The Prohibition Era: Why?

Hi. Today I’d like to discuss drugs. Kids, as Nancy Reagan once said, “Just say no”…….to not legalizing drugs. Just kidding.

Our country may be on its way to legalizing marijuana and on behalf of the owners of the royalties to Bob Marley’s Legend album and the sellers of Lays potato chips, “It’s 4:20 somewhere”. But is legalizing pot merely the first step to legalizing all recreational drugs? Will this be a slippery toke, if you will? (See what I did there? Not a slippery slope but ….sorry).  For many, the very idea is pure insanity. You read about kids dropping dead from heroin overdoses and some dweeb claims the problem is that this deadly drug is illegal?! This apparent assault on common sense is so strong that I wonder if we will never become like the Dutch and legalize drugs. Amsterdam will remain just a far away sin city of the American imagination and a mediocre Van Hagar song.

Yet the other day I came across the best argument for legalizing drugs I’ve ever read--and it had nothing to do with drugs. I read a thorough academic analysis of Prohibition. (You’re right: it was mostly the Wikipedia page. You’re also right: I only read it after I started watching Boardwalk Empire). And let me just say it’s completely crazy that this was ever a thing. And it wasn’t terribly long ago: from 1920—1933. There are people still living who were around back then. The US Government—which always touts itself as a gleaming beacon of freedom—decided Americans no longer had the right to legally buy or sell alcohol. We could say, “Well, hindsight is 20/20” but many thought it was insane in real time. Winston Churchill said it was “an affront to the whole history of mankind”. And that was an understatement.

So how did this happen? Well for one, more non-white Anglo Saxon Protestant immigrants were coming to America. Nativists (think many Trump supporters) associated heavy alcohol use with immigrants. Germans were our enemy in World War 1, Germans were huger beer brewers, you do the math. I’d like to take the moral high ground here, but a few years ago I went to a Hartford Wolf Pack game and got off the bus at around 5PM with the morning/early afternoon’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade revelers still stumbling around loudly slurring f-bombs and Neil Diamond classics and even I wondered if revisiting Prohibition might be worth consideration. Anyway, upright post-WW1 Ned Flanders-esque Protestants thought they could correct and civilize these wild, dirty, sloshed immigrants who often barely spoke English! Prohibition to the “America: F$%@ Yeah!” rescue. So today’s Trump fanatics might want to consider the potential unintended consequences of their flag waving, wall building xenophobia: a constitutional amendment banning quesadillas and orange chicken. Is this really a high stakes gamble you’re prepared to make?

But the movement was actually somewhat bipartisan. Many social progressives sided with the pro-America conservative Protestants. They saw alcohol as a stumbling block to creating an American utopia. Since many poor people drank like every day was an Irish wake, eliminating alcohol, might remove a stumbling block to social and economic equality. Sure you had to infringe on personal liberty but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet when you’re trying to save the world. When it comes to reducing freedoms to further a noble cause, neither liberals nor conservatives have ever entirely cornered the market.       

Also the suffragette movement had earned women more political power. They gained the right to vote months after Prohibition went into effect. In particular, the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement helped influence the ban of alcohol. Now I can hear some guys saying, “Man, women ruin everything”. To be fair, many were subjected to their idiot husbands coming home drunk and beating them for letting the pot roast get cold, so it’s understandable why they thought ousting liquor might correct and civilize their cavemen husbands. In a world before socially accepted divorce, it must have been temping to think the father of their children’s underlying issue was alcohol, not that he was a garden variety jerk.   

And the crazy thing is Prohibition may have partially worked. Some think it cut alcohol consumption in half during the 20’s. While usage is impossible to measure through sales (since all sales were under the table) medical cases of cirrhosis of the liver went down and since non-alcoholic cirrhosis is rare, it can be inferred fewer people were getting their drink on at the da club or the speakeasy while dancing to the devil’s music. Jazz.    

Of course many still drank and for them things became far less safe. Legal alcohol had adhered to relatively safe production standards but illegal booze produced in hidden stills was often tainted with metals and other impurities which made people sick or dead. An estimated 1,000 people died every year from this impure homebrew. Oh and the government poisoned alcohol. No, really. This is not a crazy conspiracy theory, it’s well documented. Having cut down on illegal gin running from Canada, the government realized bootleggers had resorted to stealing domestic commercial alcohol so they could re-distill it to make it drinkable. Plug one hole and you create another! So in 1927 Uncle Sam decided to add methyl alcohol, kerosene, brucine, gasoline, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and/or acetone to people’s cocktails. No word on whether guys would attempt to woo flapper girls in speakeasies with lines like, “I think you and I have really great chemistry—and that’s not just the carbolic acid talking”.

