Showing posts with label legalization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label legalization. Show all posts

Thursday, January 17, 2013

MAKING CRIMINALS OUT OF ORDINARY CITIZENS

Carrie Nation
From The Writer's Almanac:
The Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act, and better known as Prohibition, took effect on this date in 1920, a year after it was ratified. It made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor illegal. The temperance movement had been fighting this fight for almost 80 years. Its activists wanted to protect families and communities from the horrors of alcohol abuse. They saw the 18th Amendment as a major victory for morality — but in reality, it made criminals out of a lot of ordinary American citizens, and made liquor even more desirable than it had been before.
The law was surely honored more in the breach than in the observance throughout many parts of the country, including south Louisiana.  I believe the citizens in the states who voted to legalize marijuana did the right thing.  My father was an alcoholic, who was periodically on and off the wagon as long as he lived, so I'm well aware of the evils associated with alcohol addiction, but prohibition was and is not the solution.  Nor does prohibition seem to be the answer for marijuana, for it makes criminals out of ordinary citizens who wish to use marijuana, which, so far as I can discover, is no more harmful than liquor or cigarettes.