enjoyable drug exports were also sharply curtailed. (link)
Some German corporations were confiscated and auctioned in the U.S. during America’s frenzy of prohibitionism. “If anyone enjoys it, ban it!” That was the attitude of the Anti-Saloon League, Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Government Morals and similar lobbies of officious, self-appointed “experts.” Addictive was left undefined, and is bandied about with promiscuous irrelevance to this day, so that South American stimulants were lumped in with stupefacient opiates. When federal prosecutor Mabel Walker Willebrandt was appointed to enforce prohibition, she ended up unwittingly lynching the U.S. economy in labors to ban the wrong kind of production and trade.
Prohibitionism is ancient. Four enforcement wars left China in ruins, with a death toll on a par with the entire U.S. population presided by Lincoln. England, France, Austro-Hungary, Germany, and others produced, refined and exported exotic drugs, then went at each other’s throats in 1914 to prevent ratification of an American-pushed Anti-opium convention. American politicians reacted to the post-1911 glut with the Harrison Act which, once enacted, became a Mr Hyde to terrorize physicians and enrich corporate producers. Anything the government bans becomes roughly four times as expensive and avoids taxes–so selling a fourth as much is more profitable than moving the original amounts.
Willebrandt changed the postwar equation by using the freshly-minted 16th-Amendment income tax to tax illegal incomes, 5th Amendment be hanged! When she won the Manly Sullivan case out of Charleston in May 1927, European stock prices changed to decreasing. American beer barons were soon being convicted for tax evasion as Europeans watched uneasily. Asset-forfeiture confiscations drove money from banks and threw the economy into liquidity crises. The year 1928 opened with the Navy blockading the entire coast of Florida, where Al Capone had a mansion with a boat slip. Only Willebrandt spoke of tax-enforcement of all laws banning production and trade–whether of alcohol, stimulants or narcotics–in her syndicated 1929 newspaper exposé series. Everyone but Clark Warburton struggled to evade the subject.
Could enjoyable drug exports have helped Germany pay war reparations, rebuild, rearm and seek revenge? Did major drug busts affect the German economy the way liquor law enforcement brought on the Great Depression? There is way too much coincidence connecting U.S. and League of Nations enforcement actions to German, French and British economic troubles in the interwar period. League of Nations agitation for the “Narcotic Limitation Convention” increased as Germany slowly collapsed in the wake of it’s own 10 December 1929 enactment of the Act for the Control of the Traffic in Narcotics. Everyone remembers THAT law being enacted right at the beginning of The Great Depression, right? So why not recall also the 13 July 1931 Narcotic Convention that brought German unemployment to 20% and reduced her per capita GNP by 17%–and cut collective GNP by one-fourth?
Joe Biden is a big fan of superstitious laws demonizing people over plant leaves and flowers. Here’s his most recent Executive Order sending Texas-style lynch mobs after free-trading individuals.(link) This other EO resembles post-1933 German legislation aimed at persecuting Jews.(link)
For additional reading on this topic, 1931 Debt, Crisis and the Rise of Hitler, by Tobias Straumann (link) rehashes Peter Temin’s 2001 working paper “Made In Germany.” Both display the doublethink by which government-remora “economists” manage to ignore the suppression of Germany’s copious exports of opiates and stimulants, and focus entirely on the resulting financial collapse as if the prohibitionist legislation were some unrelated nonentity and the Crash a deus-ex-machina miracle that coincided by happenstance with the world around it.
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, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual 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…
American blog…
Tagged: prohibition, confiscation, asset forfeiture, initiation of force, blackouts, energy crisis, liquidation, liquidity, bankruptcy, Crash, Depression, communism, inviting attack, treason, girl-bullying,
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