Negative Space: prohibition
- ACLU and War on Drugs
- The following was written on ACLU Letterhead.
- Across the River and into the Trees
- Liquor flowed easily across the border between Canada and Detroit. One way or another the liquor was going to get across, so the police joined in for a piece of the take. Prohibition was a jobs program for criminals, employing tens of thousands of people to bring liquor to Michigan. And in a taste of things to come, free from the law sellers began targeting schoolchildren.
- Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do
- Peter McWilliams died in defense of freedom: this book, an incredibly well-written and well-researched book about “the absurdity of consensual crimes in a free society” was probably his death warrant.
- Alcohol and the State in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
- Hermann Fahrenkrug’s shows that, to the Nazi leadership, it was the civic duty of every German to maintain good health in order to support state power.
- Alcohol as a Contributing Factor in Social Disorganization: The South African Bantu in the Nineteenth Century
- Bertram Hutchinson sees, among the Bantu, the same problems we saw during our own alcohol prohibition, and still see for other forms of prohibition.
- Alcohol prohibition archive
- A few files about that dangerous time when drugs were illegal!
- Another victim of prohibition
- “Chalk it up as collateral damage, and add Hoffman’s name to that of Isaac Singletary and Anthony Diotaiuto, three deaths of non-violent, non-threatening Floridians in just the last few years, thanks to the drug war.”
- Anti-War Fliers
- If you want to end the war and shit you’re gonna have to sing louder! Anti-drug war and anti-gun control fliers and posters.
- Bad laws cause crime
- “Honestly, the level of apathy I’m dealing with is maddening.” Bad laws make it easy to get away with breaking them.
- Benevolent Repression: Popular Culture, Social Structure, and the Control of Drinking
- Joseph Gusfield focuses on the repression of prohibition, and the perspective that allows it. What is this “personal liberty” that the opposition speaks of?
- Bet you can’t order just one!
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What better place to put an anti-drug flier than above the coffee machine?
- The Black Market in Cocaine
- The simple act of labeling products in 1906 dropped cocaine use so low that only the massive prohibition enforcement of the seventies was able return cocaine use to, and surpass, pre-1906 levels.
- Bush: We should live by our principles
- President Bush compares Al Qaeda to the mafia, without apparently realizing that, as during alcohol prohibition, it is our prohibition laws that fund criminals.
- Cannabis Britannica
- Subtitled “Empire, Trade, and Prohibition”, this is an in-depth history of how prohibition came about in Britain, and ends up describing how marijuana prohibition came to the forefront of international attempts to ban opium.
- The Cartoon Guide to Recreational Drugs (213.7 KB)
- The Birds and the Bees do it, Pigs and Porcupines do it. But evidence suggests that humans are champion drug users. We are born with a natural urge to alter our consciousness. Children spin until they drop for the same reason that their parents drink alcohol. Nature requires it.
- The Case for Legalization
- Ethan A. Nadelmann compares modern prohibition with alcohol prohibition: more laws and more enforcement generate more crime.
- Cerebus the Gopher
- Cerebus the Gopher is my personal Internet site, dedicated to comic books, role-playing games, and information about drug prohibition, as well as a bit of information on gun control and other politics of personal freedom.
- Ceremonial Chemistry
- Thomas Szasz subtitled this “The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers”. It’s a brilliant piece of work drawing on history from as far back as the witch trials and persecution of Jews. His thesis is that mankind requires scapegoats on a ritual scale. While hardly a ground-breaking idea, the depth of his examination is.
- The Cheerful Spring
- Prohibition is that rare law that benefits those who disobey it. In Detroit, underworld figures were soon able to afford diamond rings and fancy cars. But, after all, such people were merely “aliens of the lowest type.”
- Consensus: The Anti-Saloon League and the End of Pluralism
- Heh. The biggest news story since World War I, and the New York Times didn’t recognize the importance of it.
- Conservative policies go to pot
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Prohibition is the conservative Obamacare: it doesn’t matter how bad the law is, or how many times people must be unilaterally exempted from it: we need it for aspirational purposes. Conservative prohibitionists can talk a good game about state-level experiments when it comes to education, and recognize the importance of the rule of law when it comes to health insurance. But when it comes to marijuana the only solution is arbitrary federal control of whoever doesn’t kowtow sufficiently to government officials.
- Constitutional Issues of Prohibition
- Text archive of constitutional issues regarding prohibition.
- Control
- Opium prohibition was part of a web of international treaties designed to give national governments some plausible deniability.
- Control—Miscellaneous Suggestions
- As above, it may have been their consensus, but I’ll bet it was also their consensus that they needed to receive and apply more resources to combat this crime, rather than back off and end the spiral of violence around it.
