In my last post I mentioned that I’d get back to Eugene Volokh’s “modest proposal” and I’m doing that now. Here’s the passage that follows the one I quoted before:
Well, we tried, and the conventional wisdom is that the cure was worse than the disease — which is why we went back to a system where alcohol is pretty freely available, despite the harm it causes (of which the deaths are only part).
I think that the conventional wisdom is wrong or, at least, unproven. I’ve already produced the facts and figures. The reality of Prohibition is that it substantially decreased the rate of alcohol abuse (which has never returned to its pre-Prohibition level) and there’s no proof that the violence and organized crime that rose during the Prohibition era wouldn’t have risen anyway. There was more than one factor behind the rise of organized crime in the 1920s and 1930s among which are technological change, increasing urbanization, and the immigration of the late 19th and earliest part of the 20th centuries. Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano were all immigrants or the children of immigrants. I’m not claiming that all criminals are immigrants merely suggesting that anomie and loss of social cohesion may be contributing factors to crime.
I think that the better argument against a return to Prohibition is that in the case of alcohol consumption the ratio of abusers to users is quite low. Nearly 60% of American adults are regular consumers of alcohol; about 7% are abusers. The comparable figures for marijuana are 25/2, for cocaine 1.5/.3, and for heroin .3/.17.
Indeed, that might be a good way to think about the rationale behind prohibiting the use of some substances while merely restricting the use of others. There is some likelihood of abuse attendant on use that is just too high a risk.
Personally, I think it’s not a a problem of alcohol vs prohibition, it’s a question of individual freedom vs state control. For alcohol I think the balance weighs heavily toward personal freedom.