A law prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages had been the dream of temperance campaigners in the United States since the early 19th Century. When prohibition came into force, in , saloons across the country were boarded up and the streets foamed with beer as joyful campaigners smashed kegs and poured bottles down the drain.
But far from ending corruption and vice, as opponents of the "demon rum" had hoped, prohibition led to an unprecedented explosion in criminality and drunkenness. Thousands of speakeasies selling illegal liquor, often far stronger than legal varieties, sprang up across the country - and gangsters such as Al Capone fought bloody turf wars over the control of newly created bootlegging empires.
National prohibition was finally repealed in , but it never quite died out. When alcohol regulation was handed back to individual states, many local communities voted to keep the restrictions in place, particularly in the southern Bible Belt.
Today there are still more than "dry" counties in the United States, and many more where cities and towns within dry areas have voted to allow alcohol sales, making them "moist" or partially dry. The result is a patchwork of dry, wet and moist counties stretching across the south.
A snapshot of wet and dry America. It is not a one-way street - some communities have voted to remain dry or even introduce further restrictions on alcohol sales. But hard economic times have accelerated the march of alcohol, and in recent years many communities that have been dry for decades are opting to end prohibition, for fear of losing business to their wet neighbours.
Williamsburg, in the south-east corner of Kentucky, is the latest community to take the plunge. On Tuesday, it voted by a margin of just 14 votes to allow the sale of alcoholic drinks in restaurants seating more than - moving it from completely dry to partially dry or "moist".
Paul Croley, a local lawyer who led the Yes campaign, which gained votes to the No campaign's , claims it is a victory for the forces of progress. In , the Religious Coalition for a Moral Drug Policy, an umbrella group representing Jews and most major American Christian denominations, observed that:. We reject this notion, as it forgets the difference between vice and crime. Enforcing positive morality is our responsibility as individuals, as parents, and as clergy.
To put the government in charge of all morality is to abdicate our individual responsibility, to weaken the moral authority of our religious institutions, and thus to fail in the execution of our duties … [T]he primary obligation of government is to secure liberty, not to promote what is called virtue at the point of a gun.
But the most important parallel between the prohibition of alcohol and the prohibition of other drugs may lie in the way in which alcohol prohibition was repealed. This could serve as a pattern for the repeal, or at least the reduction, of the penalties associated with the use of illegal drugs.
Alcohol prohibition was introduced because of popular pressures. It was repealed almost entirely by means of referendum. In Canada, the repeal of prohibition took place slowly, and on a piecemeal basis, with some parts of the country voting to retain anti-alcohol measures long after other parts had re-legalized the sale of alcohol. In the United States, repeal took the form of a series of parallel, but simultaneous local consultations.
In both countries, however, it was direct public consultation that allowed for the repeal to take place. Under the provisions of the local option law, a county could arrange for a plebiscite to be held on the question of a local ban on alcohol sales. Using this provision, many counties held referendums on the question over the course of subsequent decades. County governments were also authorized to hold referendums on the question of repealing temperance, provided that no plebiscite on repeal could be held within three years of a referendum in which prohibition had been approved.
The final referendums under the provisions of the local option plebiscite law were held in , when Huron and Perth counties, both in Ontario, voted to repeal existing prohibition laws.
Provinces also held referendums on the prohibition question, with 12 votes taking place in various provinces during the s alone. Prohibition had been introduced piecemeal and it was repealed piecemeal as well, with a great deal of political fuss but very few negative social consequences, and the resulting step-by-step and region-by-region return to full legal status reflected the slow spread of a social consensus across Canadian society.
Toronto: Dundurn Press, , pp. The repeal movement in the United States took a much more centralized form, but was also made possible by reliance on direct consultation with the voters.
Because Prohibition was mandated by a constitutional amendment, repeal could not occur without the approval of two-thirds majorities in each of the two houses of Congress, as well as of the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. From to , a massive and well-organized campaign developed, encouraging voters to cast their ballots for pro-repeal candidates for both federal and state office.
The presidential and congressional elections, which took place at the absolute nadir of the Great Depression, were as much battles over the repeal of Prohibition as they were about the deplorable state of the economy. Starting in March , the new Roosevelt administration acted quickly to enact its pro-repeal promises.
Congress approved a draft constitutional amendment which called, not for the direct repeal of Prohibition, but for the election of delegates to individual state ratifying conventions that would debate and then vote upon the text of a resolution repealing the 20th Amendment. The elections of delegates to these state conventions represented a de facto referendum on repeal—the only nationwide referendum in US history. Campaign literature for this referendum makes interesting reading.
Direct democracy was therefore the key to allowing for the repeal of alcohol prohibition. Perhaps it is time to consider allowing Canadians to use some version of the same mechanism in determining the legal status of other drugs. Polls indicate that if a referendum were held today, a majority of Canadians would probably vote to decriminalize, although not to legalize marijuana and to make the use of this drug fully legal under medical supervision.
