Geneva, Switzerland was inundated in January 1929 with stacks of reports on the violence of victimless crime laws plus fictional tales of taxed, licensed, permitted and legitimate drug imports and exports from countries whose politicians were unevenly eager to stick heads into the prohibitionist noose. "Discrepancy" is repeated ten times on the first page of the minutes of that afternoon meeting, and much sputtering and spilled ink finally resulted in a Holy Trinity of instructions:
1. The League Secretariat must examine all discrepancies
2. All governments concerned must be scolded, and
3. Every 5 years the Committee must examine an international table of statistics for accuracy...
and sub-instructions (b) concluding: "In the annual statistical returns, both provisional and final, any figures in regard to which discrepancies arise will be marked with an asterisk." (*)
In physics, chemistry, statistics and even the machining of high-quality government service pistols used in enforcing the laws of God's Own Prohibitionists, tolerances are the allowance made for deviations from theoretical or ideal standards; in a word, discrepancies. One logical consequence of the ritual aspersion of smuggling, shipment and seizure reports with asterisks signaling discrepancies was the gallons of ink the League's Fourth Committee--in charge of budget and financial accounting--would have to account for were tiny tolerances to require asterisks proportional to the comical absurdities contained in the country reports. The dilemma was resolved by adding one additional sub-instruction under (b) to wit: "Discrepancies involving no more than the following quantities will be ignored:
Raw opium 500 kilos
Morphine 100 kilos
Heroin 10 kilos
Cocaine 10 kilos.
Under the "cartels only" rules then being developed, half a tonne of opium one way or another is handled as a rounding error.
To soothe yet another Italian outburst the Serbian Chairman referred to the League Covenant as lending support to the distinguished colleague's tirade. The Covenant's American-authored Article 23 mirrors part of the Versailles Treaty Article 23, putting the League in charge of that noble Prohibition which--under The Hague management--had run aground on a reef of Balkan and World War hostilities. Both documents were routinely cited as the legal authorization for unlimited initiation of force and endless addition of items to the list of "drugs" to be restricted worldwide--economic results be damned! The entire Versailles treaty and all its fittings also been targeted for denunciation by the political platform of a German Socialist party, small enough to be safely ignored, since February of 1920.
Some articles cleared for export in 1927 by the French Sûreté had been seized in China, which, according to League documents, had not applied the system of import certificates for drugs. This dereliction made those shipments to China legal by European standards. Up leapt "Kinky"--a Chinese delegate whose name is spelled differently in different League documents--to deny all knowledge of additional facts. Kinky then claimed the Chinese government "in principle" adopted the system, but if the Interior Ministry had not acted, it was because China was "bound hand and foot by unequal treaties" and local foreign big shots answered no queries--all of which which morally obligated foreigners to change the facts and correct the French document for them. When informed the list was compiled by the League, not France, Kinky cited where France had quoted the list and demanded the Committee fix things so he could point to that as proof the Committee had done something to help China. Comprehension dawned, and Europeans understood the man to mean that whatever went wrong was, by definition their fault, not China's. China's Kuomintang government had been in power for one year, and was anything but comfortably settled in.
News from the Americas was handed to predawn New York newsies at about lunchtime in Geneva. The previous day's papers were all the delegates had for news from The West. Under DECISION IN BORDER ARREST IN FEW DAYS-- The 22JAN Montreal Gazette reported U.S. Customs and Immigration officers had grabbed and arrested a Canadian citizen about 3 feet into the Canadian side of the border. The fellow was accused of smuggling undocumented Greeks into the USA, and stepped past the door of a store located right on the border before being tackled, cuffed and dragged Stateside.(link) On the same page, FOREIGN POLICY IS REVIEWED BY JAPAN PREMIER relates a sobering interview with Baron Tanaka on international issues, most importantly the Japanese presence in Manchuria.(link). Lawrence of Arabia was burned in effigy in Afghanistan, and Canada's representatives to the League of Nations were thanked for their service.
Page 2 related US DRUG ADDICTS BECOMING FEWER--Report To League Urges Control In Foreign Countries To Stop Smuggling... and revealed that one in a thousand Americans were believed to be "addicts."(link) On p29 NEW YORK MARKET CLOSE IRREGULAR means, in Wall Street American, SHARP BREAK WITH 4,897,500 SHARES SOLD (with nary a whisper of the Japanese gentleman giving "strong support to the American idea that there should be limitation of the manufacture of narcotics" 27 pages earlier.) And finally, PRESSURE ON REICHSMARK--Pressure against the German mark, which resulted in a fractional decline in the exchange rate today, was attributed to the easy money rates in the Berlin market. If present conditions should continue for any length of time, many believe that withdrawals of foreign funds from Berlin would develop in considerable volume... By skillful elision this formula transmits the idea that the USA and League threatening to gang up and legislate limits to and regulations hampering production from Germany's pharma industry could have no economic or financial effect whatsoever. After all, it such a consideration were important as a cause of crashes, recessions, unemployment and wars, surely the fact would be included as part of any honest analysis, right? Wrong. Any and all contrarian hypotheses were airily waved away by reference to hypothetical gaps between graphs of interest rate differential equations nobody but the elect would understand even if explained in detail. The same gimmick is successfully applied to this day.
Good reading: Books by Frederic Bastiat, free to download from Project Gutenberg.(link)
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, plus my own blogs using U.S., Australian, Canadian, Chinese, English, European and South American 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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