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Today is the 75^th anniver­sary of the repeal of Pro­hi­bi­tion.  As a fan of alco­hol in all its forms, I fig­ured I’d write up a bit of his­tory and my thoughts on the lessons of Prohibition.

The roots of Pro­hi­bi­tion can be traced to the mid-1800s when cer­tain Chris­t­ian groups, par­tic­u­larly Methodists and later Bap­tists.  Many states passed dry laws lead­ing up to Decem­ber 1917 when the eigh­teenth amend­ment was pro­posed.  The amend­ment took over a year before it was rat­i­fied in Jan­u­ary of 1919 when Utah approved it.  Rhode Island and Con­necti­cut were the only two states to not rat­ify the amend­ment, and in fact both put out state­ments reject­ing it.

Of course many Amer­i­cans did not like the gov­ern­ment telling them what they could drink, so the new ille­gal sta­tus didn’t really do much except cre­ate a black mar­ket.  Now what comes with a black mar­ket?  That’s right, crime.  If it weren’t for Pro­hi­bi­tion, do you really think gang­sters like Al Capone could have made as much money as they made and had the power that they had?

We all know by now that the gov­ern­ment is slow to real­ize its mis­takes, and even slower when those mis­takes are still being backed by pow­er­ful polit­i­cal groups.  Due to the incred­i­ble influ­ence of the reli­gious groups who sup­ported pro­hi­bi­tion it took four­teen years before the twenty-first amend­ment was pro­posed in Feb­ru­ary of 1933.  Once again, Utah was the state that made it offi­cial by cross­ing the 2/3 require­ment on this day 75 years ago.  South Car­olina rejected the amend­ment and North Carolina’s vot­ers decided against hav­ing a con­ven­tion to con­sider it.

I believe these lessons need to be applied to many other recreational-use drugs such as mar­i­juana.  The mod­ern alco­hol dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem shows how to effi­ciently oper­ate and reg­u­late such drugs, and sales num­bers show how many of us are respon­si­bly using it.  I don’t see any rea­son the same can’t apply to the world’s favorite smok­able plant.

Some argue that legal­iz­ing mar­i­juana for recre­ational use will put every­one in dan­ger with peo­ple work­ing and/or dri­ving stoned.  Again I say just look at alco­hol.  The vast major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion con­sumes it safely and those who don’t are dealt with strictly.  When vapor­ized it has very lit­tle effect on res­pi­ra­tory health (unlike tobacco), not to men­tion it can be eaten, and it is impos­si­ble to over­dose with­out a direct IV injec­tion of THC (unlike alcohol).

It just seems hyp­o­crit­i­cal and point­less to make a safer and more enjoy­able drug ille­gal, fuel­ing a black mar­ket, when we could be reg­u­lat­ing qual­ity and fund­ing projects with taxed while also allow­ing our cit­i­zens to alter their state of mind as they choose.