10 ms·

100 years ago, prohibition went into effect

96 points by vo2maxer 7y ago

save_ferris 7y ago
I recently watched (and highly recommend) Ken Burns’ fantastic documentary series on prohibition. I learned so much about that era that wasn’t really covered much in school (i.e. prohibition gave rise to the first federal income tax, women’s suffrage was very closely tied to the prohibition movement, bootleggers were delivering shipments to congressmen at their offices in the capitol, etc.) It was an incredible look into America’s failed attempt to govern morality. It reminded a lot of how we see cannabis today.
- Magodo 7y ago
  On a lighter note, HBO's Boardwalk Empire is an excellent period piece as well
  - phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
    Based on the non-fiction book[0] by Nelson Johnson. The show is very entertaining, while taking a number of liberties with the source material. I liked it a lot, and I'm in the process of re-watching it. It is also very graphic in it's depiction of violence. [0]http://www.boardwalkempire.com/ http://www.boardwalkempire.com/
  - simplicio 7y ago
    I really liked the first season, which gave a wide view of the intersection between political machines, the wealthy, mobsters, ethnic communities, WWI veterans, reform groups, etc that made up the prohibition era in a much more interesting way than a lot of treatments of the time, which tend to focus on the mobsters to the exclusion of all else. Sadly after the first season, it pretty quickly degenerated into "all mobsters, all the time" show. Even the FBI guy joined the mob.
    - MrZongle2 7y ago
      That was my take as well. I really liked it as a period piece, but after S1 it seemed like the showrunners kept some characters merely because they liked the actors. Michael Shannon was wasted in later seasons, IMO.
- hylaride 7y ago
  That documentary is definitely on my top 10 list. It's amazing (especially in hindsight) how both prohibition's opponents didn't take the movement seriously, to how it's proponents didn't take the problems it caused seriously.
- kiba 7y ago
  It was an incredible look into America’s failed attempt to govern morality. It reminded a lot of how we see cannabis today. What do you mean by "governing morality"? Do we not have laws that attempt to prohibit harmful acts?
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Laws should only be passed when you’re harming someone else. The US has a long history of passing laws governing morality even if it isn’t harming anyone else from segregation, to laws against interracial marriage, to laws banning homosexuality.
    - nkozyra 7y ago
      This pattern exists throughout history. When you look at it closely a lot of these laws (which have roots in old religious law) do have a kind of hook into "public safety." You can - through the lens of people without the technical capability to mitigate them - understand how the causality of certain acts were reflected in the creation of the laws. The argument that was made about alcohol was that it had a systemic, cascading effect on society. I think it's a fair argument at scope. Rampant alcoholism certainly can lead to a lot of larger societal problems. What prohibition proved, though, was that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Of course both alcohol and drug abuse are bad. But anytime the government is given more power, it’s always applied unevenly to poor and minorities. As much as some people love their guns for instance, the NRA and conservative politicians like Reagan were all for gun control when minorities were “exercising their rights”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
        nkozyra 7y ago
        Believe me, I'm not arguing for legislating behavior and there's no shortage of hypocrisy when it's been done.
- nullxnull 7y ago
  Learning about the connection to the women's suffrage movement was, for me, completely changed my context for understanding Prohibition. For those who haven't dug into it, I'd recommend checking out this Time article: https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffrage-metoo/ https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffra...
  - mstade 7y ago
    Ditto, I had no idea about the link before watching the aforementioned documentary. I really enjoyed it!
- fortran77 7y ago
  This was covered extensively in high school American History courses (in NYC in the 1970s) and in my college's required American History courses. And even though the range of History studies is now much broader than when I went to high school, the current California public school curriculum still includes it. https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf
- Wingman4l7 7y ago
  It also paved the way for law enforcement's use of wiretapping (Olmstead v. United States, 1928).
- utopian3 7y ago
  > Ken Burns’ fantastic documentary series on prohibition. I love Ken Burn's work, but haven't heard of this one. Looks like it is PBS. Do you know if it is available to stream anywhere (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, Vudu, etc?)
