Prohibition Creeps Back: Essay by Wendy Kaminer. Intro: "Prohibition was a disaster, as nearly everyone must know. By banning the legal sale of alcohol, the Nineteenth (and stupidest) Amendment to the Constitution, enacted in 1919, effectively promoted illegal sales of sometimes toxic substitutes, spawned lucrative new criminal enterprises, and greatly increased police corruption without decreasing alcohol consumption. Congress and the states repealed Prohibition fourteen years later in a belated fit of common sense. (According to one legend, the Yale Club presciently laid in a fourteen-year supply of alcohol when the Nineteenth Amendment passed; coincidences like this make people believe in conspiracy theories—or God—or at least the value of a Yale education.) But the calamitous failure of a law or social practice doesn’t condemn it to obscurity; sometimes we treat policy failures of the past not as cautionary tales but as challenges to try again. (Maybe that’s why Americans are considered optimistic.) They surely seem unwilling to give up on the supposed promise of Prohibition. It’s not just the disastrous war on drugs—some drugs, anyway—that demonstrates the faith we invest in the strategy of Prohibition, against all the odds and the evidence that criminalizing particular drugs greatly erodes civil liberties, increases violent crime and the supply of guns on the street, and encourages police corruption without decreasing drug use. Consider the efforts to ban abortion, if not directly then indirectly, by limiting access, shortening the time period in which abortions may be performed legally, endowing fetuses with rights that may someday trump those of pregnant women, and limiting the abortion procedures doctors may employ."
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posted by johannes,
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
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