HOW CAN AMERICA'S 'WAR ON DRUGS' SUCCEED IF THEIR PROHIBITION LAWS FAILED?

America's Prohibition Laws Were Meant to Cut Crime and Boost Morality
-- They Failed on Both Fronts. So How Can the 'War on Drugs' Ever
Succeed? It Can't.

Since we first prowled the savannahs of Africa, human beings have
displayed a few overpowering and ineradicable impulses-for food, for
sex, and for drugs. Every human society has hunted for its short cuts
to an altered state: The hunger for a chemical high, low, or
pleasingly new shuffle sideways is universal. Peer back through
history, and it's everywhere. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a
divine gift. The Chinese were brewing alcohol in prehistory and
cultivating opium by 700 A.D. Cocaine was found in clay-pipe
fragments from William Shakespeare's house. George Washington
insisted American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of
their rations. Human history is filled with chemicals, come-downs,
and hangovers.

Yet in every generation, there are moralists why try to douse this
natural impulse in moral condemnation and burn it away. They believe
that humans, stripped of their intoxicants, will become more rational
or ethical or good. They point to the addicts and the overdoses and
believe they reveal the true face - and the logical endpoint - of
your order at the bar or your roll-up. And they believe it can be
ended, if only we choose to do it. Their vision holds an intoxicating
promise of its own.

Their most famous achievement - the criminalisation of alcohol in the
United States between 1921 and 1933 - is one of the great parables of
modern history. Daniel Okrent's superb new history, 'Last Call: The
Rise and Fall of Prohibition', shows how a coalition of mostly
well-meaning, big-hearted people came together and changed the
Constitution to ban booze. On the day it began, one of the movement's
leaders, the former baseball hero turned evangelical preacher Billy
Sunday, told his ecstatic congregation what the Dry New World would
look like: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a
memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into
storehouses. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the
children will laugh. Hell will be forever rent."

The story of the War on Alcohol has never needed to be told more
urgently - because its grandchild, the War on Drugs, shares the same
DNA. Okrent only alludes to the parallel briefly, on his final page,
but it hangs over the book like old booze-fumes - and proves yet
again Mark Twain's dictum: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

There was never an America without chemical highs. The Native
Americans used hallucinogens, and the ship that brought John Winthrop
and the first Puritans to the continent carried three times more beer
than water, along with ten thousand gallons of wine. It was
immediately a society so soaked in alcohol that it makes your liver
ache to read the raw statistics: by 1830, the average citizen drank
seven gallons of pure alcohol a year. In 1839, an English traveller
called Frederick Marryat wrote: "I am sure that Americans can fix
nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you make
acquaintance, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make
up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it
is cold... They commence it early in life, and the continue it until
they soon drop into the grave."

America was so hungry for highs that when there was a backlash
against all this boozing, the temperance movement's initial proposal
was that people should water down their alcohol with opium.

It's not hard to see how this fug of liquor caused problems, as well
as pleasure - and the backlash was launched by a furious housewife
with eight children from a small town in Cincinnati. One Sunday in
1874, Eliza Thompson - a woman who had never spoken out on any public
issue before - stood before the crowds at her church and announced
that America would never be free or godly until the last whisky
bottle was emptied onto the dry earth. A huge crowd of women cheered:
they believed their husbands were squandering their wages at the saloon.

They marched as one to the nearest bar, where they all sank to their
knees and prayed for the soul of its owner. They refused to leave
until he repented. They worked in six hour prayer shifts on the
streets, until the saloonkeeper finally appeared, head bowed, and
agreed to shut it down. This prayerathon then moved around every
alcohol-seller in the town. Within ten days, only four of the
original thirteen remained, and the rebellion was spreading across
the country.

