solution Unsatisfactory. Alerted by German atom-splitting experiments, a Hungarian physicist designed and patented a nuclear reactor. He and a German atom-splitting physicist left Germany after the National Socialist party--backed by the German pharma companies the USA and League were irritating--won the election. Nuclear energy became a topic of practical interest in the U.S., and Heinlein wrote a story titled Solution Unsatisfactory in which a secret weapon... um... reviewer... almost gave away the gimmick and spoiled the story! Whew. 

Cool stuff: Mellow Mood Imports has clothes 'n stuff you can dance in.(link) Charleston, North Carolina was where attorney Manly Sullivan was charged with violating the National Prohibition Act. He appealed and won on the argument that forcing him to declare and pay taxes on illegal income was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Charleston promptly became America's signature popular dance. This is a family-owned and operated small business in the spirit of American free enterprise. 

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 Libertariantranslator or 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. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, 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 and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

This financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.criseeconomica.com (link)

Go ahead and comment. 

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

Está procurando tradutor ou intérprete credenciado?

 

The 1927 French Tariff versus Codeine Prohibition

 

1927: The U.S. had been collaborating with China to ban all manner of drugs for 22 years. So France exported a shipment of codeine-laced cough syrup U.S. customs grabbed in New York about the middle of August. 

Out of nowhere came the September 9 news story that France had slapped a 400% tariff on a wide range of American exports already enroute to France.  Word of the cough syrup shipment seizure leaked out in a small newspaper (link) while the League of Nations was in one of its dope temperance conventions in Geneva, Switzerland. American infiltrators were lobbying for explicit international export-import controls to be applied to codeine--a morphine product similar to heroin which the United States shifted to after banning manufacture of heroin itself. Precisely because of those restrictions, many European pharmaceutical companies had switched to producing codeine for the more laissez-faire regulatory treatment this novel morphine derivative enjoyed. 

French officials denied there was any connection between U.S. refusal to give France a refunding loan--in essence refinancing French repayment of money borrowed to fight WW1--and France's sudden markup of tariff rates. British officials had likewise tried since the armistice to make repayment of US loans contingent on German payment of war reparations to Great Britain stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles, but President Coolidge rejected the argument. As we've seen, European pharma companies had for roughly a century sold strong pharmaceuticals all over the world, and resented Dry America's warlike interference in honest trade. But Republicans--traditionally unpopular among American farmers--were tickled to have conquered the Philippine Islands as an Open Door for grain shipments to China. China, desperate to exclude foreign drugs from a market its new government had little choice but to monopolize, sought with America's help to protect its homegrown opium régie from foreign competition. France and other nations were also irritated by Americas non-tariff "sanitary" trade barriers. Even Panama, upset that the Canal Zone had turned into a huge stop, search and confiscate racket, questioned whether that was legitimate sovereignty. But the U.S. had bigger fish to fry and agents already in place to influence the League of Nations. 

A most unusual agent was Rockefeller Jr, participant in a huge empire of glucose corn sugar that provided the raw material for over 95% of all the alcohol consumed in America. The Argo sugar plant next to Cicero is to this day the world's largest food factory. Just south of Chicago across the Indiana State line the American Maize plant supported the region once made wealthy by the Hammond, Indiana Distilling company. Federal agents now swarmed about those and other glucose sugar plants and were asking Al Capone's brother Ralph about his tax returns. Rockefeller calculated it was prudent to curry government favor by donating a couple million dollars to the financially-strapped League of Nations--the sort of thing Andrew Carnegie had been doing for decades. (link) 

The other prong of the pincer movement Commander-in-Chief Coolidge was tightening about France was the American Legion's first conference outside the USA, to be held in Paris. While Geneva filled up with prohibition activists presenting as peace-mongers, Paris began bulging at the seams with the arrival of the same soldiers and officers that 9 years earlier had asfixiated Germans in their trenches with barrages including lewisite, chlorine, mustard gas and high explosives. French officials had picked a bad time to pressure Uncle Sam to let their codeine past customs. Nine days after "tariff trade war" hit the headlines, Paris was surrounded and occupied by raucously tipsy veterans eager to support President Coolidge and Make America Get Paid Again! Headlines blared STIRRING ADDRESSES BY FOCH AND PERSHING AT LEGION SESSION—CONVENTION HALL RESOUNDS WITH CHEERS FOR TWO MILITARY LEADERS, FRENCH MARSHAL PAYS TRIBUTE TO AMERICAN GENERAL'S DEVOTION TO COMMON CAUSE OF ALLIES—(link) Other stories told of Marines mopping up Nicaraguan resistance; still others of terrifying situations in Shanghai, a major international drug bazaar. (link)

