As the pace of enforcement under the Volstead Act increased, it became ever more lucrative to bring alcoholic beverage to the market by any means necessary, increasing the spread of tainted liquor throughout society. Moreover, the criminalization of alcohol created a market for even more dangerous substitutes.
Consumption of substances such as cocaine and opioids increased; while these substances had been rendered virtually illegal by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of which required non-prescribed possession of subject to taxation and licensure , they were not terribly difficult to obtain.
In essence, the Eighteenth Amendment succeeded in increasing two concurrent black markets. As a quick aside, increases in the acquisition and usage of illicit drugs still shows a positive correlation with State and local alcohol prohibition today.
This is, perhaps somewhat predictably, a case of misguided public policy causing two problems for the price of one. Not only did Prohibition fail, over the long-run, to decrease the overall consumption of liquor, it also failed to decrease taxpayer burden, the prison population, and public corruption.
As a matter of course, all of these things increased under the scope of the Eighteenth Amendment. Naturally, an increase in the rate of crime corresponded with an increase in money spent on enforcement, and an increase in the number of inmates processed throughout the prison system. A clear majority of these individuals were not housed in federal prisons, but in state or local facilities, increasing the burden of taxpayers not only as a function of cost, but community as well.
Clearly, there was no easement on the burden of taxpayers in regard to decreasing the prison population. Because of the large profit margins enjoyed by the most organized black-market cartels, public corruption also increased during this era. Politicians, policemen, and policymakers were all known to accept bribes and gifts from bootleggers, speakeasy owners and crime lords.
Ironically, the entity most susceptible to corruption was the federal Bureau of Prohibition, the agency specifically created to enforce the provisions of the Volstead Act. Graft within the Bureau was widespread enough that its own commissioner, Henry Anderson deemed the whole program a fruitless exercise that created public disregard for the law.
Ironically, both alcohol consumption and crime had significantly decreased on their own in the decade immediate preceding passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Not surprisingly, they decreased in the decade following its repeal.
Tragically, current public policy seems to have gathered nothing from the mistakes of this well-publicized era in our history, and has taken us down this same path with the prohibition of drugs. This is meant to be the first in a series highlighting the problems of our current drug policy.
Next, we will look at some of the parallels between the Eighteenth Amendment and the War on Drugs, as well as its negative social costs. It always surprises me that the politicians are so eager to support black markets and enrich cartels when they could simply decriminalize and tax.
The results should serve as a warning signal to all policymakers. If an explicitly illegal product such as heroin cannot be kept off the streets and out of prisons, city and state officials in New York and elsewhere will be powerless to stop a wave of vaping favorites from flowing in from jurisdictions near and far.
Banning flavored vaping products likely will mean revisiting the Prohibition era. Both subjects have led me to take an interest in New York.
What I have found is that bans give birth to smugglers, as do high price differentials based on excise taxes on popular products. Banning flavored e-cigarettes will prompt more smuggling, enriching smugglers and the treasuries of bordering states. Each year, my colleague Todd Nesbit and I estimate the degree to which cigarettes are smuggled because of tax evasion and avoidance. Most of that may be because New York City, with its high tax rate on cigarettes, is densely populated and relatively close to lower-tax jurisdictions such as Virginia.
A report by eight scholars examined discarded cigarette packs in New York City for evidence of their origin and found that only 40 percent had the correct local tax stamp. Researchers bought packs of cigarettes across 92 city neighborhoods. More than 29 percent of those bore a Virginia tax stamp and more than 70 percent carried a counterfeit New York stamp.
An outright ban on flavored vaping products likewise will not work. It will only raise the cost of a product people want and the price that smugglers will charge. The restriction of private behavior has outlived the alcohol ban, persisting in state and local governments and finding new life in modern conservative administrations. But the idea of using a constitutional amendment for that restriction, once held up by temperance advocates as a holy grail, has been tarnished and, mostly, left to the past.
When the union formed, states retained that authority; the Constitution established no overarching national system of criminal or civil law and laid out no moral prescriptions for citizens to follow. In the next century, prohibitionists began making the case that alcohol-related offenses were deserving of special attention by linking them to a litany of societal issues. Leaflets and illustrations distributed by various temperance organizations depicted intoxicated men beating their wives and children , confessing to liquor-fueled murders and other uncharacteristic acts of violence , and spending money at the saloon that was needed by their impoverished families.
Organizations like the Anti-Saloon League decried the proliferation of drinking establishments operated and patronized by first-generation immigrants and, as World War I set in, demonized German brewers in particular as an anti-American force. By banning alcohol, prohibitionists argued, the country could combat domestic problems, crime, and the influence of immigrants, and assert the primacy of Protestant morality in American law.
Writing critically of the new amendment for The Atlantic , the journalist Louis Graves had a more cautionary prediction. Researchers have found that in the early days of Prohibition, alcohol consumption fell to as little as 30 percent of its previous levels, before rebounding to around 60 to 70 percent in the following years.
Hospitalizations, arrests, and deaths directly related to alcohol abuse similarly decreased. But at the same time, the amendment gave rise to new sorts of illegal, and immoral, behavior.
Black markets sprang up to supply illicit establishments. The manufacture and transportation of liquor went underground. Organized-crime syndicates gleaned new power and connections from the bootlegging business.
0コメント