Prohibition, crises and War in the 1930s

 

Typical drug manufactures chart, 1930

No American schoolbook mentioned the Opium Wars until Brian Inglis published The Opium War in 1976, the election year the Libertarian Party ran its second slate of candidates demanding repeal of drug prohibition laws. The audiobook version is now available.(link)  Brian's other drug book, the Forbidden Game, gives further insights into how prohibitionism developed as a cudgel with which pharma cartels wielded government laws as marketing tools and double-edged weapons once the colonial harnessing of addiction was out of the bag.(link) The link between the dragooning of political States into marketing tools and weapons of economic warfare is not the sort of thing those political states extoll with pride. Enormous effort goes into disguising the fact made plain by Adam Smith in 1775 that wars prohibiting production and trade necessarily wreck national economies, just as purging the violence of law from trade relations gives rise to the Wealth of Nations.(link) As Smith cannily observed "We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen."

So ingrained by conditioning is blindness to the prima facie obviousness that banning trade brings Panics, Crashes, Depressions and War that the very suggestion that Prohibitions on commerce--be it of liquor, drugs or books--elicits an almost instinctive skeptical reaction worthy of the attention of the son of a deputy opium inspector second-class. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was in fact just such a son and in 1930 wrote a book the publication and sale of which was soon banned throughout the British Empire.(link) This blog mostly unfolds a tale of the whys and wherefores of this censorship. You and I are examining the facts it conditions people to ignore by methods proven to sell liquor and cigarettes.(link)

The chart above claims that German production of morphine fell in 1930 to a level lower than the previous five years of rapid population growth. Nobody mentions that American prohibition laws urged ahead by Chinese trade boycotts as of 1905, had expanded internationally via the Hague until war exploded in morphine-exporting Europe. The Versailles surrender treaty operated by the League of Nations took over drug cartel prohibitionism--in its Article 23--and also demanded Germany pay war reparations to the European victors. German morphine found its way to the USA as a replacement for alcohol, but those clandestine exports were hampered by the establishment of the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs on 15DEC1920, the day before liquor was banned by U.S. law. The subsequent  Jones-Miller Act of 26MAY1922 creating Federal Narcotics Control Board soon played a role in wrecking the German economy.(link) Government schools elide these laws and focus instead on French incursions into Germany's Ruhr region and the horrors of hyperinflation.(link) 

America's War On Beer and Gin led to enforcement of the Prohibition Amendment via the Income Tax Amendment. This method leaked over into so-called "narcotics" as of 16MAY1927, and all German industrial output fell sharply, as the 1927 morphine bar shows on the League of Nations chart above. That same politician, Wesley Livsey Jones, wrote a law making even beer offenses a felony in March 1929, one month after the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meeting in Geneva spent two weeks in lively discussions of ways to enforce prohibitions on the "illicit" traffic in what it called "dangerous drugs." 

The word CRASH described the U.S. financial situation in Time Magazine in its 21APR1929 edition.(link) But the word CRASH soon returned to journalistic vernacular, for the Opium Advisory Committee turned its report and recommendations over to the League of Nations which met on 02SEP1929. These came complete with Chinese recommendations that drug manufactures be limited by government fiat and that China be given a world monopoly on producing opiates. Three days earlier, talks on war reparations payments at the Hague were concluded. Check any interactive chart and you can see that stock prices changed from rising to falling on 03SEP1929. There are lots more of these examples. 

Good reading: The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs, Kindle Edition, by Brian Inglis. This brilliant Irishman assembled a fluent and readable history of the way prohibitionism extended its reach throughout all global trade and production. (link) It may sound like a joke, but when I was in college and extra history classes on Southeast Asia, the Opium Wars that wrecked the Qing at a cost of deaths equal to the entire US population never happened. To find out about them you have to search out Brian Inglis and William Darymple's The Anarchy, The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire. 