Some estimate Prohibition caused at least 10,000 people to die from government poisoned moonshine and bathtub gin. And since the poor were less likely to be able to afford the purer stuff, they were disproportionately killed off for their wicked imbibing ways. Apparently the government believed the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for violation of the almighty Volstead Act as well as a potential deterrent to future drinkers. Maybe fewer people got cirrhosis simply because they weren’t lucky enough to live long enough to destroy their livers.   

Making drinking a crime was also an amazing late Christmas gift from the government to criminals. (The law went into effect in January of 1920). In the first year alone, a study of 30 US cities estimated that crime went up 24 percent, including a 13 percent increase in homicides. The distribution of liquor was transferred from legal, regulated respectable salesmen to gangsters. And what is a gangster other than a supplier of products customers can’t get at his or her local convenience store? Prior to 1920 gang affiliated black market merchants’ main products were prostitution and gambling, but for 13 glorious, gin soaked, blood soaked years, crime syndicates would also have a monopoly over alcohol sales. It’s no coincidence that this era features some of the most famous gangsters in US history: Al Capone, John Dillinger, Arnold Rothstein, Bonnie and Clyde… It’s estimated that Capone had an income of $100 million per year---a present from incorruptible Prohibition passing politicians which he used to  pay off corrupt politicians to look the other way on his violation of the law. (Except that do-gooder Kevin Costner—I mean Eliot Ness). Capone said, “All I do is supply a public demand….somebody had to throw a liquor on that thirst, why not me?”. Without illegal products to sell, a gangster’s rug is swept from under him so demonizing a product and making it illegal creates a gangsta’s paradise.

Prohibition was also both a job killer and a job creator. What? You lost your bartending job when the bar was forced to shut down? What? The Depression hit? Don’t worry: your local neighborhood mob boss has a huge demand for gin and whiskey to deal with so he’s hiring. Is it productive to society when the suppliers of a product—harmful vice though it may be-- consider murder a viable business strategy to deal with competitors, late paying customers, employees who call in sick, or just anyone who disrespects them? Are the vices of these illegal salesmen more harmful to society than the vice that is the product itself?

Another problem: Prohibition may have prohibited the government from obtaining necessary revenue more than it prohibited people from drinking. They thought they had gained monetary independence from alcohol after passing the 16^th Amendment in 1913 which created the federal income tax. Prior to this, about 40-50 percent of the government’s revenue came from taxing alcohol. Uncle Sam’s livelihood was no less dependent on booze than a bar owner, a karaoke machine maker, or a country music songwriter. But they discovered incomes seem to fluctuate more than alcohol consumption—whether it’s legal or not--so the income tax was in many ways a less reliable revenue stream. The Depression hit, tax revenue tanked, and, adding insult to injury, they were depriving themselves of an obvious revenue source. All told the US government deprived itself of $11 billion in tax revenue over the 13 years. And Prohibition created a costly increased demand for law enforcement. City police budgets went up by at least 10 percent and the feds had to employ thousands of enforcement agents which cost them an additional $300 million.

But it wasn’t all bad. More people joined churches and synagogues! …..because you were still allowed to obtain wine for religious purposes. And more people became pharmacists! …..because you were still allowed to distribute alcohol for medicinal purposes. That’s right, medicinal whiskey was a thing. Anxiety? The flu? 80 proof whiskey is just what the doctor ordered. But fewer people went to the theater or the ballpark. You couldn’t even drink. They must have experienced something similar to Homer Simpson's epiphany when he found himself sober at a baseball game for the first time in his adult life and said, “I never realized how boring this game is”. Prohibition also created the booze cruise! No need to worry about sourpussed federal agents confiscating your stash when you’re over international waters, baby. And the Prohibition did one valuable thing: it fueled modern country radio. Can you imagine a country song without a reference to moonshine? It’s too scary to even imagine.  

So finally Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress decided to end the dry madness and ratified the 21^st Amendment which repealed the 18^th Amendment. Having made abolishing Prohibition a key campaign stance while running for President in 1932, FDR repealed it on March 12, 1933 with the quote, “I think this would be a good time for a beer”. Now this was a guy who knew how to make America great again. 

