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> But as Prohibition demonstrated, we can't legislate away people's vices.It's extremely expensive and doesn't work. Death rates from cirrhosis of the liver we

by wahern 4y ago

> But as Prohibition demonstrated, we can't legislate away people's vices.It's extremely expensive and doesn't work. Death rates from cirrhosis of the liver were halved by Prohibition, and didn't return to pre-Prohibition levels until the late 1960s. Similarly, per-capita alcohol consumption dropped to 30% and then plateaued at about 60-70% of pre-Prohibition consumption, only returning to pre-Prohibition levels in the 1980s. Prohibition worked. But arguably it was too expensive, and certainly inconvenient. OTOH, national Prohibition turned out to be much stricter than originally intended; the 18th Amendment was originally sold to the public as way to ban hard liquor, not beer and wine, permitting Congress to harmonize state laws which primarily banned the former, not the latter. The ban on beer and wine was a turn that most didn't expect. If Congress' Volstead Act hadn't been so extreme or if SCOTUS hadn't interpreted the amendment so loosely, we might still have the 18th Amendment.

quantified 4y ago
The Puritan extreme of "no fun for you" doesn't work in society at large. Neither does "everybody get wasted all the time". Forces pushing to restrict a vice tend to go total. Cannabis use is not a virtue. It can be responsible so that the negatives are less than or equal to background negatives from the rest of life, though, similar to alcohol and other ingesteds.
autoexec 4y ago
> Death rates from cirrhosis of the liver were halved by Prohibition, While cases of Jake Foot went through the roof, tens of thousands died from drinking alcohol the government intentionally poisoned, crime increased, and the Mafia profited heavily. I'm all for people choosing for themselves what they should or shouldn't do with their bodies, and it seems like the more people try to force others to adhere to their own moral hangups the more it just brings suffering The war on drugs caused far more harm than it did good.
- wahern 4y ago
  > While cases of Jake Foot went through the roof Jake Foot was caused by a change of ingredients to Jamaica Ginger, which had been a popular cold remedy in America for over 100 years. It was caught almost immediately. And while Jamaica Ginger, along with many other patent medicines, was indeed a popular alternative to hard liquor[1], it was also consumed by many Americans (quite possible a majority--it was the Nyquil of the 19th century), including children. Only a single dose of Jamaica Ginger was required for paralysis or even death, and this why children were among the many victims. There were other cases of organophosphate poisoning around the world, some much worse, that had nothing to do with Jamaica Ginger or Prohibition. Jake Foot is just another story popularized in support of the mythology of Unintended Consequence in which anti-government conservatives, and now liberals, love to revel. You also greatly exaggerate the number of methanol poisoning deaths from the infamous government-sanctioned liquor adulteration scheme. All-in-all, the number of deaths in both cases don't seem to exceed the number of reduced deaths from cirrohsis alone, let alone all the other alcohol related deaths. It's difficult to exaggerate how much Americans drank prior to the institution of Prohibition, and more importantly the extent of the public health catastrophe that had long been unfolding. (And the peak came well before Federal Prohibition as state Prohibition laws had already become common, so looking back merely to the 18th Amendment doesn't properly capture various causes and effects.) There's a reason the country passed a constitutional amendment, which is, to say the least, not something that happens regularly; it requires an uncommon degree of political consideration and agreement across the population, testifying to how significant of an issue it was. But, as I said, Prohibition as enacted may indeed have been too expensive. Not because in a simple statistical sense there were more net deaths from Unintended Consequences(TM) (which is almost certainly wrong), but because it had the effect of changing the demographics of death. Increased criminality resulted in more highly publicized random deaths of bystanders who might have never touched alcohol. As with terrorism, the archetypical example, people respond in an exaggerated manner to things which they feel they have no control over. As has been shown time and again, the middle class is more than willing trade the well-being of the poor for improvements in their own quality of life; and that exchange can happen both when prohibiting something but also when permitting something. There are other lenses with which to view this. Prohibition was at its heart a feminist movement designed to and arguably quite successful in reducing spousal abuse and economic impoverishment of the household. To say "prohibition doesn't work" is trite and easily falsified. There are all kinds of cases where prohibition works like a charm for its intended cases. Take, for example, drug trafficking in Singapore. The question is whether the result is worth it, and very often the answer to that pivots on a qualitative analysis, not quantitative. But people want to avoid qualitative analyses because it requires making moral arguments which are much more difficult to justify, so you end up with a bunch of junk quantitative "science" to justify a position, and that tactic is just as available to "bad" people as it is "good" people. [1] See this article from 1900 about a group of woodsmen who overdosed on Jamaica Ginger: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/04/16/101056652.html?pageNumber=7 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/04/16/101... Maine banned the sale of liquor in 1856.

