Toasting the End of an Error

[groovedaddy]

On Dec. 5, 1933 — nearly 75 years ago to the day — America was buried in the Great Depression. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed, industrial production had halved, and the Dow was more than two thirds below its 1929 peak. There was, however, something to celebrate.

At 7 p.m. that evening president Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the ratification the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which nullified the Eighteenth, making drinking alcohol legal once again. The event was celebrated in New Orleans with a 20-minute cannonade, and in New York cargoes of premium spirits owned by Joseph Kennedy, Sr., were unloaded from ships that had been waiting for the announcement just offshore. Prohibition — what Herbert Hoover in 1928 had called a “great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far reaching in purpose” — was over. The writer and social commentator H.L Mencken compared its effects, in terms of the suffering it had caused, to the Black Death in Medieval Europe and marked its passing with a glass of water — “my first in 13 years.”

Prohibition had been an anachronism long before its demise. Introduced in 1919 on the back of World War I austerity measures, it was soon out of step with the spirit of the age. The Roaring Twenties were fueled with bootleg hooch, and people took consolation from a bottle in the slump that followed. By 1932 America’s workers, industrialists, women and intelligentsia were against it. Repeal was a plank in the Democrats’ platform that year, and once they were elected they set about terminating the noble experiment. The 21st Amendment was drafted on Dec. 6, and the Volstead Act, the 1919 bill that helped usher in the ban, was modified to permit the sale of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2 percent from April 7, 1933 onward. The change was made not so much as to accustom the American public to alcohol again but rather “by reason of the great need of additional revenue.” The few brewers that had struggled on through Prohibition by selling alcohol-free beer reconfigured their breweries, and the next morning The New York Times carried the headline, BEER FLOWS IN 19 STATES AT MIDNIGHT.

Notwithstanding the euphoria surrounding the repeal, 75 years on, Prohibition is far from dead in the United States. Kansas has yet to ratify the 21st Amendment, and harbors a large number of dry counties, as do Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. Indeed the list of American communities that operate partial or total restrictions on the sale or consumption of alcohol is extensive, and surprising. Even Florida boasts a few of them and Nevada, the most liberal of states in its attitudes towards alcohol, and where it is otherwise legal to be drunk in public, has one — the little community of Panaca. The patchwork nature of liquor legislation is confusing even to residents, especially where county boundaries intersect in towns so that dry neighborhoods border wet ones.

http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/toasting-the-end-of-an-error/

[BridgeTheGap]

1. Prohibition of alcohol did not work then and prohibition of drugs doesn't work now.

REGULATE them. Educate people about them HONESTLY. And treat addiction / abuse like the mental health issues that they are instead of throwing people in prison. What a huge amount of money we could save by ending the war on drugs, not to mention the families ripped apart because of incarceration. We need a large dose of sanity on this issue!