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Alcohol wrecks plenty of people's lives for sure even today, and yet... it probably wrecked more people's lives in the US when they tried to illegalize it. You

Alcohol wrecks plenty of people's lives for sure even today, and yet... it probably wrecked more people's lives in the US when they tried to illegalize it. You have the people's lives it wrecks as users (probably not all that diminished when illegalized), and then you can add to it the people's lives wrecked as a result of the criminalized industry. But that's why they made alcohol illegal in the US for a bit in the early 20th century, because they worried it was wrecking people's lives. (And it surely was wrecking some people's lives, as it still is).

abfan1127 6y ago
This is an important point. Those that choose to use will get wrecked regardless of legality. However, the ripple is small. Illegality drives all sorts of huge ripples: tax money sinks (police, courts, prisons), post-prison felony limits life improvement, unrelated victims of violence, are all just a few issues. Users even stuggle with getting help because of illegality.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  Yes, all of that, 100%. There are other surprising ways the illegality can wreck more people's lives by changing consumption in ways other than "discouraging". Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine. If the thing is contraband and you have to sneak it around, better to have lower volume to sneak. But liquor is of course more dangerous in a variety of ways. (On the plus side, we owe the modern cocktail to liquor drinking in prohibition -- because people were drinking more liquor, and it was BAD liquor, you had to cover up the taste. And I do like a cocktail myself). Similarly, someone getting fentanyl when they wanted to get cocaine is consequence of it being criminalized, and their life is really going to get wrecked, and it was criminalization that did it. Or for that matter the "crack" formulation of cocaine in the first place is a consequence of the criminalized market, it was invented to fit the "business" needs of black market vendors.
  - iguy 6y ago
    > Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine Here's a graph I found, it looks like prohibition happened at the end of a huge swing from 90% liquor in 1850 to majority beer in 1915 (with wine always a tiny slice): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/alcohol-consumption-per-person-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/alcohol-consumption-per-p... That doesn't have data during prohibition, consumption was obviously not zero, and I'm sure it swung towards hard stuff. But I think there are estimates, maybe 30-40% of pre-prohibition levels (with some lasting effect, but not huge, 1980 above the 1910 peak). I also believe that consumption in say 1700 was considerably higher than 1900.
    - jrochkind1 6y ago
      interesting, thanks for the data! Maybe it was swinging from liquor to beer, but then prohibition sent it back to liquor? It looks like estimates are that overall consumption dropped during prohibition (and it was kind of amazingly high before prohibition), but I think what consumption there was, was moved back to liquor? But I can't currently find a cite for that on google, so maybe I was wrong! It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor. But sometimes 'common sense' is not a good guide...
      - kbenson 6y ago
        > It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor. That does track with how cocktails were supposed to have gotten much more popular during prohibition at speakeasies, as the alcohol quality was much lower and they needed to cover the poor taste.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Beer and wine need to be refrigerated. The traditional alcohol of choice was liquor.
misja111 6y ago
I think the problem with the prohibition was that alcohol was widely used already and regarded as ok by most of the general public. Governments always meet a lot of resistance when they try to take away some given right. As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  Cocaine is extremely widely-used in the US despite being illegal. And obviously widely-produced in Columbia despite being illegal. Coca leaves are widely used in Columbia without too much ill effects, but cocaine not as much both for cultural reasons and because many are too poor to afford it.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Cocaine usage (at least one time) is around 2%—regular usage presumably a small fraction due to the cost. https://vertavahealth.com/cocaine/statistics/ https://vertavahealth.com/cocaine/statistics/ Alcohol use is around 65% with a substantial fraction drinking higher quantities regularly. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-people-drink-alcohol-in-the-us-67305 https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-people-drink-alcohol-i...
    - jrochkind1 6y ago
      I would like to see the statistics for restaurant workers under age 30. Or lawyers.
      - 1123581321 6y ago
        Lawyers are about a third of a percent of the US population, so they certainly could overrepresent. https://www.wisegeek.com/what-percent-of-the-us-population-do-lawyers-comprise.htm https://www.wisegeek.com/what-percent-of-the-us-population-d...
      - 6y ago
iguy 6y ago
