The Peculiarity of State-Sanctioned Vice
One hundred years ago, on January 17th, 1920, the Volstead Act went into effect, implementing the alcohol prohibition imposed by the 18th amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Suddenly it became illegal to make, buy, sell, or transport intoxicating beverages. The stated intent was to curb vice and crime. The real result was rampant moonshining, smuggling, organized crime, and violence. Then the government mandated that industrial alcohol be poisoned, and people were injured or killed as a consequence. Prohibition eventually ended in 1933 with the 21st amendment to repeal the 18th. However, alcohol would remain heavily taxed and regulated. Currently, we can legally brew beer in small quantities at home, but distilled spirits are still effectively illegal.
Lotteries are also illegal unless conducted through the government monopoly. Raffles and Bingo are usually OK, but one must generally visit the Indian casinos for legal gambling around here. Gambling is bad, so only government may administer lotteries and license casinos? That doesn't really make sense at all.
Mmmm... Irish Death...
I don't use tobacco or marijuana, so I don't have either on hand for the photo on this post. I was only willing to spring for a beer and a lottery ticket tonight. Sorry.
Tobacco is heavily taxed, regulated, and subsidized nationwide, although again there are exceptions to an extent for the indian reservations. In Washington, marijuana is also legalized (taxed and regulated) and openly consumed. Across the border in Idaho, some people take advantage of the neighboring legalized drugs and buy the overpriced weed to smuggle across the state line. Others stick the tried-and-true black market. On the one hand, the legal pot has a certain advantage in quality control, but the prices are doubtless higher than those of the friend of a friend who knows a guy, too.
In the Land of the Free, vice remains largely illegal unless the State can wet its beak in the process. Never mind the blatant overreach. There is no victim, so there is no crime.
Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime — that is, the design to injure the person or property of another — is wanting.
— Lysander Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes
Governments don't really cease to be moralistic busybody control freaks where they realize the benefits of political plunder trump the benenfits of prohibition-justified police state growth. While I enjoy a beer from time to time, I have the power to choose when and how much I drink. I don't need some authoritarian to send jack-booted thugs to dictate such matters to me. Even if I lacked self-control in the matter, it does not justify government intervention, regulation, taxation, and incarceration. If vices are bad, at least prohibition was honest authoritarianism. Now, governments condemn vice whilst demanding a cut of the action, too. That is absurd.
Statism is addictive and since it never only hurts the addict, it is also a crime (or a krime, as Jim Davies calls it).
Careful what you say! I smell a Washington/Idaho border checkpoint in the offing... kinda like the "California Border Protection Stations" the state's "first line of defense in our pest exclusion efforts".
Too bad they missed all the tyrants that somehow made their way to Sacramento... ;)
😄😇😉
It's interesting that they chose to criminalise marijuana over "legalising" it, like tobacco and alcohol, all those years ago. I guess the medicinal benefits were just too much for them to risk.
It's mafia, just on a much larger scale.
I don't think it was ever about medical benefits. Control freaks gotta control people, and marijuana also tied in with the latent and blatant racism of the government goons. "Legalize" always means "tax and regulate," and that still means control freaks in change. We need to just decriminalize freedom, but governments can't stand for that.
Hmm, yes. I guess the explanation is usually more simple.
If someone invented the devils piss today. It would be illegal before the morning. It says a lot about our society when one of the most useful plants on the planet is demonized. While a violence inducing, organ killing liquid is sold on most street corners.
As for the USA, they imposed their "reefer madness, anti weed" propaganda across the world. Creating criminalization in places where the weed plant was respected and used as a medicine, Now they have legalized marijuana and started it's gentrification.
Alcohol consumed in moderation is no bad thing. It says a lot about you when you use the same language of the drug prohibitionists of today and the alcohol prohibitionists of yesteryear. Government is always the enemy, especially when they paternalistically deem us infantile subjects to be punished for "our own good" should we choose an unapproved vice.