It was women who led the first cry for Temperance, and it was women
who made Prohibition happen. A woman called Carry Nation became a
symbol of the movement when she travelled from bar to bar with an
oversized hatchet and smashed them to pieces. Indeed, Prohibition was
one of the first and most direct effects of expanding the vote. This
is one of the first strange flecks of gray in this story: the
proponents of prohibition were primarily progressives - and some of
the most admirable people in American history. The pioneering
suffragist Susan B Anthony gave her first public speech demanding a
booze ban. The ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglas said: "If
we could make the world sober, we would have no slavery." America's
greatest Socialist, Eugene V. Debs, said liquor was a capitalist tool
to render the workers supine.

The pioneers of American feminism believed alcohol was at the root of
men's brutality towards women. The anti-slavery movement saw alcohol
addiction as a new form of slavery, replacing leg irons with whisky
bottles. You can see the same left-wing prohibitionism today, when
people like Al Sharpton says drugs must be criminalized because
addiction does real harm in ghettoes.

Of course, there were more obviously sinister proponents of
Prohibition too, pressing progressives into weird alliances. The Ku
Klux Klan said that "nigger gin" was the main reason why oppressed
black people were prone to rebellion, and if you banned alcohol, they
would become quiescent. The dry newspaper the Nashville Tenessean
wrote: "The Negro, fairly docile and industrious, becomes, when
filled with liquor, turbulent and dangerous and a menace to life,
proporty, and the repose of the community." And of course there were
hints that white women were in greater danger: one Congressman said
alcohol "increases the menace of the black man's presence."

This, too, is still there in America's current strain of prohibition.
Powder cocaine and crack cocaine are equally harmful, but crack -
which is disproportionately used by black people - carries much
heavier jail sentences than powder cocaine, which is
disproportionately used by white people.

It was in this context that the Anti-Saloon League rose to become the
most powerful pressure group in American history, and the only one to
ever change the constitution through peaceful political campaigning.
They announced their movement "was begun by Almighty God." In fact,
it was begun by a little man called Wayne Wheeler, who was as dry as
the Sahara and twice as overheated. One of Wheeler's friends said of
him: "Like most humourless men, he had to make life into a crusade to
make sense of it." Okrent compares him to Ned Flanders, but he was a
political genius, maneuvering politicians of all parties into backing
a ban. He made them change the school curriculum so children were
taught that "the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy" because it
is "a narcotic poison [that will] deaden or paralyze the brain."

Wheeler and the Prohibitionists had a structural advantage over his
enemies. As the writer George Ade pointed out: "The Non-Drinkers were
organising for fifty years but the Drinkers had no organization
whatsoever. They had been too busy drinking." The League succeeded in
1921, when the Eighteenth Amendment came into effect, and it became a
crime to drink alcohol anywhere in the United States. They celebrated
the arrival of Utopia - and the inevitable dysfunctions of prohibition began.

When you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn't
disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the
hand of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that
they had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country,
and unleashed an Armada of freighters, steamers, and even submarines
to bring booze back. Nobody who wanted a drink went without. As the
journalist Malcolm Bingay wrote: "It was absolutely impossible to get
a drink, unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy
bartender in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar."

So if it didn't stop alcoholism, what did it achieve? The same as
prohibition does today - a massive unleashing of criminality and
violence. Before prohibition, the saloon-keepers could defend their
property and their markets by going to the police if they were
threatened. After prohibition, the bootleggers could only defend
theirs with guns - and they did. As the legendary lawyer Clarence
Darrow explained: "The business pays very well, but it is outside the
law and they can't go to court, like shoe dealers or real estate men
or grocers when they think an injustice has been done them, or unfair
competition has arisen in their territory. So, they naturally shoot."
Massive gang wars broke out, with the members torturing and murdering
each other first to gain control of and then to retain their patches.
Thousands of ordinary citizens were caught in the crossfire.

The icon of the new criminal class was Al Capone, a figure so fixed
in our minds as the scar-faced King of Charismatic Crime, pursued by
the rugged federal agent Eliot Ness, that Okrent's biographical
details seem oddly puncturing. Capone was only 25 when he tortured
his way to running Chicago's underworld. He was gone from the city by
the age of 30, and a syphillitic corpse by 40. But he was an eloquent
exponent of his own case, saying simply: "I give to the public what
the public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen.
Why, I could never meet the demand."