One headline read: U.S. REPLIES TO TARIFF NOTE—Paris Sept20—The reply of the American government regarding representations made by the United States Embassy on the new French tariff rates was received at the Embassy today... (link) At the U.S. Department of State, a lot was going on behind the scenes.(link) (link)

Good reading: The Man Who Solved the Market, by Gregory Zuckerman(link) is a highly worthwhile book for anyone interested in the mechanism by which faith-based prohibitionist asset-forfeiture orgies wreck an economy then fabricate lies to conceal what actually happened--as in 1907, 1929, 1931, 1987 and 2008. As a biography it will endear anyone who ever flunked partial differential equations to main character Jim Simons, a pioneer of quantitative trading. To help understand the method consider Bernard Baruch, who made money by noticing in 1891 that whenever an optimist placed outsized bets on a saloon roulette wheel, he lost. Baruch decided the wheel must be gaffed and simply made small bets opposite the high bettor. If the mark bet red, Bernie chose black, if odd, even. Baruch's strategy earned him a steady income until the equally perceptive saloon owner invited him to never come back. Simon had before him 1986 Know-Your-Customer bank customer interrogations, the 1988 Omnibus Drug Bill(link), 1990s implementation of prohibitionist looting under color of law, including entire banks(link), the Money Laundering and Financial Crimes Strategy Act of 1998 signed as Public Law 105-310 on 30OCT1998 as banks in Latin America drowned in hyperinflation and collapse. After a decade of this even politicians had by Summer 1999 become alarmed(link). After non-alcoholic Sand People knocked down NY skyscrapers, Bush doubled down, coining "narco-terrorism" in 2003 as pretext to confiscate more homes and bank accounts(link). This practice was promptly adopted by looter governments everywhere. But the death blow to mortgage-backed derivatives markets came when thermal imaging & helicopters informed on forfeitable hemp houses, marijuana farms and related assets & goods.(link) (link) (link) Looking at data gathered way before the tremors that prompted the Kerry Report, Just Say No and Drug-Free America crusades, Simons would have had to have been a pretty slow mathematician not to notice that government looting under color of eugenic prohibitionism was wrecking the economy. It had occurred in 1907, 1914, 1929, 1970, 1974, 1980, 1982 & 1990.(link) Renaissance Technologies' $5.2B Medallion Fund--launched in 1988 after the Drug Enforcement, Education, and Control Act of 1986--which segued seamlessly into the 1987 Reagan Crash. This pioneering Big Data fund doubled its earnings in 2006, then earned $7.1B in 2007 and $7.9B in 2008. Those facts indicate Simons understood what was going on--even as suckers inconveniently struggled to disbelieve that mortgage-backed derivatives were melting like a waterlogged fairytale witch in OZ.(link) Swindlers straight out of The Emperor's New Clothes(link) still spray verbiage to explain away the 2008 Crash as ANYTHING BUT what Ayn Rand explained in her 1966 Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal: "A nationwide depression, such as occurred in the United States in the thirties, would not have been possible in a fully free society. It was made possible only by government intervention in the economy—" Yet like the little child in the story, who saw and said "But he has nothing on," Ayn Rand's hypothesis fits the facts. Simons doubtless had this figured out, but had better sense than to tip his hand after raking in the chips. 

Cool stuff: Mellow Mood Imports has clothes 'n stuff you can dance in.(link) Charleston, North Carolina was where attorney Manly Sullivan was charged with violating the National Prohibition Act. He appealed and won on the argument that forcing him to declare and pay taxes on illegal income was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Charleston promptly became America's signature popular dance. This is a family-owned and operated small business in the spirit of American free enterprise. 

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 Libertariantranslator or 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. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, 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 and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

This financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.criseeconomica.com (link)

Go ahead and comment. 

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

Está procurando tradutor ou intérprete credenciado?