While national alcohol prohibition in the US is widely (if not quite universally) regarded as a failure, there remains substantial support for our current tragic folly, drug prohibition. The respective prohibitions are not identical, however, and I want to point out two ways in which drug prohibition is worse than alcohol prohibition. First, during alcohol Prohibition, purchase and (for the most part) possession of alcohol were not crimes. (People often seem surprised to learn this these days, as if the drug war has made a firm link in their minds between prohibition and the criminalization of possession and purchase.) In other words, what we refer to as a “decriminalization” regime with respect to drugs today is pretty much what we had with alcohol prohibition: drug prohibition is much more severe than alcohol Prohibition.
The second major difference is that alcohol prohibition was restricted to a handful of countries, whereas drug prohibition is global. As a result of the limited geographical scope, there was plenty of legally produced alcohol during Prohibition, such as that made in Canada (and then illegally smuggled into the US) by Seagrams. But more importantly, the fact that other countries had legal alcohol — and were often just as successful in reducing consumption and alcohol-related problems as the US — provided ongoing evidence of the extent to which Prohibition was a policy blunder. With global drug prohibition, we are very limited in the types of policy experiments that can be run; even in the Netherlands, marijuana is technically just as illegal as it is in the US. This helps to explain the odd “self-justifying” nature of drug prohibition. Bad outcomes under drug prohibition should tend to discredit prohibition as a policy. This is what would likely occur if there were a visible alternative policy with outcomes that were better. Instead, bad outcomes under drug prohibition are met with the logic that if there were fewer drugs, there would be fewer bad outcomes. So to reduce bad outcomes under prohibition, we need… a stronger, more committed prohibition!
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