UP FROM PROHIBITION

You have to go to the history section of the bookstore to find
Michael Lerner's new book recounting New York during Prohibition,
"Dry Manhattan." It would be more usefully displayed in Current
Affairs. Mr. Lerner has given us not a mere academic exhumation of a
bygone New York, but an uncannily accurate description of New York
last week and the city's fight against drugs.

Prohibition was, of course, a dismal failure. It didn't stop people
from drinking, and, in fact, made many, attracted by the glamour of
the illicit, drink more. But worst of all, it created an ongoing war
between police forces and humble working people, bringing out the
worst in everybody.

Public respect for the law plummeted. Mr. Lerner writes, "officers
increasingly accused of using excessive force, planting evidence, and
conducting illegal searches and seizures." I could have opened this
oped with that sentence and pulled the journalist's rhetorical trick
of writing, "Does that sound like something out of today's headlines?
Well, in fact, it is a description of 1921 in Michael Lerner's new book ... "

And even honest agents and officers were "chased, bombarded with
bowling pins, assaulted by women and children, and knocked
unconscious" out of hostility to a frivolous and unfair policy.
Nowadays officers attempting drug arrests encounter weapons more
menacing than bowling pins, but the principle is the same.

Because the risk involved in trafficking liquor meant tempting money
for those doing it, for too many poor people bootlegging became an
alternative to legal work. Today, way too many inner city young
people seek the easy score available from "working the corners"
selling drugs. It is not that there are no jobs available for them --
check work by the Urban Institute, for example. The problem is the
temptation of a trade where high risk spells big bucks -- and even if
the underlings don't make much, they aspire to rise in the outfit and
make more.

Finally, immigrants and blacks were hounded much more than native
whites. They didn't like it. Fast forward to today, with the common
resentment that the white middle manager caught with powdered cocaine
in the glove compartment gets a slap on the hand while the black kid
with some vials of crack goes to jail.

Never mind that this sentencing disparity was at first supported by
black lawmakers expecting it to get crack out of inner city
neighborhoods. The man on the street is not a historian, and the
modern reality of the disparity enables a false sentiment that
America is dedicated to getting as many people of color as possible
behind bars.

We look back at Prohibition chuckling that people had to endure what
they did for the prissy, puerile notion that no one should be able to
have a drink. Yes, alcohol can be addictive. In excess, it harms
health. It often ruins lives. Nevertheless, today, we assume that the
response to those things hardly is to call for a dry America.

But when it comes to the war on drugs, most of America almost is
robotically accepting of the idea that even talking about ending it
is "politically unfeasible."

In fact, this passive position on the war on drugs represents a
catastrophic failure of imagination, compassion, and plain common
sense on the part of this great nation. It will look as grievously
ridiculous in the history books as Prohibition does now.

We shake our heads that throughout the 1920s drunkenness actually
increased. Meanwhile the war on drugs makes no difference in the
usage of them, and we let that pass.

We know that gangsters profited from liquor's illegality, such that
the repeal of Prohibition was as positive a development as
flouridation was of our water supply. But regarding today's
"gangstas" selling drugs, eliminating the futile policy that makes
selling the drugs lucrative is considered something irrelevant to
serious discussion.

It would appear that to a great many, the specter of a coke addict is
more horrific than that of an alcoholic, and that therefore, good
heavens, my dears, we simply cahn't, cahn't permit such substances to
circulate. Imagine that said in the voice of Margaret Dumont from the
Marx Brothers movies.

However, for one thing, it would appear that nothing we could do will
ever stop those substances from circulating anyway. And more to the
point, it is unclear whether the differences between an addiction to
drugs and to drink are so stark that the war on drugs is a worthier
project than Prohibition was.

Think of Nicholas Cage's alcoholic character in "Leaving Las Vegas"
and Jamie Foxx's heroin-addicted role as Ray Charles in "Ray." Why,
precisely, does the latter justify a policy that tears at the fabric
of American society just as Prohibition did, and shows no more signs
of success -- even after having existed for decades longer? What
might we learn from other countries' drug policies? Might we stress
rehabilitation over interdiction?

Questions like that should be at the center of political discourse in
America. That instead they are considered radical musings from the
edge is, given current realities, pathetic.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.