In Defence of Prohibition - and other matters

The point about Prohibition is that it works if it is cleverly done. As I've said here before, total banning often doesn't work, when an ill is well-established and part of the culture. To reduce tobacco smoking, an ever-strengthening campaign of workplace bans, advertising bans and display restrictions has been quite effective - though I sometimes wonder if they shouldn't put something in all cigarettes to make the smoke black. Not so glamorous.

In the case of cannabis and other illegal drugs, it is still quite possible, through enforcement, to discourage all but the most determined from taking up the use of drugs which are not part of our culture and which are widely (and justly) viewed with suspicion. For that, possession must remain an offence and be effectively prosecuted.

By the way,  I really do hope those posting here who continue to deny the possibility of a link between cannabis and mental illness will soon grow up and start acting responsibly. Don't they realise that some young person, acting on their complacent, ill-informed  advice, might end up needlessly in a locked ward?  And it will be their fault. Can they really not face the infinitesimally small risk of prosecution, and the still smaller one of actual punishment, as the price of their nasty pleasure?  In that case, are they really the bold revolutionaries they imagine themselves to be? Must they sacrifice others for it? And how long will they continue to expect that the rest of us will take their insistence that 'it never did me any harm' at face value? As I've pointed out before, they're not the ones to say. The self-regard of these people is limitless, and is perhaps a sign of the deeper damage done by this drug even to those who appear superficially to be unharmed by it.

In the case of alcohol, total bans are unlikely to work. It is far deeper in the culture than tobacco, which has really only taken hold as a mass pleasure in the last century, and the law is wise to distinguish between different kinds of drinking - restrained social drinking and binge-drinking or drinking to get drunk (the difference, if you like, between 'Martini's '

bar in Bedford Falls , and 'Nick's' in Pottersville, both portrayed in the same building in 'Its a Wonderful Life').

This is the case with alcohol in Christian countries, or in Muslim countries which have in the past liberated alcohol.  So during my visit to Iran it was often made clear to me that I could easily get a drink if I wanted one, despite a supposedly draconian ban. I didn't bother because I didn't want the authorities to have any excuse to interrupt my work, and because after many Lents and Advents I can manage for long periods without a drink anyway (though a cold beer would have been welcome, for its astringent taste alone, as I sat in a rooftop cafe overlooking the heart of Isfahan, pondering what seemed to be about the millionth lamb kebab and rice that I had consumed since arriving).

In Baghdad soon after the Blair invasion, and so between Saddam's not-very-serious attempt to appear more Islamic, and the growing wave of puritanism that followed the Shia ascendancy,  I was easily able to find wine shops run by Christians . But you couldn't always get precisely what you wanted.  One riverside restaurant unbelievably served an ultra-strong Scottish lager,  apparently brewed to reduce Glaswegians to giggling oblivion, which I declined. There was nothing else on the wine list.

Even this wasn't available further south in Najaf and Karbala, Shia shrine towns where the men I talked to called noisily for a booze ban (But my

(Christian) interpreter muttered that they would all go home afterwards and get sozzled on home-brewed Arak).

The only wholly dry place I have ever visited was the Gaza strip under the iron rule of Hamas, presumably because in Gaza even the smuggling is controlled by Islamic fanatics.

The American experiment with a total alcohol ban failed for many reasons.

One, it attempted to go from total availability to total non-availability, and in one step. Two, it penalised sale and distribution, but had nothing to say about possession. And it was also political. Recent Roman Catholic migrants from Ireland, Germany and Southern Europe, with their strong beer and wine cultures, felt penalised by Anglo-Saxon Puritans who loathed drink anyway.

While this was going on Canada had extremely strict saloon laws, likewise designed to control the desperate drunkenness which was rampant in early 20th century north America, laying waste lives, destroying families, leading to crime and pandemic wife-beating. Not to mention general ill-health, from chronic liver disease upwards. Prohibition was not just the crabby idea of intolerant, purse-lipped killjoys but a serious idealistic (and sometimes feminist) movement for the improvement of the lives of the poor.

