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Prohibition: The History of A Calamity
- InclinedPlane 15y agoI wonder if we'll ever see a movie in the future about the failed and disastrous prohibition of other drugs.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoMost Americans don't see the disaster, but in Mexico and Colombia (and in some others south american countries) thousands of innocent people die each year for the marijuana and coca crops.
- lmkg 15y agoIn the future? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/
- InclinedPlane 15y agoYes, also The Wire, and The Corner, all quite excellent. But they are narratives, typically fictionalized. They are not non-fiction documentaries. They do not take on the issue head on, they do not discuss the statistics of the problem, etc. They come close, but a full head-on confrontation of the issue is still too taboo to be done by the mainstream press or entertainment industry.
- njharman 15y agoYeah. It blows me away that people are so propagandized that they can't see we are in prohibition now. "How, in the United States of America, the land of the free, could Prohibition ever have come to be?"
- toddmorey 15y agoAn aside: This may have been discussed before about WSJ, but /article/SB10001424052970204226204576600863260993384.html has to be one of the worst URLs I've seen. What system is it that builds those filenames?
- sk5t 15y agoMaybe it's CityDesk?
- Hisoka 15y agoA society with so many ppl that rely so much on alcohol is just a symptom of even bigger problem. Give people a sense of purpose, or better community ties, and the need for "drugs" decreases
- irahul 15y ago> A society with so many ppl that rely so much on alcohol is just a symptom of even bigger problem. It's common for people who don't drink to assume alcohol is a big problem - it's not. > Give people a sense of purpose, or better community ties, and the need for "drugs" decreases People with sense of purpose, and better community ties, indulge in social drinking all too often. Never been to an entrepreneur's meetup which is in a bar? Never seen a family and friends getting drunk?
- lewcypher 15y agoorly? Alcohol is a very large problem, not least keeping people isolated and stuck in their lower self, see Timothy Learys writings on drugs and Chakras. http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa38.htm http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa38.htm
- irahul 15y ago> orly? Oh, really? Yes. > Alcohol is a very large problem, not least keeping people isolated and stuck in their lower self, see Timothy Learys writings on drugs and Chakras. http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa38.htm http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa38.htm Alcohol is not a problem, being an alcoholic is. Breaking news, excess of anything is generally bad. By your reasoning, tv is bad since excess tv is bad, food is bad since excess food is bad...The list goes on and on.
- lewcypher 15y agoFair enough, you have half a point there, though this is the whole 'guns don't kill people...' argument. In the context of western society alcohol abuse has been almost normalized, and binge drinking especially amongst young people is considered 'a fun night out'. You are right, alcohol abuse is the problem. As a society we abuse alcohol. TV and sports events are saturated with alcohol advertising, children are exposed from a very young age to alcohol (ab)use. Granted, there is nothing wrong with drinking in moderation, I enjoy a few beers myself. Though if there were an actually sane and evidenced based approach to drug policy, alcohol would be seen to be one of the most damaging drugs and would be regulated appropriately. Regulation meaning education, higher taxes on alcoholic beverages, a heavy restriction on advertising, and support for the sick people that are abusing it.
- w1ntermute 15y agoIf anyone's interested in Prohibition-era America, I would strongly recommend checking out HBO's Boardwalk Empire series for a masterful televised reenactment of that period in history.
- jseliger 15y agoDaniel Okrent's book (mentioned in the article) is also worth reading; I wrote a little about it here: http://jseliger.com/2010/07/18/hypocrisy-as-enabled-by-wealth-a-lesson-from-daniel-okrents-last-call http://jseliger.com/2010/07/18/hypocrisy-as-enabled-by-wealt... . One upshot of the book: Prohibition required an unusual confluence of political factors, including racism and class fear, in order for it to pass. On a separate note, I wouldn't be surprised if drug prohibition eventually comes to look as silly as alcohol prohibition. From an intellectual standpoint, it already does.
- bd_at_rivenhill 15y agoIt already looks sillier, alcohol prohibition didn't lead to the loss of thousands of lives and breakdown of civil order in Mexico, didn't fuel a sustained rebellion in Colombia, and didn't handicap the prosecution of a war in Afghanistan the way the drug war has.
- bennesvig 15y agoThis article from a respectable economist is pretty convincing on why drugs should be legalized. He compares it to prohibition - http://www.overdrome.com/index.php?id=1816 http://www.overdrome.com/index.php?id=1816 Audio version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZbHndilYsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZbHndilYsI
- guelo 15y agoBack then people understood that it was outside the power of federal government to ban a drug and that it would require a constitutional amendment. Today, marijuana and a whole host of drugs are banned at the whim of bureaucrats.
- bd_at_rivenhill 15y agoThe power of the Federal government was much lower before the Supreme Court allowed the abuse of the commerce clause to get so far out of hand.
- jacobolus 15y agoThe power of the Federal Government was a lot lower before the huge “trusts” of the late-19th century grew in size and strength until they could wantonly trample the rights of consumers, their own workers, and citizens generally without any similarly powerful opposing force. It grew still further after the outsized influence of corporate and financial interests led to a calamitous worldwide economic collapse (the great depression) and citizens demanded that their government do something to prevent those imbalances and instabilities. The US Supreme Court changed its understanding of the commerce clause and other aspects of government regulation of commerce in the 40s–60s in rejection of the previous generation’s court whose every decision favored the rich and powerful and blocked corrective legislative action at every level (for instance in the famous Lochner v. New York case after which we now refer to that whole court “era”). The citizenry explicitly (and overwhelmingly) elected legislators and executives who promised to reign in the power of corporations, and they replaced the previous justices... that’s how democracy is designed to work. Government regulation is a response to real serious abuses of the type almost everyone is horrified by when they hear the specific examples that prompted the regulation – false advertising, fraud, miserable working conditions and the general treatment of workers as replaceable objects (and preserving the same by viciously breaking up any attempts by workers to organize), the sale of deadly diseased food, dumping of toxins into drinking water supplies, the use of market power to block competitors from markets or disrupt their operation, discrimination based on race, gender, and religion, etc. etc. To just sum up this history as “the Supreme Court allowed the abuse of the commerce clause to get so far out of hand” is deeply disingenuous.
- DanBC 15y agoThis is a staggering statistic: "By 1830, the film informs us, the average American male over the age of 15 was consuming the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey a year." That makes prohibition a lot more understandable. Not acceptable! Just easier to understand why desperate people thought desperate measures were needed.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- potatolicious 15y agoHe already disclaimed that - he said it makes it understandable, not acceptable. There are lots of things in this world that are understandable yet unacceptable.
- burgerbrain 15y agoAppears I did misread.
- ramanujan 15y agoWithout rigorous original sourcing, I'd take that statistic with a large grain of salt. Would not be surprised to see it originate from the WCTU, which in other places claimed that alcohol could set fire to a man's body. The only really credible way to calculate that would be to backsolve the number of liters sold from alcohol company revenues at the time, and divide by population.