Garrison Keillor posted this on his very engaging website “A Writer’s Almanac.” The daily newsletter is delightful, it’s free, and I recommend it. I was chastised by a reader for reprinting anything by Keillor, since he was credibly accused of #MeToo actions. I believe in redemption. I also believe in my freedom to post whatever I want.
Keillor writes:
It’s the 100th anniversary of the beginning of Prohibition! The Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act, took effect on this date in 1920, a year after it was ratified. It made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor illegal. The temperance movement had been fighting this fight for almost 80 years. Its activists wanted to protect families and communities from the horrors of alcohol abuse. They saw the 18th Amendment as a major victory for morality—but in reality, it made criminals out of a lot of ordinary American citizens, and made liquor even more desirable than it had been before.
In the end, it was the Depression that led to the demise of Prohibition. A wealthy Republican named Pauline Sabin led the repeal movement. She said that making liquor legal again would create jobs, weaken organized crime, and generate tax revenue. It took almost 14 years before the 21st Amendment reversed Prohibition. It’s the first and only time an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been repealed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Many of the women working in the temperance movement were trying in an indirect way to reduce domestic violence, and they partnered with religious leaders whose religion prohibited consumption of alcohol. The female champions fighting domestic violence couldn’t address domestic violence directly because the state was run by men who were not going to legislate against the male prerogative to assault women and children. Prohibition was a creative and serious attempt to address domestic violence. Obviously there were problems with prohibition, but the biggest tragedy was and is the lack of legal protection for the vulnerable victims of domestic violence.
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Well said, Ms. James!
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But we continue the insane prohibition on various scheduled drugs, which
a. serves as a jobs program for drug cartels
b. gives the United States the highest incarceration rate in the world
c. ruins the lives of people arrested and tried, whether they are convicted or not
d. mostly hurts the poor, the black, and the brown
e. makes identifying people who need treatment quite difficult (because they fear being arrested)
f. has done nothing to decrease drug usage rates or drug crime rates
It is time to decriminalize all illegal drugs and put the money that went into the complete failed “War on Drugs” into prevention and treatment–to treat this as a health and mental health problem rather than as a crime problem.
Portugal did this. It’s crime rates fell, and its drug usage rates didn’t increase, and it saved billions.
Particularly insane, ofc, is our patchwork of laws related to marijuana, which was only scheduled to begin to suit the profit motives of an oligarch. William Randolph Hearst ran the first big fully vertically integrated business. He owned woodlands, paper mills, and newspapers. When someone created a machine for making cheap, high-quality paper out of hemp, he started running pieces in his papers about black and brown people smoking weed and attacking white women (playing up racism) and introduced the term “marijuana” to give hemp a foreign-sounding name.
Before LSD was made a scheduled drug, psychologists were getting astonishing cure rates of depression and alcoholism using it. Nixon’s Chief of Staff has admitted that they created the War on Drugs only as a means to “go after the hippies.”
Our drug laws are what ought to be criminal.
Make them illegal for kids. Make it VERY illegal to deal to kids. Decriminalize drugs for adults–all of them. Pour the billions we now waste on the drug-related policing, judicial, and penal systems into treatment and counseling.
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Decriminalize. Get everyone’s brothers and sisters out of wrongful incarceration. Many of them are the parents of our students. They should be home, raising their families. Legalize it. Go Bernie.
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Absolutely. One of the big reasons why decriminalization hasn’t occurred is that every bust means paperwork done as overtime, which vastly increases the pay of local law enforcement. So, there’s a strong economic incentive to oppose it. And then we have the privatized prisons and people like Cheney who are big investors in them.
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Biden still thinks it might be a “gateway drug” (the Gateway to San Francisco?)
He says we need to study the issue more.
He’s utterly clueless.
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Then again, maybe by “study the issue some more” he meant he needed to smoke some more joints and report back to us.
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They didn’t just target the hippies. They didn’t like the Black Panthers(?) either so they concocted stories of black males as heroin addicts laying in allies with needles sticking out of their arms.
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Yes. Exactly right.
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In states where marijuana is legal, do they have laws against driving high?
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I don’t know. I did read about a study suggesting that this was much less dangerous than was driving drunk, but I wouldn’t recommend it. LOL. Especially not with the potency of much weed these days. Interestingly, the laws drove marijuana cultivation inside, where it was perfected to create super weed. Our policy makers are not the brightest bunch.
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Yes, most jurisdictions have laws against driving while impaired, including prescription medications and recreational, uh, medications. Also notable that legalization doesn’t have any effect on crime rates.
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At what age would you make it illegal to kids and why?
