PROHIBITION DOESN'T WORK

Editor, The Gazette:

The message behind the CBC's CannaBiz show is not that Grand Forks is
the pot capital and is totally crime-ridden but that, in order to
reduce local crime and increase a legitimate economy, we need to
consider abolishing the prohibition of marijuana.

Prohibition refers to a sumptuary law which prohibits the manufacture,
transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages.
Prohibition was spurred on by the efforts of the temperance movement,
which pressured the government to enact anti-alcohol legislation,
thus, closing all drinking establishments, which they viewed as the
source of societal ills and misery.

The reality, despite the prohibitionist's propaganda, is that
prohibition didn't work. North Americans like to drink and there was
even a rise in the number of women who drank during the era referred
to as "prohibition", which helped change the general perception of
what it meant to be "respectable" (a term prohibitionists often used
to refer to non-drinkers).

Alcohol prohibition failed as bootlegging (rum-running) became
widespread and organized crime took control of the distribution of
alcohol whereby distilleries and breweries flourished. Enforcement of
the law was also a logistical nightmare; there were never enough
enforcement officers and many of them succumbed to corruption.

Quebec, Alberta, and Saskatchewan repealed their respective laws upon
realizing that they were unenforceable and unpopular. As legislation
prohibiting consumption of alcohol was repealed, it was typically
replaced with regulations restricting the sale of alcohol to minors
and imposing excise taxes on the products.

"National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33) - the 'noble experiment' -
was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems,
reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve
health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly
indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence
affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of
mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure." (Alcohol
Prohibition Was A Failure by Mark Thornton O. P. Alford III Assistant
Professor of Economics at Auburn University.)

Lorraine Dick, Grand Forks