UTEXAS at Austin also kept the existence of the Libertarian party a trade secret. One of my History profs went so far as to use "The Vegetarian party" as an example of things that have no clout. When it became mathematically clear that the LP was swinging election results to make the more totalitarian looter candidates lose to slightly less totalitarian opposition, and that the Travis County Libertarian Party could no longer be safely ignored by its ku-klux and communist opposition, things changed. Instead of republicans discarding prohibition and Comstockist girl-bullying planks, they began infiltrating a fifth column into the LP. After accidentally electing Trump, thanks to Dem dereliction, the GOP went all out to replace libertarians with T-party and Trumpanzee muppets. The Trojan Horse got the Don elected a second time, but enough is enough. Welcome to Third Party Watch(link) If you would rather have the libertarian party back instead of a Hitlerjudeng/SA replica, visit and learn what is being done in the way of reclaiming our former leveraged, law-changing spoiler vote clout.

Interesting Reading: Ghosts of Panama, A Strongman out of Control, a Murdered Marine, and the Special Agents Caught in the Middle of an Invasion, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll.(link) No it's not great literature, but the story unfolds day-by-day throughout the U.S. invasion of a once-friendly nation, naming names and dates. The officiousness is the same as led to book-burning Comstockism in 1873, through the brutalization of the Philippine Islands and Dominican Republic by abstemious and patronizing Christian Nationalism. Key to all these episodes since 1920 is the license to invade contained in the League of Nations Charter and Treaty of Versailles article 23: "entrust the League with the general supervision over agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs." In July 1986 U.S. newspapers labeled "Panama's Noriega" as tied to "the drug trade." From then till the close of 1989 the fix was in. Ghosts of Panama provides insights into how U.S. agents believe anything the government kleptocracy tells them to believe. 

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the 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)

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the 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)

Spot an error? Comment!

Wrecking Latin America, early 1980s

 

After America's 1931-1946 war on foreign drugs led through WW2, the UN replaced the League of Nations as vector of laws against production and trade. Nixon and Gov. Reagan banned psychedelics worldwide from 1967 through 1971--and money suddenly flowed into Latin American jurisdictions. Ronald Reagan stepped into Herbert Hoover and Harry Anslinger's shoes and per-capita manufacturing GNP in the largest such country, Brazil, promptly changed from increasing to decreasing in 1981. 

Probability tells us that two events A and B are independent if and only if the probability of event A does not change when B occurs or is a given condition. This requirement is written P(A|B)=P(A). From 1980 through 1987, American mixed-economy conservatives noticed that expensive cocaine had replaced cheap LSD--unobtainable thanks to their prohibiton laws. The 400% price hike resulting from prohibition laws made the crude replacement substance profitable enough to finance tens of thousands of Fabian socialist and communist candidates and movements south of Brownsville. The 18th Amendment Prohibition régime had in 1920 damaged the economy so that Communist Party membership increased 300%. After the 1929 Crash, Communist Party membership again blossomed in the Great Depression--this time increasing 700% as Hoover's "Ordered Liberty" replaced "dog-eat-dog" laissez-faire. Prohibition laws came before both crashes. Prohibition laws were widely enacted before the Panic of 1907 and before the market Crash and lengthy shutdown of August 1914, but those might have been coincidences. Does the probability of stock crashes, liquidity contractions, waves of bankruptcies, falling production, rising unemployment, hyprinflation and war increase when production and trade is banned by the violence of prohibition legislation? Consider these events: 

In April 1981 the DEA wound up a series of raids on marijuana shipments as pilot Barry Seal set up cocaine shopping in Mena Arkansas.(link) Cash-strapped communists had taken to kidnapping the children of Colombian drug exporters but were swiftly hunted down and butchered for their effrontery. Prohibitionists won a February lawsuit jailing defendants for possession of quinine which, like sugar, could be mixed with drugs.(link) By May, deaths from malaria had increased sharply.(link)  

The UN National Narcotics Board met for 11 days in May in continued efforts to redefine everything except gin and cigarettes as "narcotics," and make the equivocation legally binding on every nation on the planet.(link) Soviet-ocupied Afghanistan had ramped up opium production to fill the gap once occupied by drugs popular among Beatles fans. In June a monkey virus endemic to mohammedan Africa and transmissible by hypodermic needles took on epidemic proportions among Russian troops and heroin users worldwide. DEA agents meanwhile were taking over entire banks as decoys (Dean Investments f/ex.) offering to launder drug money away from the prying eyes of the IRS.(link)