I was once in the interesting town of Fond du Lac in Wisconsin (investigating that enjoyable state's famed 1990s welfare reforms)  when I came across a plaque commemorating the day in 1902 when the ferocious anti-booze campaigner Carrie Nation stormed into the Schmidt sample Room (a

bar) with her trusty hatchet, and smashed it up. It was the wreckage of families and the mistreatment of women that exercised Mrs Nation, a formidable six-footer in black who patrolled the American Midwest with an axe in one hand and a Bible in the other, greeting barmen with the salutation :'Good morning, destroyer of men's souls' before laying about her.

We have had Hogarth's 'Gin Lane' here. I'd like to, but can't readily find, display some of George Cruickshank's 19th century anti-alcohol paintings, showing Victorian civilisation wounded by disease, brutality, insanity and crime, the consequences of unbridled boozing.

People who call themselves 'Libertarians' are of course welcome to take this position, and say that nobody has the right to interfere in such choices. But they can only do so, in my view, because the huge temperance campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries actually greatly reduced drinking in this country, helped by Lloyd George's clever use of World war One as a pretext to bring in the wise and effective licensing laws which did so much to reduce the menace of drunkenness in Britain in the 20th century.  I'm told this was only a problem with seaports. Well, I doubt it, but even if true, look at a map and see how many of our great cities fit that description. Interestingly temperance is still a major issue in works of fiction written in 1932 ('South Riding') and 1959 ('No Love for Johnnie'). In the former,  a corrupt  and presumably Labour councillor is a Methodist lay preacher and temperance advocate (who secretly drinks when away from his home area and unrecognised) . In the latter, an ambitious but frustrated Labour MP breaks a huge taboo and risks offending many of his voters by taking his first drink, a step which turns out to lead him on to general failure.

I don't think they really understand just how devastating unrestricted drinking is in the lives of poor people, though I think we are soon going to find out.

 

they have also swallowed whole John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' as if it offered a definitive answer on a question which must surely always be very carefully shaded.

Hence the silly false parallels that are sometimes made, suggesting that there is no difference in principle between telling someone what to think (the case of the Johns) and stopping someone doing himself physical or mental damage, damage which will also ruin the lives of others.

What principle is this, actually?

Then there is the stuff about riding horses, or mountaineering. Now, as i bear the scars of a bad motorbike accident in 1969, which was entirely my own fault and which only by great good fortune did no serious damage to anyone else, I am quite sympathetic to a law banning anyone below the age of (say) 72 from riding powerful motorbikes on the public road. The difficulty is in finding an age when men have lost their insane bravado, which some do rather late,  and not become too senile to control these things, which some do rather early.

But motorcycling is just a recreation. The riding of horses and the climbing of mountains are both examples of activities which require long training, great skill and patience, the pursuit of which makes their enthusiasts better, braver, wiser people than they might otherwise be.

This just can't be said of smoking tobacco ( or dope) or of taking Ecstasy or Cocaine.

Oh, one other thing. I am angrily attacked elsewhere on the web for dismissing  the evidence that 'second-hand smoke' causes a serious health danger. This is not self-serving, simply an observation I feel bound to make. So I am perfectly content to be shown to be wrong, and will willingly concede if so. I am relying on published articles by Christopher Booker, who wrote in July 2007 :'A further series of studies in the Nineties, mainly in the US, claimed to have found that passive smoking was causing thousands of deaths a year. But however much the researchers tried to manipulate the evidence, none could come up with an increased risk of cancer that, by the strict rules of epidemiology, was "statistically significant".

'In 1998 and 2003 came the results of by far the biggest studies of passive smoking ever carried out. One was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation. The other, run by Prof James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat for the American Cancer Society, was a mammoth 40-year-long study of 35,000 non-smokers living with smokers.

In each case, when the sponsors saw the results they were horrified. The evidence inescapably showed that passive smoking posed no significant risk.

This confirmed Sir Richard Doll's own comment in 2001: "The effects of other people's smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me'.

'In each case, the sponsors tried to suppress the results, which were only with difficulty made public (the fact that Enstrom and Kabat, both non-smokers, could only get their results published with help from the tobacco industry was inevitably used to discredit them, even though all their research had been financed by the anti-tobacco cancer charity).'

If this is incorrect, or has been superseded by later research, then I would be most interested to know.