Prohibition's Past and Present

Jacob Sullum from the July 1997 issue

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There's a reason for that. As measured both by the long-term health consequences of heavy use and by its involvement in accidents and crime, alcohol is more dangerous than any popular illegal drug. As measured by the percentage of experimenters who become heavy users, it seems to be no less "addictive" than heroin or cocaine. Tellingly, Jonnes claims that the concept of drug addiction originated with the opiates. In fact, as the sociologist Harry G. Levine showed in a 1978 article published by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, "the idea that drugs are inherently addicting was first systematically worked out for alcohol and then extended to other substances. Long before opium was popularly accepted as addicting, alcohol was so regarded."

In her effort to distinguish illegal substances from a familiar drug that we manage to live with despite its dangers, Jonnes resorts to the notion that "anyone who is using drugs is seeking strictly to get high," while people drink alcoholic beverages for other reasons: "to relax" and "for the pleasure of the taste." Even if this were true, so what? Is there something inherently wrong with trying to alter your state of consciousness? Isn't that what drinkers are doing when they seek "to relax" with a cocktail or beer? The distinction is specious in any case. Consider marijuana. As with alcohol, people use it for a variety of purposes: "to relax," to enhance social occasions, to stimulate creativity, to heighten their enjoyment of food, music, or movies. They even bake it into brownies "for the pleasure of the taste."

The alcohol double standard is also apparent in Jonnes's discussion of drug use during pregnancy. There is clear evidence that heavy drinking during pregnancy causes birth defects, including deformed features and mental retardation. This Jonnes mentions not at all. On the other hand, she endorses the notion, repudiated even by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, that babies exposed to cocaine in the womb are damaged for life: born underweight and sick, retarded emotionally and intellectually even when no physical abnormalities are apparent.

But as former Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Baum notes in Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, by 1989 "researchers cautioned that the lives of poor, crack-using women were bad for babies in so many ways that there was no way to isolate crack as the primary cause of their infants' health problems." Observers who attributed babies' health or behavior at birth and subsequent developmental difficulties to cocaine exposure did not take into account factors such as prenatal care, nutrition, the use of other drugs, and the quality of the home environment. Trying to assess the impact of cocaine itself, researchers at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta injected monkeys with the drug throughout pregnancy. "Their babies were unaffected," Baum reports. "Researchers of human `crack babies' furthermore found that the effects of cocaine wore off within a few months and that such babies who were well fed, loved, and properly stimulated could recover completely."

Baum is not only more skeptical about the harm attributed to drugs, but also more sensitive to the harm caused by the war on them. Whereas Jonnes sees a worthy struggle marred by occasional exaggeration, corruption, and excessively harsh sentences, Baum sees a series of publicity stunts and political games that have wreaked havoc in the streets and the courtroom. "The War on Drugs is about a lot of things," he says, "but only rarely is it really about drugs." Tracing the development of U.S. drug policy from Nixon on, he skillfully tells a tale of demagoguery, cluelessness, and hysteria that is alternately amusing and depressing, alarming and infuriating.

For surreal comic relief, it's hard to beat Baum's account of Nixon's historic meeting with Elvis Presley, wherein the King of Rock 'n' Roll, "a dopehound of legendary excess," was dubbed a "special assistant" in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Equally entertaining is the discussion of the ever-escalating estimates for the amount of property stolen by heroin addicts each year. In one memo, a Nixon administration official put the figure at $18 billion--15 times the FBI's estimate for all property crime. Baum also reminds us of the drug paraphernalia panic that led McDonald's to replace all of its coffee stirrers because of a false rumor that they were popular as cocaine spoons.

The war on drugs, of course, has also had far more serious consequences. Baum details how "the drug exception to the Bill of Rights" was carved out, one piece at a time, while attorneys who thought they knew the law were dumbfounded time and again by how far the Supreme Court was willing to go in the quest for a drug-free America. Among other things, the Court has endorsed the use of search warrants based on information from anonymous (and possibly nonexistent) tipsters; warrantless trespassing and surveillance from the air; a "good faith" exception to the exclusionary rule; government-mandated, suspicionless drug testing; and detention of suspected drug couriers pending bowel movements. It's a measure of Jill Jonnes's blindness to prohibition's impact on individual rights that she alludes to this trend just once (in a discussion of drug testing), and then in an approving way. The index to her book has no entries for civil liberties, privacy, the Fourth Amendment, or the Constitution.

Baum, by contrast, is clearly disturbed by the consequences of drug war fever. One of his sadder stories concerns the calmer, more rational approach to drug policy that emerged in the mid-to-late '70s, during the Ford and Carter administrations. This was a time when public officials (including Carter) were not afraid to advocate decriminalization of marijuana, when they were prepared to make distinctions among illegal drugs, between use and abuse, and between adults and children. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws was a major player in Washington policy circles: The president's drug czar consulted the group and went to its parties. (The latter habit, as Baum explains, turned out to be a big mistake.) For a variety of reasons--including a scandal over drug use by White House officials and parental alarm about rising pot smoking by teenagers--that brief era of relative enlightenment came to an end, replaced by the mindlessness of "Just Say No" and "zero tolerance."