- Control—National
- The Harrison Narcotics Act destroyed all of the successes of the only “prohibition” act to ever work successfully—the labeling act of 1906. Instead, opium prohibition ended up with all of the success of alcohol prohibition.
- Control—State
- The Texas law, on the surface, appears to make some sense: why not reduce the violence of prohibition by making it illegal to carry weapons while dealing in prohibited drugs? But its an example of our inability to back down in the face of bad decisions. One law results in more violence, and rather than repeal that law we add more laws to it, much as if we were addicted to bad laws.
- Cops Say Legalize Drugs: Ask Me Why
- Why do you oppose the drug war? Tell me in fifteen seconds or less!
- The Crisis in Drug Prohibition
- David Boaz edits this collection of reasons for ending modern prohibition.
- The Day After
- A short excerpt from “Thinking About Drug Legalization” in the book “Crisis in Drug Prohibition”.
- Dealing With Drugs: Consequences of Government Control
- Ronald Hamowy edits this collection of articles about the consequences of prohibition on crime levels, racism, and corruption. Arnold S. Trebach describes U.S. drug policy in terms familiar to anyone who has read Animal Farm.
- Decay from Within: The Inevitable Doom of the American Saloon
- Madelon Powers notes that it was the existing decline of the saloon that may have made prohibition possible.
- Drier and Drier, and Wetter and Wetter: Drinking and the Pluralist Renaissance
- Prohibition lobbyists screamed that liberalizing drinking laws would mean blood in the streets; but ending prohibition on alcohol didn’t increase violence or crime any more than liberalized concealed carry has. But fears of angry drunken blacks didn’t stop repeal, and the day after prohibition ended was just another day.
- Drinkers and Reformers: The Origins of Postbellum Temperance
- When voters start doing things you don’t like, call them unpatriotic and their actions a danger to public morals. Nineteenth-century prohibition advocates sound like Reagan-era prohibition advocates when they argue that people who use recreational drugs responsibly are a danger to the nation: they set a poor example. It’s a circular argument: they set a poor example because drinking is bad; their drinking is bad because it sets a poor example.
- Drinking in America: A History
- Mark Edward Lender & James Kirby Martin. The Free Press, New York, 1982. Seems almost pro-prohibition, and definitely pro-temperance, possibly even pro-legal-system-controlled temperance.
- Drinking in Modern America
- I wonder how much it would cost nowadays to re-enact and enforce alcohol prohibition? It would, I suspect, dwarf prohibition of little drugs like marijuana and probably even cocaine.
- Drinking in the Sober Republic: Did Prohibition Prohibit?
- I’m not sure what he’s trying to say here; death rates by cirrhosis make no sense without also knowing how long it takes cirrhosis to develop.
- Drug cops on tape
- Drug cops were caught on tape torturing a man for hours, beating a fake confession out of him. How many times does this happen and not get caught on tape?
- Drug Prohibition Recommended Reading
- Recommended books about the drug war and about recreational drugs in general.
- Drug war undermining Afghan, Iraqi peace
- Prohibition continues to fund terrorist organizations, and we continue to pour money into maintaining prohibition. Prohibition is, as it has always been, one of the best and easiest means for criminal organizations to grow.
- Drug-Law Enforcement Efforts
- John R. Pekkanen summarizes enforcement efforts—and their general failure—up to New York in 1970-73.
- Drugs Around the World
- Links to information about the drug war outside the United States.
- Dry Debacle
- Presaging what was to end national prohibition, state interest in prohibition faded whenever there were real problems to deal with, such as slavery and secession.
- The Economics of the Black Market in Cocaine
- For criminal gangs, prohibition is “a modern day alchemy” spinning mundane plants into gold and influence.
- Epilogue
- Congress noted that since organized crime was making so much money off of marijuana prohibition, that they ought to help ’em along a little.
- Etiology
- Where physicians had no particular desire to spread heroin use, addicts apparently did.
- The Facts About Drug Abuse
- From the Drug Abuse Council in 1980, this collection of reports attempts a “credible, coherent, and verifiable” entry into the debate about prohibition.
- FireBlade Coffeehouse Editorials
- Interesting, touching, and dangerous editorials covering movies, history, and politics.
- From Reform to Reaction: The Sober Republic at Bay
- What’s fascinating to me is how much we’ve changed since repealing alcohol prohibition: there was once a time when appeal to racism did not suffice to keep bad laws. The calls for killing drug users when the drug was alcohol match almost exactly modern rhetoric. From adding poisons to the drug, to increasing penalties far beyond the bounds of the crime, we’ve seen all this before.