  - soperj 7y ago
    Looks like it's on Netflix
is_this_valid2 7y ago
>> America (and a few other places) actually did have a War On Booze, they just gave up because it's too socially normalised > They might've given up because alcohol prohibition increased the crime and alcohol poisoning rates; because it was killing more people than it was saving. > They might've given up because the state prohibition laws had exceptions for religious and medical purposes and so were explicitly unequal ("de jure discriminatory") They might've repealed the Amendment authorizing alcohol prohibition when they realized they were unintentionally ensuring tax-free funding for organized crime. The whole Gangsters vs G-men thing was a direct product of prohibition. Where US Marshalls (Justice branch) and Secret Service (Executive branch) had been more or less sufficient, we then needed another new 'bureau' to handle interstate organized crime headed up by a German guy; amidst Irish Rabbis (during prohibition) Where we had had men drinking in saloons and not going home to their families, we then had men and women drinking in illegal literally underground speakeasies (on like every other corner of New York) breathing leaded gasoline (which, apparently, noone ever went to jail for) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_(miniseries) episodes: "A Nation of Drunkards", "A Nation of Scofflaws", "A Nation of Hypocrites"
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  > They might've repealed the Amendment authorizing alcohol prohibition when they realized they were unintentionally ensuring tax-free funding for organized crime. The whole Gangsters vs G-men thing was a direct product of prohibition. Welcome to the modern Drug War: Prohibition 2.0
- is_this_valid2 7y ago
  Sorry - to clarify, it's perfectly acceptable to be Irish and a Rabbi. Portugal's reduction in drug deaths per million rate is something we could all aspire to.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
scarface74 7y ago
And the government still didn’t learn and made the same mistakes with the “War on Drugs” Less charitably, the War on Drugs has always been about race. http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war If alcohol was thought to be only used by whatever the disliked race/nationality of the day was it would have never been legalized.
gbronner 7y ago
The ways around it were unbelievably ingenius: "medicinal" whiskey, boats 3 miles offshore, irish rabbis who distributed sacramental wine to their "congregations", the concentrated grape extract shipped (with a packet of yeast) to NYC from California. It may have been the first law widely mocked and ignored since the anti-smuggling laws of the 1700s.
- npo9 7y ago
  My hunch is that widely mocked and ignored laws is a common human behavior across many societies and times. It’s likely America had their examples of this between 1800 - 1920.
- Pete_D 7y ago
  I remember (but can no longer find) an article on the history of mince pies, which claimed that since foods were exempt from prohibition, people were making mince pies that were so soaked with brandy that they were around 14% ABV.
  - gbronner 7y ago
    "I love pie" they said as they clinked their plates together https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mince-pie-the-real-american-pie/Content?oid=1267308 https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mince-pie-the-real-ame... Was unaware of that particular deception, but there were so many others... entire factories that reprocessed "industrial" alcohol to make it drinkable, pharmacies that dispensed whiskey, etc etc.
Aloha 7y ago
The most harmful thing prohibition did was normalize flouting the law, I'd argue it also introduced in popular American culture the concept that an individual could judge the law and decide whether it was just or not.
- damnyou 7y ago
  I don't see that normalization as particularly harmful, given that the law is so often merely a tool of state oppression.
  - username90 7y ago
    Why do Americans even think that? Wouldn't it be better to just live in a country where the law is not used to oppress people?
    - jeffdavis 7y ago
      It's a defense-in-depth strategy: a written constitution with enunerated rights to avoid bad laws; divide power to isolate and extinguish bad laws; and allow citizens routes to evade enforcement in case we still end up with bad laws. Systems always fail. Handle the failures with something better than SIGABRT.
      - username90 7y ago
        That thinking might have made sense 300 years ago, but not today.
        jeffdavis 7y ago
        Can you explain?
    - damnyou 7y ago
      I have very little confidence that human beings can actually create that sort of country — at most we can only aspire to it.
OliverJones 7y ago
