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Showing posts with the label media lying

Prohibition, crises and War in the 1930s

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  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 ...

Wrecking Latin America, early 1980s

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  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 o...

Before the 1987 Crash

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  Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats increased poisonous drug overdose deaths by banning natural and non-toxic preparations ( link )   Few noticed when California Governor Ronald Reagan banned LSD in 1967. An easily-transported  half-thimbleful made in Austin or Prague sufficed for some 5000 psychedelic experiences anywhere. But after Reagan became President, LSD was so effectively suppressed that primitive drugs moved into its vacant market niche, making use of existing trade networks. Middle-eastern countries such as Afghanistan and Iran ramped up narcotics production, and WW2-era poppy fields in Sinaloa, Mexico, were replanted with little delay. Dollars, spies and soldiers flowed abroad, overdose death rates grew exponentially. Totalitarian socialist congregants in South American countries--impoverished by U.S.-imposed prohibition laws--made hay with the fund-raising opportunities offered by fake U.S.-bought elections. American voters whose loved ones were...