Here is an excellent 4-part article on how the Rockefeller Family took control of the world narcotics trade, both the legal and illegal forms.  Part I is reprinted below and the links to the other parts follow.  It is a fascinating and important story that sheds light on the nature of the present day pharmaceutical and medical monopoly cartels.

How the Rockefellers turned the United States and other countries into police states.

By Jean Carter

Most people are not aware that John D. Rockefeller Junior (1874 to 1960) was the man directly responsible for creating and instigating the destructive war on drugs. The war on drugs which has continued for many decades since it was started in the early 1900s was carefully planned and orchestrated to protect the family ownership of a chemically-based pharmaceutical monopoly.

The war was first begun by Rockefeller Junior, with the help of his father, John D. Rockefeller Senior (1839 to 1937), taking over the control of all legal narcotics. A few years after Rockefeller Junior had taken over the narcotics business market, they then set their sights on eliminating medicinal marijuana (known as cannabis), because it was a competitive threat to their chemically-based pharmaceutical sales.

In addition to the control on narcotics, Rockefeller Junior was also directly responsible for the prohibition of marijuana back during the 1930s, and he was the real reason behind the government-sponsored Reefer-Madness propaganda campaign designed to scare people about marijuana. Rockefeller Junior used as a business tactic the strategy of controlling narcotics by using political influence to get laws passed. He also used the strategy of prohibiting certain medicines, in order to control the entire medical system, which he, with the help of his father was able to accomplish. This was done to insure that the Rockefeller-owned pharmaceutical companies would remain the powerful monopolies that they had become. Hemp/marijuana made plentiful ethanol when distilled and was good for running car engines, generators etc. Hemp/marijuana had many industrial uses such as cloth, paper, ropes, and many, many other uses. Because it made plentiful ethanol it therefore was seen as a competitive threat to the Rockefeller petroleum monopolies, as was the fact that cannabis/marijuana was an excellent natural medicine which presented a serious threat to the Rockefeller monopoly on chemically-based pharmaceutical sales.

I do not want to spend a lot of time writing about John Rockefeller Senior or the oil monopoly he built, since this is a research paper about the war on drugs. However, in order to understand the strategies used by Rockefeller Junior in causing prohibition, thus creating the war on drugs, it helps to look at the strategies used by Rockefeller Senior and how he earned his huge oil fortune. Rockefeller Junior learned a lot about how to conduct business from his father. So just a brief but closer look at the elder Rockefeller and his early days follows.

From a humble beginning, by the early 1900s John D. Rockefeller Senior was considered to be the richest man in the world; having made a huge fortune in oil. The Standard Oil Company formed by Rockefeller Senior in 1870 was by now so big that the government insisted that it be broken down into several smaller oil companies, which are still largely owned by the Rockefellers today. There have been many name changes over the years of the oil companies formed from the old Standard Oil Company such as BP, Texaco, Exxon-Mobile, Sunoco to name just a few of the oil companies still owned by the Rockefeller family.

An excellent book about the early days of Standard Oil is The History of Standard Oil Company, by Ida Tarbell. When her book was published around 1904, it caused a sensation. Rockefeller allies publically labeled Miss Tarbell as a muckraker, and Rockefeller Senior privately made fun of the author and called her Miss Tar-Barrel. However Rockefeller Senior never made any public reference to the book, because he was probably embarrassed, or maybe he just did not care if people knew he was a crook. In any case the Tarbell book contained a detailed account of the early years of Rockefeller building his oil refinery monopolies and she exposed his crooked business dealings in her book. Her book goes into highly documented detail about fraud, secret kickbacks, bribes and ruthless business practices used by Rockefeller Senior in his strategy of deceit and deception to eliminate any competition from others, and which would also guarantee a monopoly for his Standard Oil Company.

When Rockefeller Senior started his first oil refinery in Cleveland, one refinery was not enough for him. He was driven to own all the refineries, whether the other refinery owners liked it or not. He was a steam roller. It also was not enough for him to just own all the refineries; he had to take over the distribution routes too, such as the railroads, waterways and pipelines. He took over the distribution of the oil from the refineries to the ports on the east coast, where his ships were waiting to carry the oil to other countries. He built huge storage tanks to hold oil before it was distributed to the customer. He took over the domestic routes, with his own fleet of trucks, delivering oil directly to homes and businesses needing oil. He eliminated any middle men and took their profits as his own. Rockefeller Senior was like a man driven to obtain more and more. He was very smart and shrewd and he knew how to make deals in which he always got the best of the deal, and often leaving the other guy emotionally broken and financially bankrupted. Rockefeller senior had a great ability to create monopolies and to break the spirit of his competitors.