- Fuck everything except marijuana
- That marijuana does not lend itself to the black market forces that make coca, beer, and poppies dangerous should not blind us to the fact that it is their illegality that makes the latter dangerous, not something inherent in the plants they come from.
- Georgia drug war unfairly targets Indian immigrants
- Federal law enforcement in Georgia has decided to crack-down on Indian-owned convenience stores.
- The graphs of destruction
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Imagine a graph with two lines charted against the years: the resources needed to cause mass destruction, and the resources available to those who want to cause mass destruction. Those lines are dangerously close today.
- The Great Gatsby
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A Lost Generation novel set in the twenties in posh New York, peopled by several Lost Generation characters, the Great Gatsby tells a story of trust, class, and desire on Long Island.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition that we see today.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- By Herbert Asbury, this “informal history” of alcohol prohibition is as good an argument against the prohibition of recreational drugs as any written.
- Has welfare failed us?
- Has welfare failed us, or have we overwhelmed the welfare system through other policies that encourage dependance and discourage economic development?
- History of Cannabis
- When Congress debated marijuana legislation, the AMA opposed it, and was told to “get out of the way of the Federal Government”. That’s been pretty much the history of marijuana legislation and regulation ever since. Need it to maintain your sight? Go blind. Need it to stay alive? Then die. Get out of the way of the federal government.
- If you support keeping drugs illegal…
- If you support prohibition, you support robbery, assault, higher taxes, and rape.
- The Inebriate, the Expert, and the State
- Once we bring state power into temperance, it becomes something wholly different and dangerous.
- Influence of Public Understanding
- Peter Goldberg and Erik J. Meyers go over some of the crazy public response to drug war mania. Of course, some of this is probably parents lying to surveyors, especially if by “national survey” they mean one performed by the federal government.
- Intemperance: The Lost War Against Liquor
- Larry Englemann’s Intemperance is a great history of prohibition. The bumper sticker “Don’t shoot, I’m not a bootlegger” could just as well be transported to homes today for overeager, paranoid police: “Don’t shoot, I’m not a drug dealer.” Companies such as Ford fired people based on their opposition to prohibition. And people claim heaven if we just step up enforcement.
- The International Pathology of the War on Drugs: Corruption, Instability, and Narco-Terrorism
- It is hard to imagine a system more suited for funding terrorism and crime than the drug war.
- Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise
- Ronald K. Siegal hypothesizes that, along with sex, food, and sleep, that intoxication is a basic, natural need in humans. He makes a strong case that recreational drug use is not just something that people like to do, it is something that humans require to survive.
- Introduction: Declaring War on Drugs (Again)
- The black market thrives on enforcement: the harder we push, the more efficient and bold the black market becomes.
- The Jazz Era
- During the prohibition era, marijuana use probably increased, and made its way into the culture of the Jazz era. Racist portrayals of the drug’s users spread throughout North America.
- Learning from alcohol prohibition
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If the people against ending drug prohibition had been around in the thirties, we would never have ended the prohibition of beer and cocktails, because of the dangers of pure alcohol and bathtub gin. One of the lessons of the alcohol prohibition era is that we don’t have to go from banning everything to allowing everything. There is a middle ground.
- Licit & Illicit Drugs
- Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumers Reports. The full title is “The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens & Marijuana—including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol”.
- Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding
- Raymond P. Shafer, chaired. the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. They submitted their official report to Congress on March 22, 1972. Whereupon, like most official inquiries that were given the freedom to investigate, it was completely ignored: it recommended lightening or outright removing sentences for marijuana use.
- Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine
- Lester Grinspoon & James B. Bakalar write a fascinating combination of medical history and survey on the medical uses of marijuana. The descriptions by patients, especially cancer and glaucoma patients, of what happens when they lose access to marijuana are heart-breaking.
- Marijuana and alcohol prohibition
- Marijuana was originally seen as a “Mexican” drug.
- Marijuana and Cocaine: The Process of Change in Drug Policy
- Robert R. Carr and Erik J. Meyers survey many of the studies—many of them government-commissioned—that have shown the relative harmlessness of prohibited drugs and the dangers of prohibition. The one drug that may live up to its hyped dangers is alcohol, but we already know that, as dangerous as alcohol is, it becomes far more dangerous when illegal.
- Marijuana: The New Prohibition
- John Kaplan, an internationally recognized expert on drug-abuse, “analyzes the medical and social evidence on America’s third most widely-used drug and discusses the case for legalization.”
- Medical marijuana returns to Congress
- Congress is considering a states’ rights amendment to the Science-State-Justice appropriations bill forbidding the federal government from overriding state laws allowing patients to use marijuana on a doctor’s orders.
