PROHIBITION DOESN'T WORK: Not for Booze, Not for Drugs
Education, Not Prohibition, Is the Answer
Kevin Kosar , a Ph.D. candidate in politics at New York University, writes
frequently for TomPaine.com.
In 1873, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) arose from a wave of
female uprisings in America's hamlets and small towns and began its crusade
against alcohol. As Johnathan Zimmerman, author of Distilling Democracy,
Alcohol Education in America's Schools, 1880-1925 (University Press of
Kansas, 1999) notes, the group's methods were manifold. The WCTU held public
protests outside saloons, sang hymns, hounded citizens into signing pledges
of sobriety, marched in parades, and targeted the young for indoctrination.
Mary H. Hunt, one of the WCTU's leaders, was particularly zealous in this
respect. For years she cajoled schools and schoolboards to use "scientific
temperance" books, which declared that "alcohol is poison" and so addictive
that it should never be consumed. By 1892 Hunt could crow that "the
legislatures of thirty five States, and the National Congress, have by law
commanded that" the zero-tolerance approach to alcohol be taught to public
school children.
In 1919, at the urging of the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League and other
temperance groups, prohibition was enacted with disastrous consequences.
Hundreds of small brewers were put out of business and financially wrecked
while criminals profited handsomely through bootlegging. Though prohibition,
the logical policy outcome of Mary Hunt's "alcohol is poison" viewpoint, was
repealed in late 1933, this peculiar, rural, Christian fundamentalist mindset
continues to drive America's public policy toward drugs and alcohol.
As for drugs, U.S. policy is simple and severe -- destroy all drugs that can
be found and jail anyone caught using or trafficking in them. In order to
achieve this goal, government has been obliged to take increasingly severe
and quasi-tyrannical methods. Turn on the real-life police show, "Cops," and
you can watch police venture undercover into poor neighborhoods and try to
sell drugs to citizens (so they might then arrest them), pull over vehicles
of white persons whom they catch driving in mostly black areas, approach
persons at airports and demand to search their bags. This is to say nothing
of the confiscation laws, wherein if police catch an individual selling an
illegal drug they might seize his car and other assets and sell them off
because he may have purchased these items with "drug money" or because these
items were "tools" in the crime.
Just the other week, Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office
of National Drug Control Policy, and Thomas R. Pickering, undersecretary of
state for political affairs, took to the editorial pages to argue in favor of
a Clinton bill that would "get illegal drugs off America's streets." The
price tag -- $1.6 billion. This is, they admit, in addition to the "$6
billion we will spend on demand reduction and the $1.9 billion we spend on
interdicting drugs." The money would be spent helping the Colombian
government battle a rebel group which is blamed as the source and conduit for
"ninety percent of the cocaine on our streets and two-thirds of the heroin
seized in the United States." The American war against drugs continues,
carrying into the savannahs and hills of foreign nations.
And when it comes to the American attitude toward alcohol, our policy and
mindset have been crazily divided. On the one hand, the attitude toward
children, nay, young adults, and alcohol consumption is pure WCTU -- don't do
it because alcohol is bad. Thus, we've raised the drinking age to twenty-one
(but allow our eighteen year olds to die fighting in foreign lands) and run
anti-alcohol programs in public schools. At the same time, the media are
replete with beer commercials while adults generally feel no compunction
about knocking back a few with their kids watching. What is a baseball game
without a hotdog and a cold beer? How can you have a backyard bar-b-que
without a twelve-pack or three? Then when a young adult reaches age
twenty-one, we essentially throw open the doors of the bars, hand them a
bottle opener and tell them to have a ball.
Instead of teaching the young in the home how to drink responsibly and
tastefully, we drive them into their cars and to whatever adult-free places
they can find. The result is that many Americans' earliest memories of
consuming alcohol are hazy and unpleasant. They get drunk, they do something
stupid, and they get sick. And most regrettably, they often drive drunk.
If the overall goal is to see that kids do not become addicted to drugs or
alcohol, then clearly the current public policies are failing. In defiance of
our laws and righteous pronouncements, many kids drink, many do drugs. Is
this surprising? Not in the least. Just look at it from a teenager's
perspective.
When it comes to alcohol, adults tend to look like sanctimonious old fogies.
We tell them alcohol is bad, yet it is advertised everywhere and the majority
of us consume it. How to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory
messages? Simple, paper it over by insulting adolescents, telling these often
headstrong creatures that they are "too young," that they need to wait until
they are wise like us before they can consume one drop.
And if a teenager can't make sense of adults' positions on alcohol, how could
they possibly trust anything adults tell them about drugs? And by reworking
our laws in order to make it as difficult as possible for the young to
purchase alcohol, we have unwittingly made drugs a more attractive choice.
Why would a teen spend an entire night cruising about town looking for a
place to that will sell him a six-pack when he can more easily buy marijuana
from someone at school? And any teenager with access to the Internet can
ferret out a recipe for the frighteningly addictive methamphetamine, which
can be made from easily obtained industrial chemicals for under thirty
dollars.
Some will object, noting that all we as a society must do is make it just as
hard to buy drugs as it is to buy alcohol. But this brings us back to the
aforementioned and failed War on Drugs approach.
Mary H. Hunt has been dead since 1906 and the Anti-Saloon League fell apart
in 1933. Today the temperance movement is limited to a few lonely souls
baying in the woods. Isn't it time that we cast out this spirit from our
mores, rethink what we are teaching the young about alcohol, and reformulate
our alcohol and drug policies?
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