Balkan Poppy crops, 1925 and 1929
China in violent revolts, Mussolini poking for trouble in opium-exporting Balkans in 1927... ( link ) What could possibly go wrong? 21JAN1929 : At the 7th meeting of the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee in Geneva, the most relevant information came from Serbia. The country had been renamed the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That event escalated the ongoing Balkan opium Wars into a full-fledged World War 1 in one of the most lied-about causal sequences in history; lots of countries changed names. Speaking for the Kingdom , Mr Militchevitch apologized for the 1927 drug statistics report having missed the deadline and--wryly quoting Danton--observed that his Economic Review article on how League suppression had increased the profits of Balkan opium farmers had cost the Kingdom its place on the USA-dominated Permanent Central Opium Board . League activities and reduction of tobacco...