April 7, 1933. 75 years ago today, our Congress declared that "Beer is not a drug". This was accomplished by a simple change in the Volstead act, a mere political "sleight of hand". The act declared that any substance containing more than 0.5% alcohol was an "intoxicating alcoholic beverage". Congress simply changed that definition to 3.2% alcohol, and beer was legal again!
Many people celebrated by actually drinking beer. Some drank too much and fell down. Some got sick. Millions were no doubt afflicted with terrible hangovers. But civilization didn't end. Our country wasn't overrun with drunken beer-heads intent on spawning mayhem and violence. Well, maybe just a little. Life went on.
A substance that was once so reviled that its prohibition was enshrined in our Constitution was suddenly legal again...
One would think this failed effort at prohibition would have taught America once and for all that using criminal sanctions to outlaw the consumption of an intoxicating product was destined to be a failure. What was cited as the cause of prohibition's failure?
Prohibition spawned an underground economy devoted to making, shipping and selling booze. The officials trying to enforce it earned more from bribes, kickbacks and the resale of confiscated alcohol than from their meager salaries. The poison of such corruption permeated daily life. It undermined respect for the Prohibition amendment and, by extension, for the Constitution itself. Worse, Americans realized that in banning the production of alcoholic beverages, one of the nation's largest and most heavily taxed industries, they had closed the spigot on a significant source of both jobs and revenue.
Now substitute "drugs" for "booze". Do the results of our current prohibition sound eerily familiar?
Today, we look back on Prohibition as an exercise in temporary insanity, but the 13-year experiment in sobriety was rooted in our quintessentially American faith that we can perfect the world. A broad cross section of people -- men and women, urban and rural, young and old -- supported the ban on alcohol because they believed that it would reduce crime, alleviate poverty, strengthen the family and nurture a more perfect union.
That lofty vision collapsed under the weight of reality.
The article in the LA Times makes for interesting reading. How naive we were in those days! The true irony in the article is that there is no mention AT ALL of our current state of prohibition. No mention of the black market, the corruption, the criminalization of otherwise law-abiding citizens. No mention of the exact same problems that occurred the last time we tried to prohibit the consumption of an intoxicating substance. No mention of the trillion dollars spent in the war on drugs. No mention of the millions of annual arrests, and our soaring, world-leading prison populations.
In a free country, you can't prohibit the possession and consumption of a substance that people want to consume, and that entrepreneurs are willing to provide. It creates the same kind of mayhem. Every. Single. Time.
Even our prisons are rife with illegal drugs! If you can't successfully manage a prohibition in a high-security prison, where residents have absolutely no rights, how can anyone expect to successfully accomplish prohibition in a "free" society?
I'm not condoning the use of drugs. I am saying that there is no way to solve either the drug problem OR the crime problem until we separate the two. We figured this out 75 years ago. Why is it so difficult to understand that today?
I agree with the author: Prohibition is insanity.
Let's hope she's right about it being temporary!