There's the Iron Law of Prohibition: If a type of substance is outlawed, only the most potent forms of that substance will be available for sale on the black market. During alcohol prohibition, nobody smuggled light beer. They smuggled overproof gin and rum. During opioid prohibition (now) incredibly dangerous form of the substance, such as fentanyl, drive out the less dangerous forms. Of course fentanyl isn't very dangerous in the hands of a skilled pharmacist / chemist who knows how to measure and dilute it to make safer doses. But, due to prohibition penalties, people with those skills don't work with it, leaving the field to clowns who dilute it with stuff like powdered baby formula. Oh, and yeah, prohibition means we get to read news about criminals with names like El Chapo. Can the world learn from the US's experience with alcohol prohibition? Some European jurisdictions, viz. Portugal, have shown good success decriminalizing drugs.
- gnulinux 7y ago
  Same happened to weed. Before the recent burst of weed legalization (i.e. before California, MA, etc legalized it in 2016) the only "high shelf" weed you could find in dealers or dispensers were >30% THC weed that was practically impossible for me to smoke as a light weight. Today we have more options e.g. 1:1 THC:CBD flowers with ~10% THC which is a lot easier to smoke for people like me who don't want to get very high. Imagine trying to drink one bottle of beer after a long day, but all you have is overproof rum. Prohibition sucks.
hirundo 7y ago
The fact that a constitutional amendment was needed to prohibit alcohol, but is no longer needed to prohibit a long list of substances, is evidence that our constitutional protections have been watered down. Such prohibition is a great stretch to fit within the enumerated powers and should be reserved to the states by the 9th and 10th amendments. The laboratories of democracy should be allowed to experiment with chemicals, within their borders, as their own legislatures see fit.
- mstade 7y ago
  I always thought the prohibition amendment was about enforcing a nationwide ban, but individual states could (and did, no?) prohibit the personal consumption of alcohol as they saw fit before then? Is this not the same with other substances, and that's why some states have now legalized weed whereas others have not, because there's no nationwide law against these substances? As an outside observer with an interest (but no formal education!) I find U.S. state/federal laws really confusing, and I'm sure I have all of the above mixed up. Would love to hear you expand your comment with some examples of how the constitutional protections are different now compared to then, and as you say watered down.
  - jrs95 7y ago
    States have changed their own laws on marijuana, but it is still a Schedule 1 drug according to the federal government and is still technically illegal as a result. It’s just not very heavily enforced. Still, the federal government claims to have the authority to ban these things when 100 years ago that was not the case.
  - Glyptodon 7y ago
    My understanding is that it didn't require an amendment, but that those supporting prohibition wanted to make it very difficult to undo compared to typical laws and thought that by making it an amendment it'd be much harder for a popular revolt against prohibition to overturn it.
  - currymj 7y ago
    The states can legalize marijuana, meaning that the state police and courts no longer prosecute it. But currently the federal government can still come in and make arrests, although they typically choose not to enforce the law, because doing so would be politically unpopular. Plus it's not like there are FBI agents walking the beat trying to make low-level drug busts. The most confusing is Washington D.C., a federal territory, which has been granted limited home rule. They voted in a referendum to legalize and regulate marijuana, but then were prohibited by Congress from spending any money to actually draft the necessary regulations. The result is that marijuana is illegal to buy or sell but legal to possess or use, except in many public parks which are technically part of the federal National Park system.
transfire 7y ago
And we still have draconian laws limiting and baring access to far too many drugs. Governents use the bad apples (addicts) to punish/control the rest of us.
forgotmypw1 7y ago
this page freezes up my device... could someone please paste the text?
- casefields 7y ago
  https://beta.trimread.com/articles/1393 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/1393
Koremat6666 7y ago
And it turns out USA has not learned anything from this very expensive lesson. The war on drugs, anti immigrant policies, war on vaping everything is like a little replica of this prohibition.
onemoresoop 7y ago
Somewhat related, today flavored electronic cigarettes including mint flavor were prohibited in the US.
dehrmann 7y ago
Every time my grandma complains about how things are today, I remind her that when she was born, alcohol was illegal, cannabis was legal, and the country was about to elect a president that went onto to illegally detain mostly US citizens of (mostly) Japanese origin in prison camps and take their property.
egberts1 7y ago
I’m so old as to remembering reading a New York Times newspaper touting the need for Prohibition on their front page.