> Alcohol wrecks plenty of people's lives for sure even today, and yet... What alcohol does have is widespread social understanding, it's deep in our culture. Your grandmother had a pretty decent idea of how this could go wrong, and of what non-dangerous use looks like. So does your priest. And your mother in law. And Shakespeare. Not a perfect defence mechanism, obviously, but not nothing. Whereas for cocaine, almost nobody has a clue.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  And yet personally (in the USA) I know more people who's lives have been wrecked by alcohol than by cocaine. Of course, now it seems I'm arguing for prohibition after all, maybe that's because alcohol is legal, is that why more people get into trouble with it? My sense is that criminalization doesn't have much role in it though. I think cultural factors, as you mention, are more powerful. And the number of people whose lives are wrecked by the criminal justice system because of drug prohibition is really significant.
  - iguy 6y ago
    This seems a little like arguing that I know several people who died in car accidents, and none in spaceships. One of these is much more dangerous, but almost everyone I know drives places, and has a drink or two, every week. Maybe that's too strong, I'm not really sure how much more dangerous cocaine is. But even if it were somehow comparable, maybe we should be scared by what the arrival of alcohol did to peoples who hadn't had much of it -- this was true of many native american groups, IIRC. And many others worldwide.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  I'm gonna guess that a fair amount of people has a clue what it looks like, but since it is illegal, few folks are gonna talk about it at family dinners. Lots of people can guess what non-dangerous cocaine use looks like, though: I mean, is once a month dangerous use if you do a reasonable amount when you do it, assuming you are otherwise healthy? Can you not warn folks that you might find yourself wanting more cocaine after doing a bit of cocaine and offer tips for dealing with that? Are there ways to make cocaine use safer? Yes, of course! Legalisation will help greatly (you'll know exactly what you are getting and we can standardize strength like we've done with alcohol). We can also educate folks in a variety of ways. Offer free help to folks that do find themselves addicted. I'm going to guess folks wrote about it more indepth before it became illegal as well.
Nuzzerino 6y ago
And yet when more recent measures were taken to reduce cigarette smoking without actually banning it outright, those measures were pretty effective. They haven't done this for alcohol, let alone marijuana.
btilly 6y ago
But that's why they made alcohol illegal in the US for a bit in the early 20th century, because they worried it was wrecking people's lives. No, it really is not. The reason why they made it illegal was mostly anti-immigrant racism. If this surprises you, see https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition for confirmation. And history repeats itself. Racism was also one of the main things fueling the drug war. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-story-behind-nixons-war-on-drugs-that-targeted-blacks-and-anti-war-activists/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st... for more on that.
- umeshunni 6y ago
  When everything is racism, nothing is racism.
- mjbxyz 6y ago
  > The reason why they made it illegal was mostly anti-immigrant racism. The temperance movement was global in scale and existed independently of racist and nativist political factions. That’s not to say that those groups didn’t overlap at times, but the reality was much more complicated than you present. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement for more background.
  - iguy 6y ago
    There was also a strong connection to the woman's suffrage movement. Since support for temperance skewed female, one of the main consequential arguments about extending the vote was precisely whether it would lead to prohibition.
    - watwut 6y ago
      The alcoholism was big thing for them due to link to domestic violence, violence in general and male breadwinner drinking out whole pay check (or being unable to keep job) having big consequences on whole family. Also, for long time, it was accepted to drink in work, leading to injuries with serious consequences. Contemporary society is much better regarding all those, so we kind of forget how ugly things often were.
nimbleal 6y ago
Just picking your comment as one of a number of similar examples to reply to. Apologies if I’ve misunderstood the intent of these comments, but —- what is the argument that connects “alcohol is more destructive” to “cannabis (and perhaps other drugs) should be legalised everywhere”? To me, without some connecting argument it seems to be a non-sequitur.
- DanBC 6y ago
  Alcohol is harmful. Illegal alcohol is more harmful. We need to stop treating substance misuse as a criminal justice matter and start treating it as a public health problem.
  - blub 6y ago
    The only wide-spread health problems we ever solved as a species were solved through medication (vaccines, antibiotics, etc). Heart disease, obesity, diabetes continue to be wide spread in spite of efforts to contain them. Meanwhile smoking has been controlled through tight regulation and negative PR. There's nothing preventing us from treating substance abuse as both and indeed it's likely more effective.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      > Meanwhile smoking has been controlled through tight regulation and negative PR. "Legalise drugs" does not mean provide them for free to anyone who asks with no controls at all on their supply or use. smoking hasn't been controlled through "tight regulation", it's been controlled through the public health measure of price increase.