Rockefeller Senior’s obsession to own everything included owning or controlling the various chemical companies that relied on his petroleum. These chemical companies made various products such as fertilizers, pesticides, explosives, industrial chemicals of all sorts as well as synthetic fibers and pharmaceutical drugs. These chemical companies were totally dependent on Rockefeller petroleum. Rockefeller took over the controlling interest of these companies and ran them.

Another thing I want to mention about Rockefeller Senior because it is important to know about. In the early days of building his oil empire, he formed a fake company called the South Improvement Company to carry out shady deals. This was the company Rockefeller would use when he did not want people to know they were dealing with him. This company would make all kinds of shady deals and many people lost their businesses when they signed up with this company. The company looked great on paper and its bylaws looked fair, and many businesses signed up with this company because it looked so good on paper. However, once the unsuspecting businessman joined up with the fake company, he soon realized that according to the fine print he had given up all control and ownership of his company to Rockefeller Senior. The reason I mention this is because years later when the younger Rockefeller Junior was creating the League of Nations, similar wording was used for the conditions of countries to join the League of Nations. In other words just like companies unknowingly gave up all their rights and control of their businesses to the old South Improvement Company which had been formed by Rockefeller Senior, those joining the League of Nations had to also agree to give up their autonomy and to agree to defer any major decisions to the League of Nations. There are many similarities between the formation of South Improvement and the League of Nations. The book, The History of Standard Oil, by Ida Tarbell can be found free on the Internet. This book is a fascinating look at the early oil industry of the Pennsylvania Oil fields and the rise to prominence of Rockefeller Senior.

The wealth being produced from oil (kerosene) was enormous even before cars were on the road to use gasoline. Rockefeller Senior began buying coal mines, railroads, steel mills, chemical companies that depended on petroleum products, and many other areas of business and industry. In 1894 he had developed oil ties in Venezuela and had purchased a railroad in Manchuria now in Northeast China. Rockefeller Senior believed that if you made a small investment in another country, it would buy great political influence in that country. He also wanted to retire from the oil business and use his time to do other things such as philanthropy and work on causes. Even before the automobile appeared on the national scene, the Rockefellers were very rich, and once gasoline became needed for automobiles, the wealth of the family became even greater. Eventually Rockefeller did retire and allowed others to run the oil business, although he still had total control over everything his oil companies did By the late 1890s he was retired from the oil business, and looking for new business opportunities, under the guise of philanthropy. This desire to do philanthropy work, while on the surface looked good, also had a more self-serving side. It seemed to satisfy an obsessive need in Rockefeller Senior to create even more monopolies to protect the growing Rockefeller Empire. So while Rockefeller Senior had now officially retired from running Standard Oil Companies, he was looking for new business ventures while hiding behind the mask of philanthropy. Now Rockefeller Senior had his son to help him.

The only son born to John Rockefeller Senior was John Rockefeller Junior. When Junior was old enough, somewhere around the turn of the century, his father gave him the responsibility for running Standard Oil. However, after Junior had worked a short time in the top position, his father replaced him with someone else who was more qualified to run the company. Nonetheless, this did not prevent Rockefeller Senior from finding other positions for Junior because Rockefeller Senior was grooming Rockefeller Junior to manage the family fortune, and there were a lot of ways to do it. Rockefeller Senior set Junior up on the board of directors of many companies and industries, including U.S. Steel.

During the period from about 1900 to 1920 the Rockefellers, both Senior and Junior, started working on serious plans to take over the educational system, the medical system, all the medical schools and research schools. This was all done in the name of so called philanthropy, but was really designed to act as a method of distributing the chemical pharmaceutical drugs that his companies produced. Rockefeller had already decided to take control of the physicians of America and use them as distributors for his pharmaceutical drugs. One thing Rockefeller Senior had always done in his past business dealings was to take total control away from others and give it to himself. To his way of thinking, buying or taking over a medical school or university was no different than taking over any other business.

Rockefeller Senior showed Junior just how easy it was to take over the entire medical system in the United States, and that is exactly what happened. Rockefeller Senior set up the Educational Fund, later to be named the Rockefeller Foundation (established in 1913) and they gave money to the various educational institutions in the form of a conditional grant. This means that if a medical school or university accepted conditional grant money offered by the Rockefeller Foundation, there were strings attached. Those strings basically gave control of the school to the Rockefellers. Rockefeller Senior was not the type of person to twist arms to get his way. The use of force was not his style, to the best I can determine. While Rockefeller Senior often resorted to crooked and unethical business practices to bilk his competitors, he did not use force to get control of a business or industry. Instead Senior used shrewd intelligence, secrecy and the practice of dangling a lot of money (like a payoff) in front of the people who could make the decision to give up control of their educational institution to the Rockefellers.