by wahern 4y ago

quantified 4y ago

The Puritan extreme of "no fun for you" doesn't work in society at large. Neither does "everybody get wasted all the time". Forces pushing to restrict a vice tend to go total. Cannabis use is not a virtue. It can be responsible so that the negatives are less than or equal to background negatives from the rest of life, though, similar to alcohol and other ingesteds.

autoexec 4y ago

> Death rates from cirrhosis of the liver were halved by Prohibition, While cases of Jake Foot went through the roof, tens of thousands died from drinking alcohol the government intentionally poisoned, crime increased, and the Mafia profited heavily. I'm all for people choosing for themselves what they should or shouldn't do with their bodies, and it seems like the more people try to force others to adhere to their own moral hangups the more it just brings suffering The war on drugs caused far more harm than it did good.

wahern 4y ago
> While cases of Jake Foot went through the roof Jake Foot was caused by a change of ingredients to Jamaica Ginger, which had been a popular cold remedy in America for over 100 years. It was caught almost immediately. And while Jamaica Ginger, along with many other patent medicines, was indeed a popular alternative to hard liquor[1], it was also consumed by many Americans (quite possible a majority--it was the Nyquil of the 19th century), including children. Only a single dose of Jamaica Ginger was required for paralysis or even death, and this why children were among the many victims. There were other cases of organophosphate poisoning around the world, some much worse, that had nothing to do with Jamaica Ginger or Prohibition. Jake Foot is just another story popularized in support of the mythology of Unintended Consequence in which anti-government conservatives, and now liberals, love to revel. You also greatly exaggerate the number of methanol poisoning deaths from the infamous government-sanctioned liquor adulteration scheme. All-in-all, the number of deaths in both cases don't seem to exceed the number of reduced deaths from cirrohsis alone, let alone all the other alcohol related deaths. It's difficult to exaggerate how much Americans drank prior to the institution of Prohibition, and more importantly the extent of the public health catastrophe that had long been unfolding. (And the peak came well before Federal Prohibition as state Prohibition laws had already become common, so looking back merely to the 18th Amendment doesn't properly capture various causes and effects.) There's a reason the country passed a constitutional amendment, which is, to say the least, not something that happens regularly; it requires an uncommon degree of political consideration and agreement across the population, testifying to how significant of an issue it was. But, as I said, Prohibition as enacted may indeed have been too expensive. Not because in a simple statistical sense there were more net deaths from Unintended Consequences(TM) (which is almost certainly wrong), but because it had the effect of changing the demographics of death. Increased criminality resulted in more highly publicized random deaths of bystanders who might have never touched alcohol. As with terrorism, the archetypical example, people respond in an exaggerated manner to things which they feel they have no control over. As has been shown time and again, the middle class is more than willing trade the well-being of the poor for improvements in their own quality of life; and that exchange can happen both when prohibiting something but also when permitting something. There are other lenses with which to view this. Prohibition was at its heart a feminist movement designed to and arguably quite successful in reducing spousal abuse and economic impoverishment of the household. To say "prohibition doesn't work" is trite and easily falsified. There are all kinds of cases where prohibition works like a charm for its intended cases. Take, for example, drug trafficking in Singapore. The question is whether the result is worth it, and very often the answer to that pivots on a qualitative analysis, not quantitative. But people want to avoid qualitative analyses because it requires making moral arguments which are much more difficult to justify, so you end up with a bunch of junk quantitative "science" to justify a position, and that tactic is just as available to "bad" people as it is "good" people. [1] See this article from 1900 about a group of woodsmen who overdosed on Jamaica Ginger: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/04/16/101056652.html?pageNumber=7 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/04/16/101... Maine banned the sale of liquor in 1856.