96 points by vo2maxer 7y ago

I recently watched (and highly recommend) Ken Burns’ fantastic documentary series on prohibition. I learned so much about that era that wasn’t really covered much in school (i.e. prohibition gave rise to the first federal income tax, women’s suffrage was very closely tied to the prohibition movement, bootleggers were delivering shipments to congressmen at their offices in the capitol, etc.) It was an incredible look into America’s failed attempt to govern morality. It reminded a lot of how we see cannabis today.

Magodo 7y ago
On a lighter note, HBO's Boardwalk Empire is an excellent period piece as well
- phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
  Based on the non-fiction book[0] by Nelson Johnson. The show is very entertaining, while taking a number of liberties with the source material. I liked it a lot, and I'm in the process of re-watching it. It is also very graphic in it's depiction of violence. [0]http://www.boardwalkempire.com/ http://www.boardwalkempire.com/
- simplicio 7y ago
  I really liked the first season, which gave a wide view of the intersection between political machines, the wealthy, mobsters, ethnic communities, WWI veterans, reform groups, etc that made up the prohibition era in a much more interesting way than a lot of treatments of the time, which tend to focus on the mobsters to the exclusion of all else. Sadly after the first season, it pretty quickly degenerated into "all mobsters, all the time" show. Even the FBI guy joined the mob.
  - MrZongle2 7y ago
    That was my take as well. I really liked it as a period piece, but after S1 it seemed like the showrunners kept some characters merely because they liked the actors. Michael Shannon was wasted in later seasons, IMO.
hylaride 7y ago
That documentary is definitely on my top 10 list. It's amazing (especially in hindsight) how both prohibition's opponents didn't take the movement seriously, to how it's proponents didn't take the problems it caused seriously.
kiba 7y ago
It was an incredible look into America’s failed attempt to govern morality. It reminded a lot of how we see cannabis today. What do you mean by "governing morality"? Do we not have laws that attempt to prohibit harmful acts?
- scarface74 7y ago
  Laws should only be passed when you’re harming someone else. The US has a long history of passing laws governing morality even if it isn’t harming anyone else from segregation, to laws against interracial marriage, to laws banning homosexuality.
  - nkozyra 7y ago
    This pattern exists throughout history. When you look at it closely a lot of these laws (which have roots in old religious law) do have a kind of hook into "public safety." You can - through the lens of people without the technical capability to mitigate them - understand how the causality of certain acts were reflected in the creation of the laws. The argument that was made about alcohol was that it had a systemic, cascading effect on society. I think it's a fair argument at scope. Rampant alcoholism certainly can lead to a lot of larger societal problems. What prohibition proved, though, was that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Of course both alcohol and drug abuse are bad. But anytime the government is given more power, it’s always applied unevenly to poor and minorities. As much as some people love their guns for instance, the NRA and conservative politicians like Reagan were all for gun control when minorities were “exercising their rights”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
      - nkozyra 7y ago
        Believe me, I'm not arguing for legislating behavior and there's no shortage of hypocrisy when it's been done.
nullxnull 7y ago
Learning about the connection to the women's suffrage movement was, for me, completely changed my context for understanding Prohibition. For those who haven't dug into it, I'd recommend checking out this Time article: https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffrage-metoo/ https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffra...
- mstade 7y ago
  Ditto, I had no idea about the link before watching the aforementioned documentary. I really enjoyed it!
fortran77 7y ago
This was covered extensively in high school American History courses (in NYC in the 1970s) and in my college's required American History courses. And even though the range of History studies is now much broader than when I went to high school, the current California public school curriculum still includes it. https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf
Wingman4l7 7y ago
It also paved the way for law enforcement's use of wiretapping (Olmstead v. United States, 1928).
utopian3 7y ago
> Ken Burns’ fantastic documentary series on prohibition. I love Ken Burn's work, but haven't heard of this one. Looks like it is PBS. Do you know if it is available to stream anywhere (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, Vudu, etc?)
- soperj 7y ago
  Looks like it's on Netflix