The Rockefeller tactics usually worked, whether in the business world or the world of academics, it did not matter, because people still reacted to money in the same way. Senior expended huge sums of money buying out medical schools, universities and especially research schools, but to Rockefeller, the money was just a drop in the bucket. The purpose of taking over the medical schools was so that the Rockefellers could now insist that physicians be trained to only prescribe the use of chemical pharmaceutical drugs for their patients. Any teaching of naturopathy, the use of medicinal plants to treat illnesses, was to be viewed as quackery. Any teaching of nutrition, holistic medicine, or the prescribing of healing and medicinal herbs/plants was not allowed. The ultimate goal of this strategy was to be able to control what physicians were allowed to do, or not do. If a physician stepped out of line and did anything that was not approved by the Rockefeller medical doctrine, the physician lost his license to practice medicine. If the physician followed the Rockefeller rules, they would be financially rewarded through money.

In the case of colleges and universities that were not necessarily related to medical teaching, they got money too. The roster of universities and colleges that have received Rockefeller money includes the leading Ivy League schools. The Rockefellers pretty much built the University of Chicago, as well as other schools, too numerous to mention. Rockefeller wanted to be able to utilize these schools to teach students the Rockefeller doctrine of global economic development. To Rockefeller Senior, the schools were just more businesses to be added to his empire, and would pay results by benefiting the Rockefeller business interests. A little historical footnote about the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the Carnegie Foundation which is actually funded by Rockefeller money follows. Back in 1954 a congressional committee called the Reese committee was convened to investigate tax exempt Foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. The investigation found a lot of wrongdoing on the part of these Foundations and was critical of how they operated. When the results of the investigation were released to the public, Carol Reese, the man who was in charge of the investigation, was slandered and attacked by the Rockefeller controlled media.

Another project that the Rockefellers were working on was narcotic control (opium) in order to insure their monopoly on the medical system. Rockefeller Senior must have known that the person who can decide who gets to use narcotics and who cannot is the person who controls the entire medical system. Without narcotics, doctors cannot practice medicine, and hospitals cannot treat patients in pain or perform surgical procedures. Without narcotics people suffering terrible pain cannot find relief. Narcotics are a necessity to any medical system. Rockefeller Senior and Junior used a variety of methods to corner the market and control narcotics. One of these tactics was to hide behind sacred cows to achieve business goals. Sacred cows such as religion, church groups and missionaries. I am not sure if it was Senior or Junior who thought up the idea to use missionaries to beat the drum for prohibition of narcotics, but that was one of their tactics. The missionaries carefully chosen by the Rockefellers were reportedly Baptist fundamentalist types who were more interested in stirring up trouble for people who used narcotics than spreading the word of the Lord Jesus. The missionaries in China were always trying to get laws passed which punished those Chinese citizens who used narcotics. In 1909 Rockefeller, using his missionaries convened the first commission on international narcotics, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, and held in Shanghai, China.

In 1912 another international opium conference, with the same group of missionaries was held, and was called the International Opium Convention. Those countries who attended this convention agreed to be bound by the rules of the convention, which committed this country to work toward the control of all narcotics worldwide. Later, this same group of prohibitionist minded missionary types would also comprise the first narcotics board on the League of Nations, created by the Rockefellers around 1920. I believe that Rockefeller Senior was planning on doing in China what he was also doing in the United States, and that was to get a monopoly of the Chinese medical system. The Rockefeller business strategy for China was to force the Chinese people off of their traditional herbal medicines and on to Rockefeller chemical pharmaceutical drugs. Rockefeller missionaries were agitating for opium prohibition in China, same as in America. I believe that Senior planned to eventually get laws changed in China, making the conversion easier. Senior and Junior built a huge medical school and hospital in China. The medical school would have produced the so called medical experts needed to convince government to change laws to favor Rockefeller pharmaceutical sales. I believe that none of these things ever came to fruition, but not because the Rockefellers did not try. Between a war in China and the Communists coming to power in China, western businessmen were no longer welcome in the country, thus removing any further hope of doing business in the Chinese market for the Rockefellers. There is much more I could write about the Rockefeller habit of using intolerant religious groups to carry out the Rockefeller prohibition agenda. Before researching this paper I did not know that the Rockefellers actually created their own church and used it to push public acceptance for the League of Nations, which Rockefeller Junior was instrumental in creating. This organization was created in order to protect the Rockefeller rapidly growing global empire. Enter (Interchurch World Movement and Rockefeller) into a search engine and find all kinds of information on this subject.  END OF PART I

Ill-Gotten Gains, The Rockefeller’s War on Drugs