abfan1127 6y ago

This is an important point. Those that choose to use will get wrecked regardless of legality. However, the ripple is small. Illegality drives all sorts of huge ripples: tax money sinks (police, courts, prisons), post-prison felony limits life improvement, unrelated victims of violence, are all just a few issues. Users even stuggle with getting help because of illegality.

jrochkind1 6y ago
Yes, all of that, 100%. There are other surprising ways the illegality can wreck more people's lives by changing consumption in ways other than "discouraging". Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine. If the thing is contraband and you have to sneak it around, better to have lower volume to sneak. But liquor is of course more dangerous in a variety of ways. (On the plus side, we owe the modern cocktail to liquor drinking in prohibition -- because people were drinking more liquor, and it was BAD liquor, you had to cover up the taste. And I do like a cocktail myself). Similarly, someone getting fentanyl when they wanted to get cocaine is consequence of it being criminalized, and their life is really going to get wrecked, and it was criminalization that did it. Or for that matter the "crack" formulation of cocaine in the first place is a consequence of the criminalized market, it was invented to fit the "business" needs of black market vendors.
- iguy 6y ago
  > Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine Here's a graph I found, it looks like prohibition happened at the end of a huge swing from 90% liquor in 1850 to majority beer in 1915 (with wine always a tiny slice): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/alcohol-consumption-per-person-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/alcohol-consumption-per-p... That doesn't have data during prohibition, consumption was obviously not zero, and I'm sure it swung towards hard stuff. But I think there are estimates, maybe 30-40% of pre-prohibition levels (with some lasting effect, but not huge, 1980 above the 1910 peak). I also believe that consumption in say 1700 was considerably higher than 1900.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    interesting, thanks for the data! Maybe it was swinging from liquor to beer, but then prohibition sent it back to liquor? It looks like estimates are that overall consumption dropped during prohibition (and it was kind of amazingly high before prohibition), but I think what consumption there was, was moved back to liquor? But I can't currently find a cite for that on google, so maybe I was wrong! It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor. But sometimes 'common sense' is not a good guide...
    - kbenson 6y ago
      > It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor. That does track with how cocktails were supposed to have gotten much more popular during prohibition at speakeasies, as the alcohol quality was much lower and they needed to cover the poor taste.
- watwut 6y ago
  Beer and wine need to be refrigerated. The traditional alcohol of choice was liquor.

misja111 6y ago

I think the problem with the prohibition was that alcohol was widely used already and regarded as ok by most of the general public. Governments always meet a lot of resistance when they try to take away some given right. As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.

jrochkind1 6y ago
Cocaine is extremely widely-used in the US despite being illegal. And obviously widely-produced in Columbia despite being illegal. Coca leaves are widely used in Columbia without too much ill effects, but cocaine not as much both for cultural reasons and because many are too poor to afford it.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Cocaine usage (at least one time) is around 2%—regular usage presumably a small fraction due to the cost. https://vertavahealth.com/cocaine/statistics/ https://vertavahealth.com/cocaine/statistics/ Alcohol use is around 65% with a substantial fraction drinking higher quantities regularly. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-people-drink-alcohol-in-the-us-67305 https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-people-drink-alcohol-i...
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    I would like to see the statistics for restaurant workers under age 30. Or lawyers.
    - 1123581321 6y ago
      Lawyers are about a third of a percent of the US population, so they certainly could overrepresent. https://www.wisegeek.com/what-percent-of-the-us-population-do-lawyers-comprise.htm https://www.wisegeek.com/what-percent-of-the-us-population-d...
    - 6y ago

iguy 6y ago

> Alcohol wrecks plenty of people's lives for sure even today, and yet... What alcohol does have is widespread social understanding, it's deep in our culture. Your grandmother had a pretty decent idea of how this could go wrong, and of what non-dangerous use looks like. So does your priest. And your mother in law. And Shakespeare. Not a perfect defence mechanism, obviously, but not nothing. Whereas for cocaine, almost nobody has a clue.

