Conservatives and others who tend to support the War on Drugs love to point to Alcohol Prohibition (1920-1933) as an example of prohibition of intoxicating substances working well for America. Quotes like "Prohibition resulted in startling reductions in alcohol consumption (over 50 percent), cirrhosis of the liver (63 percent), admissions to mental health clinics for alcohol psychosis (60 percent), and arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct (50 percent)." -- p.311 are all too common, though generally not true to history. Click on the graph to the left to take a look at what Cato's researchers have brought to light about the actual consumption rates during prohibition. You will notice something very interesting. Prohibition only worked for a very limited period of its ignoble history, and there is a reason for that.
The reason that Prohibition worked in the beginning is that there was no major black market compared to what would come in a few years. The only targets for "alcohol warriors" were legal businesses that made and sold alcohol. These targets were weak and easy because they were law-abiding men and women who had no desire to lose their lives, liberty, property or families to make a few bucks selling booze. Shutting them down, and thus killing the existing distribution system was an open and shut case. It was a legal massacre of a previously legal market.
And of course, nature abhors a vacuum and the black market expanded very, very rapidly to accommodate the booze needs of the public. By virtue of being an illicit substance that was in popular demand, there was inherently much profit to be had, and the criminals in the trade showed a remarkable habit for responding as violently toward the system as the system did to them. Fancy that.
So, there are two lessons to learn from this:
1) The size of the black market will tend to vary indirectly with the ability of the "white market" to operate.
2) The only way to control drug or alcohol use is to reduce the demand, not the supply. The only effective, moral and constitutional way to do this is moral persuasion and religion. $400M a year of private money spent on printing religious tracts and Bibles for drug and alcohol addicts would do more than our current $40B a year of tax dollars to reduce drug consumption in America.
"Le plus ca change..." as they say.
Vox opened my eyes on this subject a while back. It's amazing how naive I was, to think that such a "war" is winnable. If prostitution is the oldest profession, bartender and drug pusher are numbers 2 and 3. And things are never seriously going to change until the Lord returns.
My eyes were opened out of cynicism before I became a Christian, but they were truly opened in a big when I became one. What separates us from these moralizing twats is that we realize that human nature is immutable--it's sinful. It can at best be mitigated, and at worst enabled by a myriad number of factors in a horribly diverse number of ways. We may enable more evil by allowing all of the power needed to fight the "War on Drugs" than we would by not fighting it, for example, and that's what I think has happened.
So free bondage, spanking, hair pulling, rough stuff, didn't make it into any of the top three spots huh?
Paid sex, alcohol, n drugs...
Life's more tolerable for some when they're indeed numb.
*sigh*
How long before antidepressants make it onto that list?
I disagree with the opening statement. I dont know of any conservatives who point to Prohibition as a good thing (tho you obviously have one to quote) They use that as an example of an over-reaching government and say how it doesnt work.
Then in the very next breath say how the war on drugs is different.
That is what I see anyways. Were the products legal then businesses would put the dealers out of business right quick due to economy of scale as well as not having to pay middleman after middleman.
Wow, after reading that article, I dont even know where to start? It was written like a string of sound bites and made no real sense.
Sometimes I think I should be a journalist. I can spit out things like that all day long.
I have to agree with eric on this.
your basic theme early is that curtailing recreational drug use is not worth doing but your final points are that it is not being done right.
While you may be right that demand mitigation is more effective than supply, those are not the only two options. There are also combinations thay may be more effective than either alone. But if your premise is that there is no value in prohibition, then supply and demand are equally moot.
The main problem with your graph is that unregulated industries do not report their production. So how can you know what it is?
It may interest you to know that there are many places in the USA where prohibition never ended. The local inhabitants seem to be just fine with it as do the many church denonimations that consume no alcohol.
Roci,
What I was getting at toward the end is that it is a social good to reduce consumption of alcohol, tobacco and narcotics. I think we agree quite clearly there, but my point that I was trying to get across is that there is no discernible connection between prohibition and ending the problem. If we cannot reasonably estimate alcohol consumption from that period, I think we enter a dangerous territory. How can drug warriors prove that there is any point then, since they cannot reasonably prove that they are winning at all?
I'll admit that you and Erik are half-right when it comes to prohibition. A lot of conservatives think it was a bad idea, but there are a lot of social conservatives who think it was a great idea. In fact, there are probably a lot today, especially women, who would support similar policies. And yes, I did know that there are counties where it is still in effect... some of my relatives live in one in North Carolina.