By 1926, he and his fellow gangsters were making $3.6bn (in 1926
money!). To give some perspective, that was more than the entire
expenditure of the US government. The criminals could outbid and
outgun the state. So they crippled the institutions of a democratic
state and ruled, just as drug gangs do today in Mexico, Afghanistan,
and ghettoes from South Central Los Angeles to the banlieues of
Paris. They have been handed a market so massive that they can tool
up to intimidate everyone in their area, bribe many police and judges
into submission, and achieve such a vast size the honest police
couldn't even begin to get them all. The late Nobel Prize winning
economist Milton Friedman said: "Al Capone epitomizes our earlier
attempts at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one."

Occasionally, the alcohol gangs would have "Peace Conferences" in
Atlantic City where they would divide up the country, fix prices, and
agree to stay out of the other's territory - and violence would go
down. But then the police would try to take out one of the many
gangs, and war would break out again to seize control of the
newly-available territory. This dynamic explains something that might
appear, at first, to be a paradox: the more the police try to enforce
prohibition, the worse the drug violence becomes. Since Mexican
President Felipe Calderon tried to knock out the heads of the drug
gangs, 40,000 people have been killed. Each killing triggers a new
war for the dead dealer's patch.

Of course excessive alcohol and drug use can cause terrible harm: I
have friends whose lives have been ruined by it. But the harm caused
by prohibition soon outweighs the harm caused by the drug itself -
whether it's alcohol or cannabis or cocaine. An appalled President
Hoover soon said in private that prohibition had caused "a complete
breakdown in Government" in Detroit with "indiscrimiate shooting on
the river." Sound familiar?

One insight, more than any other, ripples down from Okrent's history
to our own bout of prohibition. Armed criminal gangs don't fear
prohibition: they love it. He has uncovered fascinating evidence that
the criminal gangs sometimes financially supported dry politicians,
precisely to keep it in place. They knew if it ended, most of
organised crime in America would be bankrupted. When Michael Levine,
one of America's top narcotics agents, went undercover in the 1980s
and 1990s with la Mafia Cruenza, the Bolivian cocaine cartel, he
discovered that, as he puts it, "not only did they not fear our war
on drugs, they actually counted on it." The cartel's boss, Jorge
Roman, told him the drug war was "a sham on the American tax payer"
and bragged it was "actually good for business." When Levine told his
boss, the officer in charge of the US drug war in South America,
about this, he replied: "Yeah, we know it doesn't work, but we sold
[the War on Drugs] up and down the Potomac."

So it's a nasty irony that Prohibitionists try to present legalizers
- - then, and now - as "the bootlegger's friend" or "the drug-dealer's
ally." Precisely the opposite is the truth. Legalizers are the only
people who can bankrupt and destroy the drug-gangs, just as they
destroyed Capone. Only the prohibitionists can keep them alive.

Once a product is controlled only by criminals, all safety controls
vanish - and the drug becomes far more deadly. After 1921, it became
common to dilute and relabel poisonous industrial alcohol, which
could still legally be bought, and sell it by the pint-glass. This
"rotgut" caused epidemics of paralysis and poisoning. For example,
one single batch of bad booze permenantly crippled 500 people in
Wichita in early 1927 - a usual event. That year, 760 people were
poisoned to death by bad booze in New York City alone. So many people
became partially paralysed by an industrial alcohol known as 'Jake'
that a shuffling, stumbling inability to walk was known 'Jake leg.'
Wayne Wheeler persuaded the government not to remove fatal toxins
from industrial alcohol, saying it was good to keep this
'disincentive' in place.