is_this_valid2 7y ago

>> America (and a few other places) actually did have a War On Booze, they just gave up because it's too socially normalised > They might've given up because alcohol prohibition increased the crime and alcohol poisoning rates; because it was killing more people than it was saving. > They might've given up because the state prohibition laws had exceptions for religious and medical purposes and so were explicitly unequal ("de jure discriminatory") They might've repealed the Amendment authorizing alcohol prohibition when they realized they were unintentionally ensuring tax-free funding for organized crime. The whole Gangsters vs G-men thing was a direct product of prohibition. Where US Marshalls (Justice branch) and Secret Service (Executive branch) had been more or less sufficient, we then needed another new 'bureau' to handle interstate organized crime headed up by a German guy; amidst Irish Rabbis (during prohibition) Where we had had men drinking in saloons and not going home to their families, we then had men and women drinking in illegal literally underground speakeasies (on like every other corner of New York) breathing leaded gasoline (which, apparently, noone ever went to jail for) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_(miniseries) episodes: "A Nation of Drunkards", "A Nation of Scofflaws", "A Nation of Hypocrites"

Matticus_Rex 7y ago
> They might've repealed the Amendment authorizing alcohol prohibition when they realized they were unintentionally ensuring tax-free funding for organized crime. The whole Gangsters vs G-men thing was a direct product of prohibition. Welcome to the modern Drug War: Prohibition 2.0
is_this_valid2 7y ago
Sorry - to clarify, it's perfectly acceptable to be Irish and a Rabbi. Portugal's reduction in drug deaths per million rate is something we could all aspire to.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

scarface74 7y ago

And the government still didn’t learn and made the same mistakes with the “War on Drugs” Less charitably, the War on Drugs has always been about race. http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war If alcohol was thought to be only used by whatever the disliked race/nationality of the day was it would have never been legalized.

gbronner 7y ago

The ways around it were unbelievably ingenius: "medicinal" whiskey, boats 3 miles offshore, irish rabbis who distributed sacramental wine to their "congregations", the concentrated grape extract shipped (with a packet of yeast) to NYC from California. It may have been the first law widely mocked and ignored since the anti-smuggling laws of the 1700s.

npo9 7y ago
My hunch is that widely mocked and ignored laws is a common human behavior across many societies and times. It’s likely America had their examples of this between 1800 - 1920.
Pete_D 7y ago
I remember (but can no longer find) an article on the history of mince pies, which claimed that since foods were exempt from prohibition, people were making mince pies that were so soaked with brandy that they were around 14% ABV.
- gbronner 7y ago
  "I love pie" they said as they clinked their plates together https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mince-pie-the-real-american-pie/Content?oid=1267308 https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mince-pie-the-real-ame... Was unaware of that particular deception, but there were so many others... entire factories that reprocessed "industrial" alcohol to make it drinkable, pharmacies that dispensed whiskey, etc etc.

Aloha 7y ago

The most harmful thing prohibition did was normalize flouting the law, I'd argue it also introduced in popular American culture the concept that an individual could judge the law and decide whether it was just or not.

damnyou 7y ago
I don't see that normalization as particularly harmful, given that the law is so often merely a tool of state oppression.
- username90 7y ago
  Why do Americans even think that? Wouldn't it be better to just live in a country where the law is not used to oppress people?
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    It's a defense-in-depth strategy: a written constitution with enunerated rights to avoid bad laws; divide power to isolate and extinguish bad laws; and allow citizens routes to evade enforcement in case we still end up with bad laws. Systems always fail. Handle the failures with something better than SIGABRT.
    - username90 7y ago
      That thinking might have made sense 300 years ago, but not today.
      - jeffdavis 7y ago
        Can you explain?
  - damnyou 7y ago
    I have very little confidence that human beings can actually create that sort of country — at most we can only aspire to it.