By August 1981, dope dealers could ship half a million dollars to Panama--where dollars have circulated since 1904--for less than thirty grand thanks to DEA banks. OPERATION BANCOSHARES materials at the online Reagan Library give some notion of the secrecy and volume of these financial shiftings.(link p.12) Another such operation moved 200 million dollars, which is real money even by Washington and Federal Reserve standards. All of these fake banks, sting operations, retasking of dope dealers into government puppets--and gun battles--were the natural outcome of United Nations prohibitionism carefully laid out in detail in May--patterned after Hague, U.S. and League of Nations procedures developed in 1912, 1920, 1925, 1929-31 with results affecting every economy on Earth. 

Much of this background is proudly trotted out in the August 1981 World Health Organization magazine published 4x a year in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and Persian-- uncopyrighted and free to download: (link) Articles read like Women's Christian Temperance Union lectures urging prayer and abstinence against the Demon Rum, yet run the gamut from reefer madness, opium addiction and cocaine fiends smoking cheap unrefined cocaine sulphate paste instead of All-American crack. All of this on a budget of only 469 million dollars! Nowhere do you see mention of agents, cops, dealers, judges, prosecutors and bystanders shot dead or wounded in gun battles, nor youths/housewives/farmers spending lifetimes in prison over plants. Confiscations, seizures, attack helicopters, fake banks, financial instability, recessions and unemployment are conspicuous only in their absence. *

A bulleted list in the WHO magazine urges "Cooperate, Develop Strategies,  Coordinate research, Ensure training programs, Fulfil responsibilities..."  WHO authors and publishers express anxious perplexity at the way poisonous inhalants, narcotics, cigarettes and alcohol flourish everywhere the violence of laws they advocate has eliminated safe alternatives. But what about the economics of confiscating banks, shipping, buildings, aircraft... of huge fines and tens of thousands of man-years' imprisonment? And what about the central question? Does the presence of officious politicians, armed forces and swarms of agents unleashed upon a populace by the better folks who know what's good for the riff-raff have ANY effect on the probability of stock crashes, liquidity contractions, waves of bankruptcies, falling production, rising unemployment, hyprinflation and war?

How about counting words like "narcotic", "drug abuse", "asset forfeiture" and superimposing THEIR frequencies on time charts of stock crashes, unemployment, recessions and war? 

The Federal Reserve said: The economy officially entered a recession in the third quarter of 1981, as high interest rates put pressure on sectors of the economy reliant on borrowing, like manufacturing and construction. Unemployment grew from 7.4 percent at the start of the recession to nearly 10 percent a year later. (Monetary Policy Report 1982, 67). (link)  This might still be just another coincidence. The serious increased penalties acts weren't passed until 1986, and weren't enforceable before 1987.  The U.S. military invasion of Panama dawdled till December 1989.(link) Hyperinflation in Brazil dwarfing the German hyperinflation of 1923 would hardly be noticed before 1989. 

* If the WHO Magazine link is diabled, contact me in the Comments below.

Interesting Reading: Ghosts of Panama, A Strongman out of Control, a Murdered Marine, and the Special Agents Caught in the Middle of an Invasion, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll.(link) No it's not great literature, but the story unfolds day-by-day throughout the U.S. invasion of a once-friendly nation, naming names and dates. The officiousness is the same as led to book-burning Comstockism in 1873, through the brutalization of the Philippine Islands and Dominican Republic by abstemious and patronizing Christian Nationalism. Key to all these episodes since 1920 is the license to invade contained in the League of Nations Charter and Treaty of Versailles article 23: "entrust the League with the general supervision over agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs." In July 1986 U.S. newspapers labeled "Panama's Noriega" as tied to "the drug trade." From then till the close of 1989 the fix was in. Ghosts of Panama provides insights into how U.S. agents believe anything the government kleptocracy tells them to believe. 

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the 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)

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the 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)

Spot an error? Comment!