The problem is ultimately the same on both booze and drugs. As Milton Friedman observed, victimless crimes are inherently problematic because neither the "victim" nor the "victimizer" want to get caught. The drug dealer and the drug user like their arrangement, price and purity notwithstanding. It takes third parties to get anything done. This is part of the reason that it's unwinnable. Few major busts can be made from outside the trade. Even today we pit drug dealers off against one another. As long as it takes black marketeers to take down black marketeers, the problem will probably be that at best, we'll be able to take down 50% of them. That is why I have always maintained that the only way to end the black market's domination and marginalize it is through regulated sale and use of narcotics coupled with systematic enforcement of all of the other crimes that drug users are today wont to commit in support of their habits or due to impaired judgement.
Another reason I see it as hopeless is that we discriminate against different types of intoxication. A user with a .20 alcohol is no better or safer than someone high on crystal meth or any other drug behind the wheel. Yet judges and police are known to be more forgiving of drunk drivers than stoned drivers when it comes to DUIs that don't result in damage and death. North Carolina has been known to be very soft on DUIs. I remember a story of a guy who just a few years ago got 7 DUIs in the state over the course of several years and never lost his license! It finally took him getting his 8th DUI in Virginia for him to loose his license and get put away on a felony charge. The fact that alcohol consumption is considered "normal" and drug use is not leads people to get caught up over the minutia of the substance and not realize that the public safety angle is the same.
I sat on a jury last year for a DUI case in virginia. Third offense is mandatory jail and loss of license. The law may have changed since your example or maybe because of it.
The alcohol=drugs argument fall apart because no legitimate business is jumping at the chance to legally grow/distribute/sell pot, cocaine, meth, opium, hash or any of the others. The alcohol industry grew in a country that had much free-er tort environment. People were considered to be personally responsible for their own behavior, including alcohol consumption. Legal liability and tort laws will keep all legitimate businesses out of this market. Every addict would sue their provider to get a big payoff. lawyers would crush them with class action suits for marketing unsafe products. Liability insurance won't touch this. The result is that foreigners, gangs, and people operating off the grid (people who do not take any responsibility for their products) will continue to provide these products
There is never going to be a Bacardi's for canibis. Therefore, the black market will have to continue to provide it.
Just as the black market continues to provide tax-free cigarettes to states that have high tobacco taxes. The product is legal, regulated and taxed and Al-quada is in the business of hauling truckloads from north carolina to New York. Even taxing these products as they cross the border is inreasonable. Extra tax increases cost, if the tax is high enough, black market smuggles the goods in to avoid the tax. Customs enforcement takes one for the team.
Mike,
Excellent post, though I tend to agree with Erik and Roci that the variety of "conservative" who holds the most sway in 2007 is more likely to deny the breathtaking similarities between Prohibitions I and II than to use the first as justification for the second.
Either way, we're screwed, and the War on Some Drugs will continue on its counterproductive course -- quite possibly until we end up either where Richard Lawrence Miller suggested ten years ago in his book "Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State," or as victims of a nuclear blast funded by black-market drug profits. (At which point the witch hunt will truly begin.)
With respect to meaningful drug policy reform, liberals have long since been cowed into submission by a combination of fears of appearing "soft on crime" -- oh, the irony -- and their fondness for the nanny state. Meanwhile, mainstream conservatives have demonstrated that they have no problem with selling out their most sacred limited-government principles when there is a possibility of people having fun in ways that they don't like.
Factor in the obvious benefits of Prohibition II to bureaucrats, lawyers, prison guards (one of the most powerful political lobbies in my state of California) and the power players in the trillion-dollar black market, and you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize that the WoSD is an unstoppable juggernaut. It's simply too good for too many people, and I for one salute our new prohibitionist overlords.
I think public sentiment is starting to move against it. I'm 23 and most of the people I know in my generation are at least pro-legalization of marijuana. When I was in high school, even the most conservative students were ambivalent about the war on drugs, and would have had a "WTF?!" sort of attitude toward seeing the excesses such as the abuse of SWAT deployments and the way property is seized.
Conservatism today has largely lost its soul, which is why you can have people who advocate essentially Socialism lite consider themselves to be honest to goodness conservatives. It really doesn't mean much anymore. Even "social conservatism" has become largely another form of leftist action. I've come to realize that conservatism in general is largely just a sentiment. The more intellectual "conservatives" are in fact classical liberals with social conservative leanings. When a giant like Buckley shocks most conservatives by actually questioning something like the War on Drugs, you know that conservatism has fundamentally changed.