How to increase morphine consumption
Prohibitionist China, defeated in the Opium Wars, ruined financially by the silver drain, wrecked by weaponized Tae-ping christianity, then humiliated anew in the Boxer Rebellion, finally ditched Manchu rule in 1911, as Jackie Chan so visually demonstrated. Opium and morphine from India, France and Scotland sat in the rain, for dock workers were not permitted to touch it. Prices fell, product backed up and warfare, rapine and looting ramped up in the Balkan States as the Taft-Roosevelt coalition sought a Hague agreement to regulate the international dumping of opiates.
Prohibitionism–as fanatical in Methodist America as dry Mohammedanism in the Ottoman Empire–was scaring the bejeesus out of the opium-farming Balkans, Raj, Cochin-china and Afghanistan. Everyone involved in converting that opium into acetylated morphine was also in a cold sweat–only without the cold-turkey prickling. England, France, Austro-Hungary, Germany-Prussia, The Netherlands, Switzerland and (less than before 1907) These United States were becoming anxious about the future. So why not pit one brand of prohibitionism against another in a sort of “Only Cure” economic jiu-jitsu?
Accept no free-market substitutskys
It was widely known, thanks to the philosophical outpourings of Mr Dooley of Arrchy Road, that morphine was added to liquor as prices fell. Mystical pseudoscience already regarded alcohol as an addictive narcotic, so the cloak of camouflage was ready-made. The added inducement, now that Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup no longer put crying babies in dreamland had palpable economic and religious benefits. The richest woman in America, addicted since childhood, used ethanol to lessen the discomfort of withdrawal sickness.
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Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle
I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or amigra.us
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