Canadians might also be willing to consider legalizing heroin use for pain relief in terminally ill patients, and perhaps to adopt other liberalizing measures.
Views on these questions have tended to ebb and flow over the past 20 years, with attitudes towards all drugs, including marijuana, tending to harden during the Reagan years, and then to soften during the course of the s. What is your opinion?
Should smoking marijuana be a criminal offence or not? Do you think marijuana use should be a criminal offence even for health-related use or should it be legal to use it for health-related purposes? This does not suggest the emergence of a consensus in favour of the complete legalization of all currently banned substances.
But it does provide evidence that Canadians do not regard the current, arbitrary boundary between alcohol and other legal drugs, on one hand, and marijuana and all other drugs on the other, as being fixed at the appropriate point on the drug spectrum. This in turn suggests that Canadians would like to take a gradual, cautious approach to decriminalization in general.
Republier cet article. Lawrence Reed Sit yourself down to dinner with an apologist for the War on Drugs, and at some point between the moment the first glass of wine is poured and the last of the coffee and cigarettes have been cleared away, make sure to ask this question: Why is it legal to use the recreational drugs that we have just enjoyed when the use of so many others is punishable by criminal sanctions? All of this is, of course, demonstrably false. In , suffragist and prohibition advocate Emily Murphy warned in her anti-marijuana tract, The Black Candle : The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility.
Should we end prohibition? Jump to navigation Skip navigation. After decades of criminal prohibition and intensive law enforcement efforts to rid the country of illegal drugs, violent traffickers still endanger life in our cities, a steady stream of drug offenders still pours into our jails and prisons, and tons of cocaine, heroin and marijuana still cross our borders unimpeded.
Not only is prohibition a proven failure as a drug control strategy, but it subjects otherwise law-abiding citizens to arrest, prosecution and imprisonment for what they do in private. In trying to enforce the drug laws, the government violates the fundamental rights of privacy and personal autonomy that are guaranteed by our Constitution.
The ACLU believes that unless they do harm to others, people should not be punished -- even if they do harm to themselves. There are better ways to control drug use, ways that will ultimately lead to a healthier, freer and less crime-ridden society. During the Civil War, morphine an opium derivative and cousin of heroin was found to have pain-killing properties and soon became the main ingredient in several patent medicines.
In the late 19th century, marijuana and cocaine were put to various medicinal uses -- marijuana to treat migraines, rheumatism and insomnia, and cocaine to treat sinusitis, hay fever and chronic fatigue. All of these drugs were also used recreationally, and cocaine, in particular, was a common incredient in wines and soda pop -- including the popular Coca Cola. At the turn of the century, many drugs were made illegal when a mood of temperance swept the nation.
In , Congress passed the Harrison Act, banning opiates and cocaine. Alcohol prohibition quickly followed, and by the U. That did not mean, however, an end to drug use. It meant that, suddenly, people were arrested and jailed for doing what they had previously done without government interference.
Prohibition also meant the emergence of a black market, operated by criminals and marked by violence. In , because of concern over widespread organized crime, police corruption and violence, the public demanded repeal of alcohol prohibition and the return of regulatory power to the states. Most states immediately replaced criminal bans with laws regulating the quality, potency and commercial sale of alcohol; as a result, the harms associated with alcohol prohibition disappeared.
Meanwhile, federal prohibition of heroin and cocaine remained, and with passage of the Marijuana Stamp Act in marijuana was prohibited as well.
Federal drug policy has remained strictly prohibitionist to this day. Criminal prohibition, the centerpiece of U. Yet the evidence is that for every ton seized, hundreds more get through. Hundreds of thousands of otherwise law abiding people have been arrested and jailed for drug possession.
Between and , the annual number of drug-related arrests increased from , to over 1. One-third of those were marijuana arrests, most for mere possession. The best evidence of prohibition's failure is the government's current war on drugs.
This war, instead of employing a strategy of prevention, research, education and social programs designed to address problems such as permanent poverty, long term unemployment and deteriorating living conditions in our inner cities, has employed a strategy of law enforcement. While this military approach continues to devour billions of tax dollars and sends tens of thousands of people to prison, illegal drug trafficking thrives, violence escalates and drug abuse continues to debilitate lives.
Compounding these problems is the largely unchecked spread of the AIDS virus among drug-users, their sexual partners and their offspring. Indeed, the criminal drug laws protect drug traffickers from taxation, regulation and quality control. Those laws also support artificially high prices and assure that commercial disputes among drug dealers and their customers will be settled not in courts of law, but with automatic weapons in the streets.
The Cullen-Harrison Act, signed about 10 months before the 21st Amendment was ratified, allowed people to drink low-alcohol content beer and wine. Incoming President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the Volstead Act amended in April to allow people to have a beer, or two, while they waited for the 21st Amendment to be ratified.
The first team of Budweiser Clydesdales was sent to the White House to give President Roosevelt a ceremonial case of beer.
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