The Real Lessons of Prohibition

			Mark H. Moore



	History has valuable lessons to teach policy-makers. That much is clear. But, as my colleagues, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May have shown in ®MDUL¯Thinking in Time®MDNM¯ history reveals its lessons only grudgingly. Close analyses of both the historical facts, and their relevance to the situation at hand is required. Otherwise, policy makers can fall victim to the persuasive power of false analogies and be misled into imprudent judgments.

	Just such a danger is now posed by those who casually use the "lessons of Prohibition" to encourage the legalization of drugs such as heroin and cocaine. They seem ignorant of important facts about the nation's experience under Prohibition. They are also careless in seeking to generalize from this experience to the quite different drug problem of today. Consequently, they risk leading the society astray with misunderstood lessons from the past.

	What everyone knows about Prohibition is that it was a failure. It did not eliminate drinking; it did create a black market. The black market, in turn, spawned criminal syndicates and occasioned random violence. Corruption and widespread disrespect for law were incubated. Most tellingly, Prohibition was repealed only 14 years after it was originally enshrined in the United States Constitution.

	The clear lesson, drawn by commentators of the time and since, is that it is inappropriate and fruitless to allow moralists to deploy the criminal law in vain attempts to control popular, intoxicating substances. The implication for today's drug policy makers is that it is equally unwise for them to rely on the criminal law to solve the nation's current drug problem. Legalization might be a better approach.

	The conventional view is not supported by the historical facts. First, the legal regime created by the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act was far from an all-embracing prohibition of alcohol use. The 18th Amendment prohibited the commercial manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverages. It did not prohibit use, nor production for one's own consumption. Moreover, its provisions were not to take effect until a year after passage leaving plenty of time for people to stockpile supplies.

	Second, despite the weakness of these provisions, alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911, and 10.7 in 1929. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct declined 50% between 1916 and 1922. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Moreover, the greatest reductions in consumption seemed to occur among the lower class consumers. There, the estimates were that alcohol consumption declined 50%. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that total consumption declined by 30% to 50%.

	Third, violent crime did not increase dramatically during prohibition. Homicide rates rose dramatically from 1900 to 1910, but remained roughly constant during Prohibition. Organized criminal enterprises may have become more visible and lurid during Prohibition, but organized criminal groups existed before the passage and after the repeal of prohibition.

	Fourth, following the repeal of prohibition, alcohol consumption increased, and now exacts a substantial toll. Indeed, today alcohol kills far more people than drugs. Alcohol is estimated to be the cause of more than 23,000 motor vehicle deaths. Alcohol is also implicated in over half of the nation's 20,000 homicides. In contrast, drugs are not yet persuasively linked to vehicular fatalities, and are believed to account for only about 10% to 20% of the homicides. 

	 Thus, the common lessons drawn from the experience with prohibition are wrong. True, it did not end alcohol use. What is remarkable, however, is that a relatively narrow political movement, relying on a relatively weak set of statutes, could nonetheless succeed in reducing the consumption of a drug which had widespread historical and popular sanction by more than a third. This is not to say that society erred in repealing Prohibition. Society might reasonably decide that its recreational drinking was worth the price to be paid in traffic fatalities and other adverse consequences of alcohol use. The point is that the common claim that laws backed by normative movements cannot reduce the drug use is simply wrong.

	That point is particularly important when one seeks to apply the lessons of Prohibition to today's drug problems. The heart of today's drug problem is not the endemic use of heroin in the nation's ghettos or marijuana in the suburbs. Instead, it is a rapidly escalating epidemic of cocaine use, now exacerbated by crack.

	History has quite specific lessons to teach about cocaine use, for the nation experienced a prior epidemic of cocaine use at the turn of the century. That epidemic spread to about 5% of the population before petering out as the society learned about the hazards of the drug through hard, personal experience.

	Relying on that previous experience, we might estimate that we are now at a crucial stage in the development of the current cocaine epidemic. If, over the next few years, the epidemic is slowed by policy instruments that help the society learn once again about the hazards of cocaine, we might end up with only a million casualties. On the other hand, if the epidemic spreads widely, we might lost three to five million before the society learns once again - purely from personal experience - that cocaine is dangerous.

	If this view is correct, now is exactly not the time to be considering a liberalization of our views of cocaine. We need the firm stand of the society against cocaine use to help extend and reinforce the messages that are being learned through painful personal experience.

	In sum, the lessons of Prohibition are both misunderstood and misapplied. The real lesson of Prohibition is that the society can make a dent in the consumption of drugs through laws and normative movements. There is a price to be paid for such restrictions, of course. For drugs such as heroin and cocaine, which are dangerous but currently unpopular, however, the price is small relative to the benefits.