Celebrate Legalization…
…of alcohol. Don over at Cafe Hayek reminds us that today is the 74th anniversary of the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which banned alcohol. As we all know, the end of alcohol prohibition increased the safety of booze, stopped the trend of sending otherwise law-abiding citizens to prison (and destroying their families), ended mob warfare over control of the alcohol black market, and generally left us more free from an overbearing police state than we would have been had prohibition continued.
But wait. Something’s wrong. We now have even more dangerous substances on the streets, inner cities wrecked by gang violence and families broken by prison, overcrowed prisons, nonviolent young people being sent to prison where they are converted into violent offenders, and a rapidly expanding police state that routinely beefs up its weaponry and violates our most basic rights in its fanatical crusade to fight prohibited goods. Of course I’m referring to the inane War on Drugs.
Why is it that we learned our lesson when it came to alcohol prohibition, but not when it comes to drug prohibition? What is it about the American psyche that results in a large majority of the public and virtually all elected officials at the state and federal levels favoring the continued prohibition of highly demanded chemical substances? Is it (as an old Army buddy told me) that we feel we’d be encouraging our kids to do drugs if we supported legalizing them? Are we really willing to continue to accept all the society-destroying consequences of drug prohibition in order to make ourselves feel better about the messages we’re sending our kids? I for one am more than willing to have a few more man-to-man conversations with my kids about how to take care of their bodies in exchange for the vast reduction of crime (which is a danger to my family), poverty, and government oppression that would come about from the legalization of drugs. Who’s with me?
(By the way, check out Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), and see how the guys in the trenches feel about the Drug War).
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