Prohibition lives!

She throws his drink out
of the car, he smashes her
face with his cheeseburger.

Seventy-five years ago today Prohibition officially ended (1933). Prohibition, you no doubt have heard of our 13 year total failure at trying to legislate morality. With prohibition otherwise law-abiding Americans by the millions were turned into criminals, or would have been had the enforcement of prohibition been much more effective than it was. Bootleggers flourished, stills cropped up everywhere, people made gin in their bathtubs, and some of the booze was so bad it actually caused people to lose their vision. Prohibition also gave us our famous gangster culture with the likes of Al Capone and many others. The crime rate soared as did the murder rate as gangsters fought each other over lucrative turfs and forced saloonkeepers into buying their product rather than a competitors (which might well have been a superior product). It was a wild time indeed, with flappers and the Charleston, and short hair and skirts and cigarettes for women, the jazz age, the roaring twenties, and the whole bit, pretty much summed up in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, The Great Gatsby.

But alas, prohibition lives! We don’t call it prohibition these days, and it has nothing to do with drugs like beer and wine, whiskey and gin, rum and vodka, and the hundreds of other alcoholic beverages that can now be purchased legally. We call it “the war on drugs” and it has to do with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, morphine, and many derivatives of those actually quite useful products, especially when used by the medical profession. We apparently learned nothing from our earlier attempts at legislating morality. We now have gangs killing each other over turf, illegal smuggling and manufacturing, murders by the score (5000 drug related deaths in Mexico alone last year), and hundreds of thousands of lives ruined, often for relatively minor drug offenses, particularly involving marijuana. As I recall (from reading and hearing about it – I’m not really that old), FDR started ending the failed experiment by first legalizing 4.2 beer. We have perhaps a parallel right now in that there are some places that have legalized marijuana that may be a similar first step in the right direction. If marijuana, which is much less harmful than alcohol, was legalized it would greatly reduce our prison population, could be sold legally and taxed, and the U.S. would be a much better place for it. Of course as marijuana is so easy to grow and use, the drug companies would resist its legalization (as they have for years). But legalizing marijuana would be a great step forward in the war on drugs and would help us to eventually eliminate spending useless billions each year tilting at the windmills of drug problems. I don’t know how many times one should have to repeat the obvious: drugs and drug abuse are medical problems, not political problems, drugs should be legalized and controlled by prescription just as most other drugs are. It is simple, in spite of our attempts to make it complicated and difficult in order to protect pharmaceutical and liquor interests. Countries that have legalized drugs have had very good results and there is little doubt any more that such programs work (think of the Netherlands and Switzerland, for example). I have little doubt but what marijuana will be legalized relatively soon (along, by the way, with same-sex marriage) and I look forward to that happy day. In fact, I’ll drink to it.

George W. Bush gave a speech today, I gather as part of his attempt to put a positive spin on his accomplishments, especially in Iraq. I am still unable to decide whether he knows what happened and knows that he must lie about it, or if, in fact, he really doesn’t know and continues to live in an absolute fantasyland. Certainly his description of our recent history (what I call the nightmare years) and my understanding of what happened could hardly be further apart. I think it is interesting that Bush, Cheney, and others now deny that they ever said certain things, when they have actually been taped and filmed saying precisely what they have denied. Have they just not caught up with technology, or do they just lie with no regard for the consequences? How many generations of politicians will we have to go through before they begin to realize that bald-faced lying is not as easy as it used to be? I think that in the future, if asked anything about the nightmare years, I might take the position that there was no initial decade at the beginning of the 21st century, it actually didn’t begin until 2010 (I like to start over when the beginnings of something go so wrong). I’m sure I will not breathe easily for the next 44 days, until Barack Hussein Obama is safely installed as the 44th President of the United States.

LKBIQ:
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Jung

TILT:
At least half of the American public did not read a book last year.