Alcohol Prohibition Symbol Analysis

Alcohol Prohibition in the U.S., which lasted from 1920 to 1933, shows that the drug war’s harmful effects were foreseeable and that the real motive behind it has more often been powerful people’s political self-interest than a genuine interest in reducing the harms of drug addiction.

During Prohibition, organized gangs took over the alcohol trade from legitimate companies. Violent crime dramatically increased, and Americans started consuming more dangerous drinks because smuggling stronger liquor was more profitable for the gangs. This all follows from a simple economic principle: when any good or service becomes illegal, trade in it moves from the legal market—where the legal system can fairly regulate it—to the black market, where the only form of regulation is violence.

Prohibition was widely seen as a failure by the time it ended. And yet, just a few years later, politicians and law enforcement officers—most of all Harry Anslinger—launched the war on drugs anyway. While it’s tempting to assume that early drug warriors like Anslinger simply didn’t expect drug prohibition to cause so much harm, in reality, they absolutely knew what they were getting into: they had just seen Prohibition fail to achieve its goals. While Anslinger certainly believed that drugs were harmful, his primary motivations for launching the drug war were his desire for personal power and his extreme racist beliefs. (The war on drugs drew unprecedented funding to his Bureau of Narcotics, and it gave him an excuse to persecute racial minority groups and activists.) Over the last century, politicians and law enforcement agents have continued to follow Anslinger’s playbook, using the war on drugs to their personal political advantage while suppressing the research that proves what they’ve already known since Prohibition: criminalizing drugs causes much more violence, suffering, and addiction than it heals.