- Metamorphosis: From “Good Creature” to “Demon Rum,” 1790-1860
- Desire for temperance led to desire for the complete abstinence from liquor; from liquor abstinence arose desire for abstinence from any alcoholic beverage. From calls for abstinence there arose calls for discouragement and finally prohibition.
- Misplaced compassion: more deaths, less dignity
- I fear that a successful “death with dignity” movement will only exacerbate the bad laws and choices that result in excessive pain, and will result in a slippery slope towards more and more assisted suicides.
- Nancy Reagan and the Real Villains in the Drug War
- Stephen Chapman notes the hypocrisy of making drugs illegal, fostering a violent black market, and then putting the blame elsewhere.
- A Nation of Drug Takers
- When America discovered that there were foreigners in the country, they conveniently forgot how recently they themselves had come over; the drugs those foreigners used became illegal. At first the laws targeted specific races; in time, the laws targeted everyone.
- Notes on Prohibition
- These are notes that I took while researching a “recreational drugs” comic book. These books also informed all of the writing that I have done for Strange Bedfellows and the Prohibition archive.
- The Opium Problem
- Charles E. Terry and Mildred Pellens. This was originally published in 1928 by the Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc. shortly after opium became illegal (1914). Before Harrison, most addicts used under the supervision of their physician; after Harrison, most addicts used under the supervision of other addicts. The law appeared to have no effect on the number of addicts, except perhaps to increase them.
- Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide
- The federal government has the power to keep effective doses of pain reduction medication from patients, but not lethal doses of medication.
- Outlawing Marihuana
- You can tell who had the power in the Progressive Era: the American Medical Association opposed the tax act but it was enacted nonetheless. But an exception was made for bird fanciers so that hemp seeds could continue to be sold in birdseed.
- The Pathology of the War on Drugs: Corruption and Violence in the Black Market
- Prohibition isn’t just lucrative for organized crime, but also for law enforcement. Whereever prohibition is stepped up, corruption among law enforcement and the criminal justice system increases.
- A Political Opiate
- Lewis H. Lapham writes a little about the prejudices that fuel the drug war.
- Portland, Maine, 1851
- Portland’s mayor Neal Dow was among the first to confuse virtue (temperance) with law (prohibition).
- The Price of Prohibition
- If we wish to maintain prohibition, we have to understand that we are funding and nurturing terrorism.
- Prisoner of the war on drugs
- A blog by someone between conviction and sentencing, describing how they (hope to) reduce their sentence by re-entering the black market underworld.
- Progressives ruin a different kind of race in New Jersey
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As a potential triple-crown winner prepares for the third race of the Triple Crown, it’s almost impossible to place a bet in Atlantic City, NJ.
- Prohibition Activists
- Text archive of files on prohibition activism.
- Prohibition in Action
- As long as people want to drink, prohibition is unenforceable. And criminals who accumulated money and power from their prohibition earnings were left alone by law enforcement in favor of small-time criminals with less ability to bribe and coerce. They even a form of three-strikes laws that gave life imprisonment for a pint’s worth of alcohol.
- Prohibition Politics
- The politics of prohibition, from alcohol to marijuana. Includes “Why End Prohibition?” and “The Pocket Guide to Recreational Drugs”.
- Prohibition Politics archive
- Negative Space text archive of files on /pub/Prohibition/
- Project Safe Neighborhoods
- A typical drug war euphemism kills Kathryn Johnston, 92.
- Prosperity, Liberty, and Lower Taxes: The Story of Repeal
- By 1929, people began to tire of “lawlessness, bootlegging, hijacking, poison-whiskey selling, shooting innocent citizens, gin parties attended by innocent high school girls and boys and rum parties attended by dry agents and other hypocrites, and of huge sums spent futilely in vain attempts to control men’s appetites by legislation.” Democrats sloganed with “Roosevelt and Repeal”.
- Put safety first: end prohibition
- Prohibition increases crime and it reduces the ability of law enforcement to fight those crimes.
- Raising Peter McWilliams
- The United States government killed an author over a book. Buy that book now.
- Reefer Racism
- During the great depression, America needed a new scapegoat, and in the southwest that turned out to be the Mexican. One means of oppression was to stereotype them as marijuana users and then claim that marijuana turned them into brutes that only superior firepower could stop, much as law enforcement in the south claimed about Negros and cocaine.
- Silencing opposition in the war on drugs
- Congressman James Sensenbrenner introduced fast-track legislation to make witnessing or learning of certain drug offenses, without reporting them within 24 hours, a federal crime, punishable by two to twenty years in jail.
