WI there were a serious effort to enforce prohibition

WI there was the equivalant amount of effort put into alcohol prohibition in the 20s has been put into the War on drugs?

The Federal Government would have wasted a lot of money, and the prison population would be much higher. Alcohol would continue to be readily available.

Prohibition was simply unenforceable. High school chemistry is sufficient for making alcohol. Equipment is easy to come by and/or make. The more you push, the higher the prices for alcohol go.

There's also the little problem of Canada - look up the song 'bound for Valparaiso in a rowboat' and the story behind it. Even the War on Drugs hasn't tried to secure the Northern US border.

None of this, of course, says the .gov couldn't or wouldn't TRY to crack down harder - just that it wouldn't work.
 
The whole of US Federal and State governing bodies plus the Army and Navy ends up involved in bootlegging. :p
Prohibition wwas a disaster, large sections of the Police became involved in bootlegging, and it turned the underworld into some criminal equivalent of the salvation army. Everybody wanted booze and if you satiated your desire then you were part of the underworld.
 

mowque

Banned
The moment you try to enforce it , it'll fall apart. it only half worked as long as everyone knew it really wasn't enforced.
 
You can tell people what to do, but never what not to do.

If people want something, they find a way to get it. Banning something just means you can't monitor it, and you make a black market around it and push it into more extreme criminal elements. If you banned Chocolate (which the Reformers thought of too), you'd have secret chocolate meeting areas and gangsters smuggling in cocoa beans and shooting eachother over supply, and paying off the cops.

So let's say Prohibition was enforced to the level of the War on Drugs. It'd be equally a quagmire as that war. You'd have overcrowded prisons, violence in the streets and poor areas, a black market, corruption, etc, etc.
 
This provides a better example why such a thing does not work and we may be able to avoid the worse aspects war on drugs to some extent

Wait, what am I saying, it will just make things worse
 

Maur

Banned
If you banned Chocolate (which the Reformers thought of too), you'd have secret chocolate meeting areas and gangsters smuggling in cocoa beans and shooting eachother over supply, and paying off the cops.
Someone totally have to write timeline about Chocolate-banning USA.
 
If people want something, they find a way to get it. Banning something just means you can't monitor it, and you make a black market around it and push it into more extreme criminal elements. If you banned Chocolate (which the Reformers thought of too), you'd have secret chocolate meeting areas and gangsters smuggling in cocoa beans and shooting eachother over supply, and paying off the cops

Someone totally have to write timeline about Chocolate-banning USA.

There's always F. Paul Wilson's "Lipidleggin'":

http://www.billstclair.com/DoingFreedom/000623/df.0600.fa.lipidleggin.html
 
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