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Location: Georgia, on the Florida line, right above Tallahassee
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The standard, schoolbook history of alcohol prohibition in the United States goes like this:
Americans in 1920 embarked on a noble experiment to force everyone to give up drinking. Alas, despite its nobility, this experiment was too naive to work. It soon became clear that people weren't giving up drinking. Worse, it also became clear that Prohibition fueled mobsters who grew rich supplying illegal booze. So, recognizing the futility of Prohibition, Americans repealed it in 1934.
This popular belief is completely mistaken. Here's what really happened....
Wow, this guy is a university chairman?! While he raises interesting points, his claim that the "popular belief is completely mistaken" ignores a large body of historical fact. The tax ramifications played a small, if any, part in Prohibition and its repeal. Several other countries and American states prohibited alcohol before the U.S. There was a strong religious movement in favor of it. Many women who were fighting for suffrage (which came shortly thereafter) were in favor of it. There was also an anti-urban, anti-immigrant movement at the time that favored prohibition. WWI and the anti-German sentiment played a part. As for repeal, it was obvious that Prohibition created more crime than prior and that it was not enforceable.
You can't disprove one simplistic explanation with another simplistic explanation.
The standard, schoolbook history of alcohol prohibition in the United States goes like this:
Americans in 1920 embarked on a noble experiment to force everyone to give up drinking. Alas, despite its nobility, this experiment was too naive to work. It soon became clear that people weren't giving up drinking. Worse, it also became clear that Prohibition fueled mobsters who grew rich supplying illegal booze. So, recognizing the futility of Prohibition, Americans repealed it in 1934.
This popular belief is completely mistaken. Here's what really happened....
It wasn't americans in general that embarked on a noble experiment as it was often referred to by some, to force everyone to give up drinking. It was a movement that was powered by certain groups like the Anti-Saloon League, the Prohibition Party and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. It was urban families, more specifically the mothers of those families that added to fuel driving the support for prohibition. After the gold rush and the expansion of the west, running a bar from your own house had become the number one home run business for people to get into in the big cities....especially in New York. In neighboorhoods where mothers sent their children outside to play all day, bars were popping up on every corner. Back then there was no legal drinking age and just like the saloons of the wild west, along with those neighboorhood bars came prostitution, gambling and alcohol influenced fights and brawls. It also provided a nearby place for men, more exactly husbands, to hang out in and get drunk after they got home from work instead of being at home with their wives and children.
A big part of the driving force behind ending all of that was the mothers of those urban families. That's why prohibition targeted the distribution of alcohol and not so much the possession or use. It was aimed at shutting down the bars and not truly an experiment to force people to stop drinking. People were still made beer, wine and distilled liquor for their own personal use and consumption. So, not only was enforcement of the law under manpowered, the law itself was only a half hearted attempt to control the use of alcohol which was supported by only a portion of the public and not all. I think that being the case, even without all the other factors that influenced it's repeal, in the end it was inevitable.
Roosevelt also seized the day by championing alcohols reinstatement, as a means to ease the pain of some Americans during the depression. It created jobs, it gave people a small escape from their bleak reality, and it raised tax revenues for the country.
Marijuana, I fear, won't be repealed until we have to repeal it. Pot also has one thing going against it that alcohol didn't, government propaganda.
The government told the country of the evils of marijuana for decades, and that it would kill you and turn your brain into a fried egg. None of this was true of course, but the government hates saying "I was wrong" about anything.
Pot also has one thing going against it that alcohol didn't, government propaganda.
The government told the country of the evils of marijuana for decades, and that it would kill you and turn your brain into a fried egg. None of this was true of course, but the government hates saying "I was wrong" about anything.
That's true but, that propoganda only worked for so long and as time passes there are fewer and fewer still alive that believed in that propoganda and are unfamiliar with marijuana because of it. That's why to date, 15 states have now decriminalized it for medical use.
The government eventually admits to being wrong when it's popular among the majority for it to do so and will not cause any serious legal/financial repercussions by doing so.
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