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| 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.