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This is a very interesting question, Mate. In general, we say that one is legally an adult at 18 or 21. But what about setting the age at 26? This might be a good place to set the age at which there would be no criminal penalties for this stuff. Why? Well, there has been a lot of research using FMRI suggesting that that’s when the prefrontal cortex, which does impulse control and planning–that acts as the editor of people’s actions–is in place. So, it would be very, very illegal to procure for people younger than that based on scientific awareness that people younger than that aren’t fully capable of being responsible for and in control of their own actions. But, a strong argument could be made that this proposal would simply continue to perpetuate the current idiocies. So, I will have to think about this. One could run some pilot projects and look at the results.
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So do you think this legal weed smoking age be different from the alcohol drinking or tobacco smoking ages? Also, isn’t it teenagers who commit the most suicides due to temporary depression and increased anxiety, and perhaps marijuana would be most helpful for them?
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These are excellent questions. I’ve not been particularly impressed by the effects of marijuana usage on teens. But derivatives, in clinical practices? I don’t know. One of the stupidities resulting from our drug laws is that research on them pretty much stopped cold for many decades.
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They classified pot as a schedule 1 drug (alongside heroin) because (they claim) it has a large potential for abuse and no medicinal value.
But the categorization was by decree and not arrived at through legitimate science.
And by their logic, there is no reason to do experiments because they already know the answer.
People think the US government has just recently become un-scientific in its approach, but the reality is that in certain areas, it has not been scientific for a very long time (if ever).
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The abuse of alcohol during the early part of the nineteenth century created a country that was divided over its use and misuse. I grew up with parents who were children of the temperance movement. They saw the period of prohibition as a good try. No amount of convincing could persuade them that the prohibition of this drug/preservation method was a failed experiment.
What this taught me is that those who seek to rule by law are always looking for more than they think they are. Today, there is a debate over how abortion will be practiced. Modern successors to the prohibition movement seek to start another. Given the Supreme Court, we may actually see the effects of such outlawing. Whatever occurs in the wake of such a decision, it will not be what is anticipated by the sides of the debate.
There are many things I would like to outlaw. The list is longer than anyone has any room to read. But I would probably find the success of these desires thwarted by the unintended consequences of my action. On some level we are required to make a case before the people. The biggest courtroom is the freedom to act unimpeded by law. Sometimes we need to let the courtroom bring its verdict enmasse.
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I don’t like Spandex beachwear on men. I don’t want the power to outlaw it.
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Great point, RT!
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Pssst! Hey, everybody, speaking of anniversaries, don’t tell Diane and spoil it, but April 24 is coming soon, the blog-aversary. https://dianeravitch.net/2012/04/24/my-new-blog/ What should we get her? Dinner? Flowers? NPE contribution?
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Seriously? Buy my new book and write about it here.
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Already bought it.
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Just a few more days until it arrives! if I remember correctly.
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January 21!!
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LCT,
Here is what I want for the blog’s birthday: Please give a copy of “Slaying Goliath” to Nick Melvoin.
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That’s funny! I will do it, though. Somehow. Maybe he’ll accept your book without causing me problems if I pretend to be a billionaire like Eli Broad. Or a politician and manager of Bain Capital like Deval Patrick.
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You know, Diane, Race to the Top in 2009 began a few years of the darkest days of my life. Everyone was against teachers. In 2012, this blog came into existence. By 2014, momentum had shifted. I believe that if you hadn’t gone against the corporate reform grain and led the movement to save public education from testing, charters, and depersonalization, the shift would never have occurred.
My school was on the chopping block. I was under attack for not being data-driven. If not for you, my rewarding teaching career would have been ended. I would probably be sitting in a sterile laboratory today, looking at boring EKG read-outs or brain tissue samples instead of leading a rewarding life as a teacher. Maybe something far worse. I owe you. Your wish is my command. No joke, Nick Melvoin definitely gets a copy of Slaying Goliath.
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Race to the Bottom
Race to the bottom
Of bottomless pit
Pit and the Pendulum
Poe on a spit
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Diane,
Today, I talked to two teachers who know Nick Melvoin on a personal level, and they both assured me that he would not be upset and retaliate against me if I just marched right into his office and handed him a copy of Slaying Goliath. I will do that. One of them even suggested he’s probably already reading it. I don’t see, however, how a reasonable human being could absorb all the information in your book(s) and still be a charter and testing zealot, unless he’s on a billionaire’s payroll. Curiouser and curiouser!
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LCT, wonderful!
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On historical tours of Cincinnati, the guides attribute prohibition to ant-German sentiment, with the temperance campaign as a front. German immigrants were gaining political strength via the wealth and jobs provided by the burgeoning brewery industry. Prohibition’s repeal was linked to the need for additional taxes.
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