It seems Prohibition is now universally viewed as one of the biggest epic fails in US Government history. It had disastrous unintended consequences and severely infringed on personal freedoms in the process. Yet advocates at the time had very legitimate reasons to argue for it: alcohol is linked to countless diseases, domestic violence, street violence, loss of productivity, lost finances, accidents, etc. In fact, if you tried to formulate a pro-Prohibition argument today you would probably have more supporting evidence than they had in 1919. Today you have the additional argument of about 17,000 auto fatalities per year from DUI’s. Back then few people had cars, there were essentially no highways, and people were more reliant on mass transit—streetcars, railroads, etc. And yet…..no one in their right mind is proposing going back to a ban on booze.

Here at Blog You Like A Hurricane I really try to ask questions rather than supply answers, but in all of this I find it hard not to see some parallels between the historical alcohol Prohibition and our current Prohibition of drugs. I mean is there any question that drug kingpins owe their livelihoods to drugs being illegal? Murderous thugs like El Chapo would be severely undercut and weakened by legalization of drugs just as alcohol supplying gangsters were after 1933. No one wants a Santa Clause without awesome gifts--let alone a creepy gun toting Santa Clause. 

And just as Prohibition caused skyrocketing deaths from unsafe booze, how many drug OD deaths are caused less by the dosage than by the purity of the drugs? Legal drugs would be subject to safety standards that black market drugs are not. Or what about comparing legal prescription drugs to illegal non-prescription drugs? Is Ritalin safer than cocaine? Probably, yet they are both central nervous system stimulants. Are prescription opiates safer than heroin? Probably, but they both come from the opium poppy plant and undergo chemical processes to release morphine and other mind and body altering chemicals. So are the safety differences simply due to the differences between the substances themselves or are Ritalin and Oxycontin safer because they are legal? Being legal, they are subjected to stricter safety control in the lab and safer dosage control by doctors.

Also, as with banned alcohol in the past, there is the question of money and taxes. Illegal drugs currently cost non-drug users a ton of money. Because others want to buy and sell drugs, we all pay big bucks to to punish them for it. There’s the money we have to pay narcotics agents and the money we pay to arrest, prosecute and imprison drug buyers and sellers. And of course, like they did with alcohol in the Prohibition era, we are denying ourselves large sin tax revenues that would come from any legal sale of drugs. All that revenue might be used to rebuild roads, bridges, and schools.

So potentially more money, less crime, safer drugs…..but we’re passing all of that up and the only thing standing in our way seems to be the fear that legalizing drugs will amount to approving of it and encouraging kids to do them. But how many kids are encouraged to do drugs today because they are illegal? Is there anything more typical of youth than wanting to reach for that forbidden fruit? Wanting to do what your parents and teachers have warned you not to do? Instead, isn’t it possible that the approach we have taken with cigarettes would actually work better? Don’t make it illegal—and potentially more tempting as a result—but educate people (and a little scare tactics and shaming never hurt anyone) on its effects to the point where it stops seeming cool but starts seeming like kind of a loser activity. That strategy has seemed to work—far fewer people smoke than they did 50 years ago. Maybe warning labels, ads, propaganda and peer pressure influence our choices more than laws.

And compared with alcohol, drugs come with more of a shadowy, built-in image problem to begin with. To many, even smoking pot is the hallmark of the loser—let alone snorting coke off a mirror or injecting smack into your veins or becoming a toothless meth fiend. I think it’s doubtful that legalizing drugs would lead to skyrocketing usage. And again, if your kid does screw up and makes bad choices, would you want relatively safe regulated drugs or completely untested, unregulated drugs by a shady drug dealer with a porn stache sold from his dingy 3^rd floor studio apartment that are more likely to kill him or her instantly?

And yes, it must be admitted that even regulated heroin or cocaine might also have the potential to kill the user. But every gun sold in the US has the potential to kill the user through suicide or accident--not to mention killing others. Every automobile sold has the potential to end up as a deadly weapon. Motorcycles, swimming pools…… Yet few are suggesting an outright ban on guns and no one is suggesting a ban on cars, motorcycles, or swimming pools.

So who knows? Maybe our current drug policy is just as wrongheaded and harmful to society as Prohibition was 90 years ago and the only difference is we don’t have the benefit of a before and after litmus test to prove it. Or maybe I’m an idiot for even suggesting it? Anything is possible. Either way…..it’s only the Internet so does it matter? Will even four people read this? But I want to thank YOU for stopping by, dear reader. Until next time…..cheers.