And now even an otherwise sophisticated writer like Jonnes wants us to abandon our critical faculties when it comes to illegal drugs. Her discussion of legalization is filled with tendentious assertions like, "when discussing legalization what we're really talking about is crack cocaine." It's understandable that a prohibitionist would prefer to focus on crack, currently the drug with the most fearsome reputation. And certainly it's true that crack has to be part of the debate over legalization. But marijuana is by far the most popular illegal drug, used in the past year by 8.4 percent of the respondents in the 1995 Household Survey, compared to 0.5 percent for crack. In terms of arrests, pot is the most significant drug, accounting for about two-fifths of the total. "[I]f anything is clear from the past twenty-five years of drug warfare," writes Baum, "it is that marijuana--not crack, cocaine, or heroin--is politically the most important illegal drug. Precisely because it doesn't kill people who use it, spawn gun battles in city streets, enrich foreign drug lords, or inspire women to abandon their babies, marijuana separates drug policy for public welfare from drug policy for public relations. Without the marijuana ban, the country's `drug problem' would be tiny."

Yet Jonnes never makes a case for marijuana prohibition, beyond trotting out "amotivational syndrome" and warning us that it's bad for teenagers to get high every day. Nor does she address the legal status of the psychedelics, even though she devotes considerable space to Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and other famous "psychonauts." Instead she offers us crackheads and heroin addicts, implying that this small minority represents everyone who uses illegal drugs.

As Kenneth D. Rose, a historian at California State University, Chico, shows in American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, the people who supported a ban on alcohol were also fond of extreme examples. A 19th-century poster depicted "The Drunkard's Progress" as steps up and down a bridge, beginning with "Step 1: A glass with a Friend" and ending with "Step 6: Poverty and Disease," "Step 7: Forsaken by Friends," "Step 8: Desperation and crime," and "Step 9: Death by suicide." Under the bridge were the drunkard's abandoned wife and child. This sort of propaganda--based on real, though atypical, experiences--might shake Jonnes's confidence in her premise that "drugs are very different from alcohol."

Indeed, the rhetoric of temperance campaigners, and the fears underlying it, would be familiar to anyone following the contemporary drug policy debate. This is how the American Temperance Society described alcohol use in the early 19th century: "If some fatal plague, of a contagious character, were imported into our country, and had commenced its ravages in our cities, we should see the most prompt and vigorous measures at once adopted to repress and extinguish it: but what are the most fearful plagues that ever carried death and havoc in their train through the eastern countries compared with this? They are only occasional; this is perennial."

After the temperance movement achieved its ultimate goal with the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919, critics troubled by the unintended consequences were not treated kindly. A dry Kansas City physician was outraged by Pauline Sabin, a prominent Republican who led the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform: "Mrs. Sabin doesn't know what she's talking about. She didn't see the children I saw. In the winter the children of drunkards froze. The parents weren't low and depraved. They were drunk and they forgot their children." Opponents of repeal were also fond of the class argument much prized by Jonnes--that rich people who can afford intoxication don't care what will happen to the poor. In a letter to Sabin, the head of the National Democratic Law Enforcement League asked, "Are we not right in saying that it is not the protected woman of wealth but the women who toil who will suffer should the old conditions return--the wives of laboring men, the mothers of little children who have no millions to separate them from the devastation that liquor brings to the home?"

In truth, as Rose shows, women of all classes (and various political orientations) were involved in the repeal movement. They included many former supporters of Prohibition, Sabin among them, who were dismayed when the liquor-free world they'd been promised did not materialize. Like the drys, the women who advocated repeal said they wanted to protect the home, but they argued that now it was threatened by Prohibition rather than alcohol. Gangsters attracted to the new black market were shooting at each other in neighborhoods that were once considered safe, sometimes in broad daylight. Illicit suppliers were not particular about their customers, and many mothers believed their children had easier access to alcohol under Prohibition than they'd had when the stuff was legal. They also felt that Prohibition had glamorized drinking, and they worried that rampant official corruption and widespread disobedience were combining to undermine respect for the law.

Reformers recognized, too, that zealous enforcement of Prohibition could lead to a literal invasion of the home. Rose tells the story of a 1924 raid that turned up a tiny quantity of liquor in the home of a prominent Portland, Oregon, businessman who was holding a charity ball. The search warrant, based on an anonymous tip, was subsequently ruled invalid, and it turned out that state Prohibition agents were routinely conducting searches on slight pretext. Oregon Gov. Walter M. Pierce was untroubled, averring that "time has modified the old adage that every man's home is his castle and sanctuary."