Prohibition?
Tamar Jacoby, usually a reliable observer, outruns her evidence a bit today when she argues, in a Washington Post article supporting the Bush/Senate version of immigration reform, that:
The best analogy is Prohibition: No matter what enforcement resources we threw at that unrealistic ban, we couldn't make it stick. But realistic regulation of alcohol use is another matter entirely -- easily achieved with modest means, such as liquor licenses and import duties.The problem with this argument is that Prohibition, in many respects, worked. There is a substantial scholarly literature about it, but most historians agree that it succeeded in reducing alchohol consumption, substantially at first and then less dramatically. Here is one reasonable summary:So, too, with immigration....
The best evidence available to historians shows that consumption of beverage alcohol declined dramatically under prohibition. In the early 1920s, consumption of beverage alcohol was about thirty per cent of the pre-prohibition level. Consumption grew somewhat in the last years of prohibition, as illegal supplies of liquor increased and as a new generation of Americans disregarded the law and rejected the attitude of self-sacrifice that was part of the bedrock of the prohibition movement. Nevertheless, it was a long time after repeal before consumption rates rose to their pre-prohibition levels. In that sense, prohibition “worked.”And here is an entry from the DEA web site:
A word about prohibition: lots of you hear the argument that alcohol prohibition failed—so why are drugs still illegal? Prohibition did work. Alcohol consumption was reduced by almost 60% and incidents of liver cirrhosis and deaths from this disease dropped dramatically (Scientific American, 1996, by David Musto). Today, alcohol consumption is over three times greater than during the Prohibition years. [David Musto, a child psychiatrist and historian at Yale, has written widely and well on this issue — jsr]Even Jacob Sullum, a libertarian at Reason who opposes government regulation, acknowledges that one must criticize Prohibition on grounds other than that it did not work.
It’s true that alcohol consumption fell during Prohibition, at least initially. In a 1991 paper, economists Jeffrey Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel estimated, based on four measures (cirrhosis, alcoholism deaths, arrests for drunkenness, and alcoholic psychoses), that consumption dropped 60 to 80 percent immediately after Prohibition was enacted, then rebounded sharply beginning in 1921. By the end of the decade, consumption was 50 to 70 percent of the pre-Prohibition level according to three measures and slightly higher according to one....I suspect that many Americans might be satisfied with an attempt to increase our border security that worked as well as Prohibition did. Even if, like Prohibition, it “worked” much better in the short run, that would at least provide some time to work on the longer term solutions.But to decide whether banning booze was a good policy, which is what the DEA seems to be arguing, it’s not enough to know whether it reduced drinking. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that paternalism can be justified on a utilitarian basis, you need to know whether the benefit from fewer alcohol-related problems outweighed the costs associated with prohibition, including the loss of privacy and freedom, black-market violence, official corruption, disrespect for the law, injuries and deaths from illicit alcohol, and the strengthening of organized crime. A consensus developed during Prohibition that, whatever its benefits might be, they were not worth these costs. By that measure, alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and early ‘30s, like drug prohibition today, was a failure, even if it “worked” in the sense that it discouraged drinking.
Say What?
Prohibition worked? Even if alcohol consumption was reduced, what business of the government's was that? The corruption alone was bad enough not to mention the rise of gangs and the unsafe booze that killed thousands.
Posted by: Miller Smith | July 16, 2006 9:46 AM
A commenter who wishes to remain anonymous emailed me the following:
My sense reading various documents of the period is that Prohibition may really have prevented many in the lower classes from drinking, but the upper classes hardly at all. All that happened there was that drinking became more secretive, and medical euphemisms more common.
If you have some spare time, it's worth poking around G.K. Chesterton's columns for the Illustrated London News from the 20s and early 30s, as well as his What I Saw In America (written after an early-20s visit). His take on Prohibition is basically that it fostered clandestine, hurried drinking of very potent alcoholic drinks at the expense of public, leisurely drinking of much milder ones. Also that it was enforced, practically speaking, only against the poor. Also that by the end of the decade, the only people wholeheartedly in favor of Prohibition were the bootleggers, who had the sole benefits (in the shape of inflated prices) of a law that no one at all, by that time, was really taking seriously.
I replied:
That said, I do believe that a good deal of it the conventional "it didn't work" view is based largely on myth. Again, that doesn't mean that the criticism you and others make is wrong, but I believe it does suggest that the uncharacteristically simple-minded comment made by Tamar Jacoby is based on received myth, not fact. Such comments reveal an unjustifiably simple view of what "working" means anyway. Do our laws against murder and child abuse not "work" because murder and child abuse still exist? I continue to believe, in short, that if we could reduce illegal immigration by as much in one decade as Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption, many people would regard that as a very successful policy.
Anon. replied:
See, this isn't the same thing. Prohibition outlawed something that most people thought a normal part of civilization. Murder and child abuse are so universally condemned that the few exceptions are infamous. (The case of Leopold and Loeb comes to mind, being both child abuse and murder, and having happened in the period we're talking about. It is also a good example of 20s money buying an excellent defense.)
I replied by suggesting that Anon. consult the work of David Musto, the excellent Yale historian I had mentioned. I could have added, but didn’t, that we view many laws and regulations as “working” that are less successful than Prohibition was in curtailing the use of alcohol.
Posted by: John Rosenberg![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.discriminations.us/nav-commenters.gif)
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July 16, 2006 10:09 PM
Tamar Jacoby is one of the most relentless apologists for unlimited immigration that has written on the subject. I certainly don't accept her as a reliable observer. She doesn't admit that an Open Borders policy has important drawbacks, both in terms of financial burdens, conflicts, and social cohesion.
Posted by: dchamil | July 16, 2006 10:47 PM
Prohibition led to the Kennedy money and the Kennedy Dynasty. That alone means it was a bad idea!
Posted by: Dom | July 17, 2006 9:37 AM
"She doesn't admit that an Open Borders policy has important drawbacks, both in terms of financial burdens, conflicts, and social cohesion."
Is she like the lunatics that think we have an open borders policy right now?
Posted by: actus | July 17, 2006 2:06 PM
Wasn't Prohibition also successful in stigmatizing drinking (maybe it was the other way around)? If so, we could afford to stigmatize illegal immigration a bit more.
Posted by: sharon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.discriminations.us/nav-commenters.gif)
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July 18, 2006 7:22 AM