Prohibition's flaws were so obvious that the politicians in charge
privately admitted the law was self-defeating. Warren Harding brought
$1800 of booze with him to the White House, while Andrew Mellon - in
charge of enforcing the law - called it "unworkable." Similarly, the
last three Presidents of the US have been recreational drug users in
their youth. If the law was enforced in full, they would all have
been ineligible to vote, never mind enter the Oval Office. Once he
ceased to be President, Bill Clinton called for the decriminalisation
of cannabis, and Obama probably will too. Yet in office, they
continue to mouth prohibitionist platitudes about "eradicating
drugs", and insist the rest of the world's leaders resist the calls
for greater liberalisation from their populations and instead "crack
down" on the drug gangs - no matter how much violence it unleashes.

The need to mouth this script can lead even the sharpest brains into
unwitting absurdities. Obama recently praised Calderon for his
"crackdown" on drugs by - with no apparent irony - calling him
"Mexico's Eliot Ness." Yes: he praised an enforcer of drug
prohibition by comparing him to an enforcer of alcohol prohibition.
Obama should know that Ness came to regard his War on Alcohol as a
disastrous failure, and he died a drunk himself - but drug
prohibition addles politicians' brains just as drugs addle a chronic addict's.

By 1928, the failure of alcohol prohibition was plain - yet its
opponents were demoralised and despairing. It looked like a fixed and
immovable part of the American political landscape, since it would
require big majorities in every state to amend the Constitution
again. Clarence Darrow wrote that "thirteen dry states with a
population of less than New York State alone can prevent repeal until
Haley's Comet returns," so "one might as well talk about taking a
summer vacation of Mars."

Yet it happened. It happened suddenly and completely. Why? The
prohibitionists made a serious miscalculations: they reacted to their
failure by demanding the laws be tightened even more. Misdemeanours
were turned into felonies - and it threw up a series of judgements
shocked America. For example, one 48 year old mother called Etta Mae
Miller with ten children was given a life sentence - for selling two
pints of liquor to an undercover cop.

But the biggest answer is found in your wallet, with the hard cash.
After the Great Crash, the government's revenues from income taxes
collapsed by 60 percent in just three years, while the need for
spending to stimulate the economy was sky-rocketing. The US
government needed a new source of income, fast. The giant untaxed,
unchecked alcohol industry suddenly looked like a giant pot of cash
at the end of the prohibitionist rainbow. They needed it. Could the
same thing happen today, after our own Great Crash? The bankrupt
state of California is about to hold a referendum to legalize and tax
cannabis, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pointed out that it
could raise massive sums. Yes, history does rhyme.

Many people understandably worry that legalization would cause a huge
rise in drug use - but the facts suggest this isn't the case.
Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001,
and - as a study by Glenn Greenwald for the American Enterprise
Institute found - it had almost no effect at all. Indeed, drug use
fell a little among the young. Similarly, Okrent says the end of
alcohol prohibition "made it harder, not easier, to get a drink...
Now there were closing hours and age limits and Sunday blue laws, as
well as a collection of geographic prosecriptions that kept bars or
package stories distant from schools, churches and hospitals." People
didn't drink much more. The only change was that they didn't have to
turn to armed criminal gangs for it, and they didn't end up swigging poison.

Who now defends alcohol prohibition? Is there a single person left?
This echoing silence is suggestive. Ending drug prohibition seems
like a huge heave, just as ending alcohol prohibition did. But when
it is gone, when the drug gangs are a bankrupted memory, when drug
addicts are treated not as immoral criminals but as ill people
needing healthcare, who will grieve? American history is pocked by
utopian movements that prefer glib wish-thinking over a hard scrutiny
of reality, but they always crest and crash in the end.

There will always be millions of people who want to get drunk or
stoned or high. The only question is whether their needs are met to
by mafias and militias, or by legal and regulated businesses.
Okrent's dazzling history leaves us with one whisky-sharp insight
above all others. The War on Alcohol and the War on Drugs failed
because they were, beneath all the blather, a war on human nature.