Periodic waves of puritanism inspire politicians to ban alcohol or
tobacco or other drugs. But history shows that legislating sobriety
achieves nothing--and may aggravate the excesses it is aimed at:

THE FUTILE CRACKDOWN

Governments, decreeing zero tolerance of drugs, have 400,000 drug
offenders in this country in jail. Mothers Against Drunk Driving
persuades legislators to raise the drinking age and now wants to
restrict advertising of alcohol. The Justice Department concocts a
convoluted theory about how tobacco vendors deplete federal coffers
and sends them a bill for $20 billion a year.

What you are witnessing is the New Prohibition. It is the Volstead Act
all over again, in different guises. It aims to enforce clean living
by edict. And it is almost certain to fail, as greatly as the last
Prohibition failed in the 1920s.

These conclusions come from a small band of experts specializing in
the history of temperance crusades. The urge to legislate health and
sobriety comes in cycles spaced 60 or 80 years apart, they tell us,
and the cycle is peaking right now. And yet, perversely, the result
may be more tobacco and alcohol consumption a decade or two on.

"Every 80 years or so we come out with all these laws against people's
personal, pleasurable pursuits: tobacco, alcohol, meat, sex," says Ruth C.
Engs, a professor of applied health science at Indiana University in
Bloomington, Ind. and author of Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of
Health Reform, due out this winter. "Consumption of drugs, tobacco and
alcohol peaked around 1980; the reform laws seem to be peaking now, and
that means clear backsliding should occur by 2010."

The up-and-down cycle of addictions seems to have its own natural
rhythm related to people's memories of what those addictions did to an
earlier generation. But crackdown legislation, far from tempering
these swings, probably aggravates them. Look at the paradoxical
increase in teenage smoking of the past several years. There may be a
certain forbidden-fruit glamour to the cigarette habit. The
antitobacco crusade, that is, may be backfiring.

Engs explains the temperance rhythm: In the first third of the cycle,
reformers agitate against the reviled behavior, which peaks and begins
to decline. Only then--when the horse has fled the barn--does the
electorate close the barn door with restrictive laws. In the middle
third of the cycle, people either lose interest in the laws or
actively rebel against them; this is when it becomes "cool" to flout
the law. Engs says that the 4.6% rise in smoking by teenage girls over
the past five years suggests that this lax phase is beginning with
tobacco, whereas with alcohol the rebound in consumption is still a
few years away.

In the last third of the cycle, the police barely enforce the laws
still on the books, the banned behavior comes out into the open, and
consumption continues to rise, but at a slower pace. Then it peaks, as
another generation comes to witness the devastation wrought by drug
use. And the cycle begins anew.

The crack-cocaine epidemic followed a course like this, although it
took place in quintuple-time. This drug's addictive powers are so
great--and its ability to destroy lives so complete--that the
up-and-down cycle covered a span of only about a dozen years or so,
trailing off in the late 1990s. Urban police departments responded to
the epidemic with a wave of arrests that put millions of drug
offenders in jail. But the enforcement action did not make crack go
away, crack made crack go away.

The cycle is vicious, because most of the time we are overreacting to
a previous generation's experiences. The lurching from one extreme to
another is particularly exaggerated in America, where it dates back to
the Puritan fathers themselves, although versions of it--with respect
to alcohol, at least--can be seen in northern European countries,
including Britain, Scandinavia and Russia. These colder cultures
experience feasts and famines of ethanol, and they make quite a
contrast with the southern European countries, which have neither the
binges nor the temperance crusades. France, Italy and Greece have
integrated wine into normal mealtime consumption since Roman times.

It is striking how pointless the laws against substance abuse
generally are by the time they are introduced, how harsh the
punishments quickly become, and how total is the switch to tolerance
at the end. In each campaign, most of the decline in consumption came
before the laws took effect.

You see the pattern again and again, for tobacco, for opium and for
cocaine, says David F. Musto, a physician and historian of medicine at the
Yale University School of Medicine. Reason: the time lag between a surge in
consumption and the emergence of a popular consensus for legislating
against it. "That's why it makes sense that laws would come in after the
peak and get more severe as demand goes down," he says.

Musto has documented how cocaine first struck even the medical elite
as a wonder drug, promoted in prestigious medical journals with
language suggestive of what we hear now in support of Prozac. In the
1890s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could portray the protagonist of his
whodunit novels injecting cocaine as he went about hunting down
criminals. Then the evils of cocaine addiction became apparent, the
drug became associated with lowlifes, revulsion against it grew,
consumption cratered and, oh yes--laws were passed against it before
World War I. By the 1930s it had fallen through the memory hole. Forty
years later it was back, with a vengeance.

Musto notes that a third of Americans don't drink, a third drink only
occasionally, and the rest drink 90% of the alcohol. There is thus
always a simple majority of voters that lacks any stake in the free
use of liquor, beyond a commitment to the principle of live and let
live. To enact Prohibition, you don't have to convert the drinkers,
you have only to energize the nondrinkers.

Look at the inordinate resources now devoted to suppressing drugs.
"The problem we have fallen into is a kind of a ratchet in these
laws," says Daniel D. Polsby, a professor of law at George Mason
University. "They have become very harsh, and they only get harsher."
A typical cocaine offender spends 10.5 years in federal prison--35%
longer than a typical rapist.

Can you argue that today's laws are based on a scientific
understanding of drugs and tobacco that our grandfathers lacked? You
can't. The opposition to smoking around the turn of the century
employed many of the same arguments, right down to the idea that
passive smoke was a danger to nonsmokers, so the cigar-smokers should
be corralled into their own cars on trains. For that matter, many
other supposedly scientific precepts--eating oatmeal, avoiding red
meat, exercising regularly--were as integral to the clean-living
movements of yesteryear as they are to today's. Science plays a small
role in this swinging of the pendulum. Popular emotions play a large
role.

Musto thinks that with the victory of the antitobacco forces, the next
target for restrictive legislation will be alcohol. That might begin
with dissuading people from drinking, then progress to marginalizing
those who do, to demonizing them and finally to enacting laws against
them.

That such laws generally fail to improve matters, and in many cases
have made them worse, has been argued long and hard by libertarians,
notably Milton Friedman. He has pointed out that banning, like
rationing, produces economically perverse outcomes, among them a
thriving business in the banned substance, fueled by jacked-up prices
and swollen profit margins. Another perverse result comes from the
substitution effect: If you make it hard (or expensive) for kids to
get beer, they will get marijuana instead.

An unfortunate effect of temperance laws is that they glamorize the
banned product. Engs sees this glamorization in the small statistical
edge in drunkenness in underage kids compared with those of drinking
age. Apparently, once you can legally belly up to the bar, you don't
want to. Unfortunately, lifelong habits often form at around that
stage in life, and those who rebelled by drinking at 19 sometimes find
that they cannot stop at 21. That is, raising the drinking age may
have boosted alcoholism in the long run.

Listen carefully to what Engs and Musto and Polsby are saying. Their
argument is not that substance abuse is harmless, but that it is
inevitable, and that we should lay the whip on lightly. That doesn't
come naturally to someone sitting on a high horse.

Make no mistake: Alcohol, tobacco and narcotics cause much human
misery, and people would be well advised to use them little or not at
all. Advised--but not commanded--for coercion doesn't work in the long
run. Problem is, we live in the short run, particularly when it comes
to what are commonly deemed the guilty pleasures. With the waning of
the generation that witnessed Prohibition, the last, and greatest,
failure of legislated morality, apple-cheeked reformers arise to
repeat the same old mistakes.