OliverJones 7y ago

There's the Iron Law of Prohibition: If a type of substance is outlawed, only the most potent forms of that substance will be available for sale on the black market. During alcohol prohibition, nobody smuggled light beer. They smuggled overproof gin and rum. During opioid prohibition (now) incredibly dangerous form of the substance, such as fentanyl, drive out the less dangerous forms. Of course fentanyl isn't very dangerous in the hands of a skilled pharmacist / chemist who knows how to measure and dilute it to make safer doses. But, due to prohibition penalties, people with those skills don't work with it, leaving the field to clowns who dilute it with stuff like powdered baby formula. Oh, and yeah, prohibition means we get to read news about criminals with names like El Chapo. Can the world learn from the US's experience with alcohol prohibition? Some European jurisdictions, viz. Portugal, have shown good success decriminalizing drugs.

gnulinux 7y ago
Same happened to weed. Before the recent burst of weed legalization (i.e. before California, MA, etc legalized it in 2016) the only "high shelf" weed you could find in dealers or dispensers were >30% THC weed that was practically impossible for me to smoke as a light weight. Today we have more options e.g. 1:1 THC:CBD flowers with ~10% THC which is a lot easier to smoke for people like me who don't want to get very high. Imagine trying to drink one bottle of beer after a long day, but all you have is overproof rum. Prohibition sucks.

hirundo 7y ago

The fact that a constitutional amendment was needed to prohibit alcohol, but is no longer needed to prohibit a long list of substances, is evidence that our constitutional protections have been watered down. Such prohibition is a great stretch to fit within the enumerated powers and should be reserved to the states by the 9th and 10th amendments. The laboratories of democracy should be allowed to experiment with chemicals, within their borders, as their own legislatures see fit.

mstade 7y ago
I always thought the prohibition amendment was about enforcing a nationwide ban, but individual states could (and did, no?) prohibit the personal consumption of alcohol as they saw fit before then? Is this not the same with other substances, and that's why some states have now legalized weed whereas others have not, because there's no nationwide law against these substances? As an outside observer with an interest (but no formal education!) I find U.S. state/federal laws really confusing, and I'm sure I have all of the above mixed up. Would love to hear you expand your comment with some examples of how the constitutional protections are different now compared to then, and as you say watered down.
- jrs95 7y ago
  States have changed their own laws on marijuana, but it is still a Schedule 1 drug according to the federal government and is still technically illegal as a result. It’s just not very heavily enforced. Still, the federal government claims to have the authority to ban these things when 100 years ago that was not the case.
- Glyptodon 7y ago
  My understanding is that it didn't require an amendment, but that those supporting prohibition wanted to make it very difficult to undo compared to typical laws and thought that by making it an amendment it'd be much harder for a popular revolt against prohibition to overturn it.
- currymj 7y ago
  The states can legalize marijuana, meaning that the state police and courts no longer prosecute it. But currently the federal government can still come in and make arrests, although they typically choose not to enforce the law, because doing so would be politically unpopular. Plus it's not like there are FBI agents walking the beat trying to make low-level drug busts. The most confusing is Washington D.C., a federal territory, which has been granted limited home rule. They voted in a referendum to legalize and regulate marijuana, but then were prohibited by Congress from spending any money to actually draft the necessary regulations. The result is that marijuana is illegal to buy or sell but legal to possess or use, except in many public parks which are technically part of the federal National Park system.

transfire 7y ago

And we still have draconian laws limiting and baring access to far too many drugs. Governents use the bad apples (addicts) to punish/control the rest of us.

forgotmypw1 7y ago

this page freezes up my device... could someone please paste the text?

casefields 7y ago
https://beta.trimread.com/articles/1393 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/1393

Koremat6666 7y ago

And it turns out USA has not learned anything from this very expensive lesson. The war on drugs, anti immigrant policies, war on vaping everything is like a little replica of this prohibition.

onemoresoop 7y ago

Somewhat related, today flavored electronic cigarettes including mint flavor were prohibited in the US.

dehrmann 7y ago

Every time my grandma complains about how things are today, I remind her that when she was born, alcohol was illegal, cannabis was legal, and the country was about to elect a president that went onto to illegally detain mostly US citizens of (mostly) Japanese origin in prison camps and take their property.

egberts1 7y ago

I’m so old as to remembering reading a New York Times newspaper touting the need for Prohibition on their front page.