- Social Response to Marihuana Use
- Throughout the history of marijuana prohibition, lawmakers have had to create blatant lies in order to pass laws against marijuana.
- Society and Race Under Threat
- Mankind always seems to need scapegoats to explain their own failures. In the late nineteenth century alcohol became the primary scapegoat, explaining why men committed crimes. In various ways, alcohol has been blamed for the downfall of kingdoms such as the Roman Empire.
- Solve the Drug War
- On December 5th, 1933, prohibition ended. That day, the drug lords were out of business. Today we have a new drug war, but the solution is the same: take away their profits and put the drug dealers out of business!
- Strange Bedfellows
- Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and virtual sex in defense of liberty is no vice...
- Support the Dope
- Some narcotics officers group is cold-calling for fundraising, and they’re actually prepared for marijuana supporters.
- Supreme Court rules against patients and states
- During the early years of the Internet, I heard someone say that the drug war is the root key to the bill of rights. That seems to be all the more true this week as the Supreme Court chose to ignore the federalist arguments in Gonzales v. Raich in order to acquiesce to the drug war.
- Take the Congressional Drug Test!
- The Third Annual Drug Test for Members of Congress and Other Drug Fiends
- Thinking About Drug Legalization
- James Ostrowski writes about the horrible things that will happen after legalization: organized crime gets a huge pay cut, violent criminals go to jail longer, street violence drops.
- Throwing Gas on the Fire
- If any incident hilights the violence of prohibition and the futility of gun control, the six-year-old killing in Mt. Morris Township, Michigan, is it.
- Tianamen Square and the Drug War
- Peter McWilliams, outspoken critic of the war on drugs, became a casualty in that war on June 14, 2000.
- U.S. homicide rate compared to gun control measures
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Extrano’s Alley lists the U.S. homicide rate from 1885 to 1940, and somebody else puts it into a chart.
- Using (Recreational) Drugs
- Links to web pages about the drug war and prohibition.
- Victimless Crime My Ass
- “I hope I pissed you off, maybe you’ll do something. Don’t bother e-mailing me your anger. The Vets did not fight and die so that a few could run my and your life. They died for freedom: everyone’s and anyone’s.”
- Virtue in Action
- Prohibition, whether of alcohol or any other desired recreational drug, seems doomed not just to failure but to the same kind of failure: massive violence and an increase in the deleterious effects of the prohibited drug. Within the United States, prohibition resulted in a rise in not just violent crime but in organized criminals.
- Wachovia fines encourage drug trafficking
- Some people are wondering why no one at Wachovia went to jail for money laundering. The authorities received 160 million dollars in forfeiture and fines. Why would they want to discourage future banks from acting as Wachovia did?
- We’re all drug lords now
- Will we still support prohibition when we all know someone who died because of it?
- The White House, 1933
- The Anti-Saloon League never recovered from getting their desire. The reality of alcohol prohibition showed everything they said to be false; when the last necessary state voted for repeal at 6:32 PM Eastern time, President Roosevelt was ready; he signed the official proclamation at 6:55 PM.
- Why End Prohibition? (123.1 KB)
- A practical solution to the marijuana question.
- Will prohibition destroy the Iraq turnaround?
- World prohibition threatens to turn the Iraq turnaround back towards violence and gang warfare.
- Women and Temperance in International Perspective: The World’s WTCU, 1880s-1920s
- Ian Tyrrell’s history of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union indicates that they used fear of foreigners—or tried to—to build their organization into an international force.
- “Pure Water”: Temperance Becomes Total Abstinence
- As alcohol became more easily available, people drank less on average. It was no longer a draw for employers to offer alcohol on the job. But nobody stopped drinking, and that bothered prohibition advocates, for whome it was the government’s duty to take care of its citizens by infringing the rights of individuals.
- “Their Best Endeavors”: Enforcing the Volstead Act
- Enforcement costs for alcohol prohibition resemble the pattern we’ve seen recently for prohibition of other drugs: an initial high price followed by astronomical prices.
- “To the Heights of Mount Sinai”
- “You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down!”
More Information
- Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do
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Peter McWilliams died in defense of freedom: this book, an incredibly well-written and well-researched book about “the absurdity of consensual crimes in a free society” was probably his death warrant.
- Drug Law Studies Over the Years
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How many times does science have to say “no problem” before politicians get the picture? A great collection of summaries of major prohibition studies over the years.
- Licit & Illicit Drugs•
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You can also purchase a copy used; as one reviewer wrote, “I learned more in one night from this book than I did in 18 years of being a youth in the Drug War.” I can’t stress enough just how amazing this book is.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition•
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Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition as well. If you can find a copy, this is a must-read.
