Prohibition: The History of A Calamity

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576600863260993384.html

by jkuria • 15 years ago

38 44 15 years ago

online.wsj.com

I wonder if we'll ever see a movie in the future about the failed and disastrous prohibition of other drugs.

Most Americans don't see the disaster, but in Mexico and Colombia (and in some others south american countries) thousands of innocent people die each year for the marijuana and coca crops.

RobLach• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if you're making an argument for marijuana and cocaine prohibition or against.

lmkg• 15 years ago

In the future?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

Yes, also The Wire, and The Corner, all quite excellent. But they are narratives, typically fictionalized. They are not non-fiction documentaries. They do not take on the issue head on, they do not discuss the statistics of the problem, etc. They come close, but a full head-on confrontation of the issue is still too taboo to be done by the mainstream press or entertainment industry.

njharman• 15 years ago

Yeah. It blows me away that people are so propagandized that they can't see we are in prohibition now.

"How, in the United States of America, the land of the free, could Prohibition ever have come to be?"

toddmorey• 15 years ago

An aside: This may have been discussed before about WSJ, but /article/SB10001424052970204226204576600863260993384.html has to be one of the worst URLs I've seen. What system is it that builds those filenames?

sk5t• 15 years ago

Maybe it's CityDesk?

Hisoka• 15 years ago

A society with so many ppl that rely so much on alcohol is just a symptom of even bigger problem. Give people a sense of purpose, or better community ties, and the need for "drugs" decreases

irahul3• 15 years ago

> A society with so many ppl that rely so much on alcohol is just a symptom of even bigger problem.

It's common for people who don't drink to assume alcohol is a big problem - it's not.

> Give people a sense of purpose, or better community ties, and the need for "drugs" decreases

People with sense of purpose, and better community ties, indulge in social drinking all too often. Never been to an entrepreneur's meetup which is in a bar? Never seen a family and friends getting drunk?

lewcypher2• 15 years ago

orly? Alcohol is a very large problem, not least keeping people isolated and stuck in their lower self, see Timothy Learys writings on drugs and Chakras. http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa38.htm

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

Tell that to the women who started the prohibition movement because they and their children were being beaten while their husbands drank their earnings away.

Alcohol (like all drugs) has a very dark side (but it is just one side). To sweep it away so blithely is, IMO, exceedingly naive.

Unfortunately, the conversations on these topics are too often "Your view is myopic. And my view is the only view that matters." We need more of the former and less of the latter.

armandososa• 15 years ago

* My grandfather was an alcoholic and caused lots of damage to my dad's infancy.

* Teenagers are amazingly stupid already. They are stupid and dangerous when driving under the influence of alcohol. A very dear friend of mine was killed by a drunk driver.

* Drunk girls are raped by drunk stupid men all the time. My cousin got pregnant at 14 because of this.

When you don't drink is when you can really see how big of a problem alcohol really is. Starting with social drinking, which means that some people are absolutely incapable of have social bonding or plain fun without any alcohol. Pathetic.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

"Giving" people a life doesn't work. It's infeasible and unrecommended to try to run people's lives for them, regardless of the high ideals you may have. Ultimately personal liberty has proven to be the only way to encourage the highest degree of personal happiness.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

If anyone's interested in Prohibition-era America, I would strongly recommend checking out HBO's Boardwalk Empire series for a masterful televised reenactment of that period in history.

jseliger• 15 years ago

Daniel Okrent's book (mentioned in the article) is also worth reading; I wrote a little about it here: http://jseliger.com/2010/07/18/hypocrisy-as-enabled-by-wealt... . One upshot of the book: Prohibition required an unusual confluence of political factors, including racism and class fear, in order for it to pass.

On a separate note, I wouldn't be surprised if drug prohibition eventually comes to look as silly as alcohol prohibition. From an intellectual standpoint, it already does.

bd_at_rivenhill2• 15 years ago

It already looks sillier, alcohol prohibition didn't lead to the loss of thousands of lives and breakdown of civil order in Mexico, didn't fuel a sustained rebellion in Colombia, and didn't handicap the prosecution of a war in Afghanistan the way the drug war has.

bennesvig• 15 years ago

This article from a respectable economist is pretty convincing on why drugs should be legalized. He compares it to prohibition - http://www.overdrome.com/index.php?id=1816

Audio version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZbHndilYsI

guelo• 15 years ago

Back then people understood that it was outside the power of federal government to ban a drug and that it would require a constitutional amendment. Today, marijuana and a whole host of drugs are banned at the whim of bureaucrats.

bd_at_rivenhill2• 15 years ago

The power of the Federal government was much lower before the Supreme Court allowed the abuse of the commerce clause to get so far out of hand.

jacobolus• 15 years ago

The power of the Federal Government was a lot lower before the huge “trusts” of the late-19th century grew in size and strength until they could wantonly trample the rights of consumers, their own workers, and citizens generally without any similarly powerful opposing force. It grew still further after the outsized influence of corporate and financial interests led to a calamitous worldwide economic collapse (the great depression) and citizens demanded that their government do something to prevent those imbalances and instabilities.

The US Supreme Court changed its understanding of the commerce clause and other aspects of government regulation of commerce in the 40s–60s in rejection of the previous generation’s court whose every decision favored the rich and powerful and blocked corrective legislative action at every level (for instance in the famous Lochner v. New York case after which we now refer to that whole court “era”). The citizenry explicitly (and overwhelmingly) elected legislators and executives who promised to reign in the power of corporations, and they replaced the previous justices... that’s how democracy is designed to work.

Government regulation is a response to real serious abuses of the type almost everyone is horrified by when they hear the specific examples that prompted the regulation – false advertising, fraud, miserable working conditions and the general treatment of workers as replaceable objects (and preserving the same by viciously breaking up any attempts by workers to organize), the sale of deadly diseased food, dumping of toxins into drinking water supplies, the use of market power to block competitors from markets or disrupt their operation, discrimination based on race, gender, and religion, etc. etc.

To just sum up this history as “the Supreme Court allowed the abuse of the commerce clause to get so far out of hand” is deeply disingenuous.

jbooth• 15 years ago

It's at the whim of demagogues. The bureaucrats are mostly just annoyed that they have to take pee tests. Politicians are the ones waging the war on drugs.

muhfuhkuh• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, you still have to follow the money to find that, behind those same politicians, are corporations of nearly every stripe (and even illegal dealers) who are behind the continued prohibition of Marijuana.

The prison lobby, law enforcement unions, and the coalition of growers in Mendocino and surrounding parts provided millions to stop Prop. 19 from passing in CA. And, the liquor, prison, and law enforcement lobbies continue to contribute to politicians who keep Marijuana a schedule 1 drug (and FYI for those that don't know or aren't American, Meth and Cocaine are both schedule II drugs, because they carry "medical value").

DanBC2• 15 years ago

This is a staggering statistic:

"By 1830, the film informs us, the average American male over the age of 15 was consuming the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey a year."

That makes prohibition a lot more understandable. Not acceptable! Just easier to understand why desperate people thought desperate measures were needed.

ramanujan• 15 years ago

Without rigorous original sourcing, I'd take that statistic with a large grain of salt. Would not be surprised to see it originate from the WCTU, which in other places claimed that alcohol could set fire to a man's body. The only really credible way to calculate that would be to backsolve the number of liters sold from alcohol company revenues at the time, and divide by population.

caf• 15 years ago

The figure is plausible. Recent figures for Australia's Northern Territory give 14.6 litres of pure alcohol per year per person aged 15 years and older: http://tinyurl.com/5uyyuv5

This equates to about 50 bottles of whiskey.

Prohibition: The History of A Calamity

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