21JAN1929 League Drug intrigues

 

Pittsburgh restaurant with that month's special illustrates the value of $1.25 in gold dollars (no beer or wine included)

Opium Advisory Committee Meeting notes for 21JAN1929 stretched on and on, largely from references to 1927 reports and tables, but also from maneuvering rival nation members into the path of United States Opium Section spies in the attending the meeting. Both The Netherlands and Japan had for years been reducing trade and production of addictive opium and switching to non-habituating coca shrubs and paste. No matter. U.S. operatives were as fanatical about that as about anything else liable to compete with Luckies, Chesterfields, Old Golds--or White Power, prayer and abstinence. Already the Democratic platform demanded additional prohibition, and sub chasers were added to the Coast Guard fleet even before two foreign submarines were photographed in the Hudson River.(link)

Additional economic pressure goes back to the year 1925, when the American and Chinese delegations stormed out of negotiations on 07 February, after failing to impose an economy-wrecking deadline by which Europeans must force their colonies and protectorates to absolutely ban all opium smoking. William Randolph Hearst's U.S. American, opposed to prohibition, celebrated the announcement.  The Balkan States between the Adriatic and Black Sea were meanwhile ramping up their production of high-quality opium just as they had from 1912 through 1914. As availability is throttled, the selling price goes up! Every schoolchild learned this in Political economy classes.

332 European ships hovered off the coasts of the U.S. briskly selling prohibited articles wholesale to trading entrepreneurs in small, fast boats. Whereas off the coast of China, opium and its alkaloids were unloaded from hovering craft by small fast boats just as in 1836. The USA, infiltrating the League of Nations to further a religious crusade against all enjoyable substances, caused European recessions long before the Wall Street Crash.  League Europeans complained of the Economic Crisis already in 1927. 

Two examples relevant to the 2007-2008 asset forfeiture erosion of mortgage-backed derivatives that crashed U.S. securities markets eighty years after the 1927 crises bear reexamination. On the Canadian and Mexican borders of Dry America, borders and laws created real estate booms based on the price differential between legal and banned goods.  On 03JUN1925 troops at Tijuana invaded and seized a $5M border resort. Stacked articles in the same Berkeley paper told of investors seeking a border resort, evidently to offer wine in competition with legal distilled liquor on the Mexican side.(link) Just north of Detroit the province of Ontario legalized beer. So border towns half a mile across water suddenly boomed as moneyed Americas swarmed in to buy land, homes, hotels and saloons at 4 to 10 times previous prices under prohibition. With Canadian breweries working overtime, the economic miracle is described in detail in the June 7th Pittsburgh paper.(link) This Gold Coast cycle has a parallel with the boom in grow houses during marijuana prohibition under the George W Bush Administration, which encouraged local enforcement gendarmes to confiscate the homes under his faith-based asset forfeiture programs providing qualified immunity--until such looting collapsed mortgage derivative securities values. 

Both articles are next to updates on gunboats and troop movements at the international drug emporium of Shanghai, where European and Japanese manufactured drugs met Asian dealers catering to mainland consumers. All indications are that this unrest and attention severely curtailed European drug movement into East Asia, hence the economic crisis that spread all over Europe even before Americans became liable to income tax assessed on income from formerly legal drug and alcohol production and trade. Before 1905, some states tried banning drugs--beer, wine, cigarettes, opiates or stimulants--and suffered heavy economic losses for replacing freedom with coercion backed by deadly force. 

Different reading: The Master Game, Pathways to Higher Consciousness, by Robert S. De Ropp, M.D.(link) This is the same De Ropp who wrote Drugs and The Mind in the 1950s to correct some errors contained in the 1924 and 1931 editions of  Phantastica, by German physician and toxicologist Lewis Lewin.(link) Lewin achieved notoriety after isolating mescaline from peyote, and travelled the world studying and reporting on little-known drugs. Burdened by the incomplete science of the 1930s and German dissatisfaction at political pressure directed against its pharma industry, he arrived as some conclusions later overturned. De Ropp's book saved the lives of many young people in the 1960s, for it contained warnings against toxic and addictive substances--meaning basically everything available in the 1930s except hemp and some rare tryptamine preparations. 
This later book appeared after the good doctor died, and is eerily reminiscent of the last of the Rama books published after British science writer Arthur C Clarke died. That posthumous work dripped mystical revelations rather than the accurate science readers expect of Clarke. In The Master Game, De Ropp is again correcting errors--this time of the mystical "Cosmic Debris" cults which attached itself to the psychedelic revolution of the 60s and 70s. The book presents a sternly disciplined approach to meditative pursuits as an alternative--and better--path to enlightenment than that illuminated by consciousness-manifesting substances like psilocybin or LSD. De Ropp approaches the subject from the standpoint of medical science, especially physiology, and warns against teacher-dominated communities and "Starry-eyed Syndrome," while revisiting historical writings on the subject. Drugs and the Mind was produced when the author was 47, while The Master Game, was assembled subsequent to his death at age 74. To folks keenly interested in transcendental meditation and mental discipline--two subjects which have so far escaped the prohibitions of book-burning Inquisitions--this book offers very specific recommendations and a broad review of background material even if not produced at the height of the author's powers (so to speak).  

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)

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