Prohibition was disaster with alcohol, still a disaster with other drugs

By David McElroy · November 9, 2011

Well-meaning moralists campaigned for years to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol in this country starting in 1920. As a result, the next 13 years were bloody time when criminal elements took over supplying alcohol and many people were killed — by rival gangs, by police enforcement efforts and from drinking poisonous homemade booze.

As crazy as this whole thing sounds to us today, some people still don’t understand that we’re doing the same thing today — and have been for decades — as the federal government fights the never-ending “war on (some) drugs.” It’s time to quite committing a slow version of national suicide. We need to end drug prohibition.

When I discovered individual liberty, the toughest issue for me to deal with was illegal drugs. My own lifestyle is very conservative. I don’t use any kind of recreational drugs, either the legal kinds or the illegal kinds. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around at the problems that I saw alcohol causing for many people and I decided that the risks weren’t worth the dubious benefits, so I never even started. The more life I live, the more I’m certain it’s the smartest decision. However, I’m equally certain that it’s not my business — and not the government’s business — to decide which recreational drugs you use, even if I would prefer you leave them alone.

For the first time, more Americans favor legalizing marijuana than favor keeping it illegal, according to a new Gallup poll. If you look at the breakdown of subgroups in the poll, you’ll see that legalization is inevitable. The group favoring making it legal the most is younger people. The group favoring keeping it illegal are old folks. Guess who are dying out more rapidly?

I’m not going to argue that I think it’s smart to smoke weed or to use other recreational drugs. I’m just arguing that it’s not moral for me to make that decision for other people and that history has proven over and over that people are going to use the drugs they want, whether they’re legal or not. Trying to stamp them out simply turns the business over to criminals and drives up prices, which just gives the criminals more of an incentive to kill each other to take over territories. For some reason, we don’t hear about this kind of violence between rival beer distributors.

And if you’re one of the many conservatives who favor legal alcohol, but favor keeping other drugs illegal, you’re being hypocritical and irrational. What you don’t realize is that alcohol causes more problems for society than heroin or crack. It’s always going to be that way.

I detest what people do to themselves when they abuse drugs or even when they put themselves on a path of tempting themselves with moderate use of them. I think it’s one of the worst decision that people in our society make. But I’m equally sure that I don’t have the right to force you to make the same decision I do (as long as you don’t infringe on my rights or put me into danger by your actions).

Even though I detest alcohol and marijuana and heroin and crack and all the rest, I’m among the growing number of people who want to give people individual freedom on this choice. Even if you hate these drugs as much as I do, I invite you to join me in that — both for moral reasons and for pragmatic reasons.

Note: If you’d like to learn about the perspective of current and former law enforcement officers who are now in favor of legalization, please take a look at the website of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. If you’re against drug legalization, you might be very interested in what they have to say.

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Most adults are so busy trying to force little children to act like miniature adults that they don’t allow kids the healthy development they need. Researcher Erika Christakis says this is because most adults don’t seem to understand the importance of being little. Christakis is a former faculty member of the Yale Child Study Center, and she says today’s parents are so eager to “invest in the future” for their children that they completely lose sight of the fact that being “little” — and doing child-like things — will give their children better outcomes than their “adultification” of childhood. Children desperately need more unstructured play and more unstructured time in general with adults who are willing to allow them to be little investigators rather than sponges for stuffing with dry facts. The very things which most affluent parents believe are helping their children get ahead are setting them up for failure instead.

What if your daughter were about to start kindergarten and you went to the affluent school where she was about to go and discovered that the school was teaching nonsense? That’s exactly what happened to an education consultant in Colorado who recently visited his daughter’s new school. Everybody was nice, but when the kindergarten teacher talked about their methods of teaching reading, he cringed. She was using “progressive” methods that were debunked decades ago. He’s learning that most schools use similar techniques that don’t work, simply because schools of education are committed to ideas and techniques based on ideology instead of cognitive science. So why do so many people entrust their children’s future to these well-meaning but incompetent people? It’s one of the most underreported scandals of modern learning. Read his summary of what he’s found here and then check out the radio documentary to which he refers where you can find out more.

I really enjoy political satire. You might remember that my first short film was political satire. But there’s a trend in political satire today which I find disturbing — and this graphic is a great example. This fake promotional ad for Fox News was placed on New York City subways recently. When I found it on social media, people who lean to the political left were smirking and enjoying this attack on their “stupid” opponents. But this isn’t satire. It’s just a mean-spirited attempt to say, “Those who agree with me are smarter than you idiots who watch Fox News.” It’s a smirking, nasty attack which makes no point other than to claim superiority over people for the sin of disagreeing. I absolutely loathe Fox News, but I also loathe CNN and MSNBC and all the other media outfits who pander to partisans and intentionally try to divide people. If you want to show that you’re a small-minded bigot who doesn’t understand his opponents, just pretend your enemies are all stupid and evil. They’re not. The truth is a lot more complicated. Ideas are ripe for satire, but that involves creative thinking, not just nasty personal attacks.

When I have a bad day, my first reaction is to want to turn to someone I love. But my next instinct is a paradox. If I can’t call someone and I can’t touch someone and I can’t be with someone who loves me, I have an overwhelming desire to be alone. Tuesday was an unpleasant day. I had to argue with my bank about something. (I won, but still.) Something happened at work that made me want to walk out and never return, although I understand that nobody else involved would understand. Tonight, someone on Facebook who I barely knew reacted badly to something I said — for reasons I’m completely baffled about — and called me a “jackass” and unfriended me. I’d like to talk with someone I love. I’d like to spend time with a loved one and feel safe and understood. But since I can’t do that, I crave the opposite. I want to find a cabin somewhere and disappear for a month. We humans are social creatures. We need each other. But there are days when others cause enough hurt that a few weeks of silence would be a relief. This has been one of those days.

Democracy is going to die — and it’s all because the human brain prefers easy answers to complex problems. You and I were born during the golden age of democracy. It was a period during which it was assumed that democracy was the natural evolution of civic governance. But Dr. Shawn W. Rosenberg is challenging that idea. He’s a leader in the study of political psychology and he says research convinces him that the human brain isn’t wired for self-rule and that democracy is heading toward collapse. In a paper presented this year to the International Society of Political Psychologists, Rosenberg argues that the human brain naturally favors simple answers to complex problems, which tends to favor the rise of authoritarian strongmen who offer confident and simplistic solutions. Anyone who’s paying attention sees this happening around the world already. Donald Trump isn’t the cause of the problem, but he is an early example of this outcome in action. All authoritarian rulers come to power offering simplistic solutions — just as Adolph Hitler did in Germany and Benito Mussolini did in Italy. I’ve argued for 20 years that this country is heading toward social and economic collapse and I’ve made the case that things are going to get ugly when that happens, at least for those who are not prepared. Many people will ignore this evidence, of course, because they have too much emotionally invested in the idea that democracy will prevail — but that is just another example of clinging to a simple answer to a very complex problem. Don’t be surprised when things get ugly.

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