jrochkind1 6y ago
And yet personally (in the USA) I know more people who's lives have been wrecked by alcohol than by cocaine. Of course, now it seems I'm arguing for prohibition after all, maybe that's because alcohol is legal, is that why more people get into trouble with it? My sense is that criminalization doesn't have much role in it though. I think cultural factors, as you mention, are more powerful. And the number of people whose lives are wrecked by the criminal justice system because of drug prohibition is really significant.
- iguy 6y ago
  This seems a little like arguing that I know several people who died in car accidents, and none in spaceships. One of these is much more dangerous, but almost everyone I know drives places, and has a drink or two, every week. Maybe that's too strong, I'm not really sure how much more dangerous cocaine is. But even if it were somehow comparable, maybe we should be scared by what the arrival of alcohol did to peoples who hadn't had much of it -- this was true of many native american groups, IIRC. And many others worldwide.
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
I'm gonna guess that a fair amount of people has a clue what it looks like, but since it is illegal, few folks are gonna talk about it at family dinners. Lots of people can guess what non-dangerous cocaine use looks like, though: I mean, is once a month dangerous use if you do a reasonable amount when you do it, assuming you are otherwise healthy? Can you not warn folks that you might find yourself wanting more cocaine after doing a bit of cocaine and offer tips for dealing with that? Are there ways to make cocaine use safer? Yes, of course! Legalisation will help greatly (you'll know exactly what you are getting and we can standardize strength like we've done with alcohol). We can also educate folks in a variety of ways. Offer free help to folks that do find themselves addicted. I'm going to guess folks wrote about it more indepth before it became illegal as well.

Nuzzerino 6y ago

And yet when more recent measures were taken to reduce cigarette smoking without actually banning it outright, those measures were pretty effective. They haven't done this for alcohol, let alone marijuana.

btilly 6y ago

But that's why they made alcohol illegal in the US for a bit in the early 20th century, because they worried it was wrecking people's lives. No, it really is not. The reason why they made it illegal was mostly anti-immigrant racism. If this surprises you, see https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition for confirmation. And history repeats itself. Racism was also one of the main things fueling the drug war. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-story-behind-nixons-war-on-drugs-that-targeted-blacks-and-anti-war-activists/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st... for more on that.

umeshunni 6y ago
When everything is racism, nothing is racism.
mjbxyz 6y ago
> The reason why they made it illegal was mostly anti-immigrant racism. The temperance movement was global in scale and existed independently of racist and nativist political factions. That’s not to say that those groups didn’t overlap at times, but the reality was much more complicated than you present. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement for more background.
- iguy 6y ago
  There was also a strong connection to the woman's suffrage movement. Since support for temperance skewed female, one of the main consequential arguments about extending the vote was precisely whether it would lead to prohibition.
  - watwut 6y ago
    The alcoholism was big thing for them due to link to domestic violence, violence in general and male breadwinner drinking out whole pay check (or being unable to keep job) having big consequences on whole family. Also, for long time, it was accepted to drink in work, leading to injuries with serious consequences. Contemporary society is much better regarding all those, so we kind of forget how ugly things often were.

nimbleal 6y ago

Just picking your comment as one of a number of similar examples to reply to. Apologies if I’ve misunderstood the intent of these comments, but —- what is the argument that connects “alcohol is more destructive” to “cannabis (and perhaps other drugs) should be legalised everywhere”? To me, without some connecting argument it seems to be a non-sequitur.

DanBC 6y ago
Alcohol is harmful. Illegal alcohol is more harmful. We need to stop treating substance misuse as a criminal justice matter and start treating it as a public health problem.
- blub 6y ago
  The only wide-spread health problems we ever solved as a species were solved through medication (vaccines, antibiotics, etc). Heart disease, obesity, diabetes continue to be wide spread in spite of efforts to contain them. Meanwhile smoking has been controlled through tight regulation and negative PR. There's nothing preventing us from treating substance abuse as both and indeed it's likely more effective.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    > Meanwhile smoking has been controlled through tight regulation and negative PR. "Legalise drugs" does not mean provide them for free to anyone who asks with no controls at all on their supply or use. smoking hasn't been controlled through "tight regulation", it's been controlled through the public health measure of price increase.