Oh, Onion… how do you manage to keep being so funny?
All joking aside, the price for a singlecigarette inside Rikers (last I heard) is $20. This black market was created, of course, after smoking was “banned.” Most of the supply comes from C.O.s. Hell, for hundreds of dollar profit per pack? I might, too.
But the old-fashioned kind. Against alcohol. In Alaska. Of course it doesn’t work. Prohibition never does.
Alcohol abuse and alcohol-related crime is a huge problem in small-town Alaska. After the drinking comes the sexual abuse and rape, often incestuous. A friend of mine is a public defender up there. Oh, the stories he can tell. You know, of good honest small-town values. It’s all too common for a guy to get drunk and then stumble into the next trailer and diddle their sister/daughter/niece/old-lady neighbor.
Then the guy tells the cops everything that happened (that is to say, confesses) and can’t understand why their lawyer can’t get them off (“but eh, all I did was touch her.”). Finally they ask for a new lawyer… ha, joke’s on them! There areno other lawyers.
Here’s the story about failed prohibition from the New York Times.
The New York Timescame out today with an editorialagainst lowering the drinking age. That surprised me, especially from a paper that says we’re not winning the war on drugs.
I started drinking when I was 15. Most people do. Seems to me that the legal drinking age for beer and wine should be 16 or 18. Since kids do it anyway, better to regulate and teach kids to drink responsibly. Instead you get kids chugging cheap vodka and being stupid.
The drinking age was raised to 21 with the goal of reducing traffic deaths (so if you don’t havea car, why can’t you drink?). I always assumed that raising the drinking age accomplished that. Turns out it really didn’t.
Here’s the surprise:
Since the drinking age was set at 21 in 1984, research shows alcohol-related traffic deaths among those 18 to 20 years old have declined by 11 percent, even after accounting for safer vehicles.
An 11 percent reduction in traffic deaths over 34 years?!Are you f**king kidding me? A higher drinking age criminalized a whole age group, prevented voters and soldiers from having a legal beer, encouraged stupid drinking, and reintroduced the failures of Prohibition back into America. 11%?! You’re telling me you couldn’t think of a better way to get a minor reduction in drunk driving among a small age group? If so, maybe you need put on your thinking cap and think just a little bit harder.
Dave H. sent me the link to this cartoon by Chris Britt in the Peoria Journal Star.
Top university officials in Maryland – including the chancellor of the state university system and the president of the Johns Hopkins University – say the current drinking age of 21 “is not working” and has led to dangerous binges in which students have harmed themselves and others.
“Kids are going to drink whether it’s legal or illegal,” said Johns Hopkins President William R. Brody, who supports lowering the drinking age to 18. “We’d at least be able to have a more open dialogue with students about drinking as opposed to this sham where people don’t want to talk about it because it’s a violation of the law.”
“How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?” the statement says. “Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.”
The whole story by Stephan Kiehl in the Baltimore Sunis here.
You don’t see headlines like this much in America anymore. But we used to (google “Jake Leg” if you’re interested in a tragic little footnote in American history). Fewer people die when drugs are legal and regulated.
Prohibitionists in India wanted to protect poor people from themselves. So, in an entirely predictable bit of failed prohibitionist logic, they made liquor drunk by poor people illegal. The New York Times reports:
The hooch deaths, as they are called, are occurring a year after the government prohibited the sale of arrack, or country liquor, arguing that it was ruinous to the poor, but left other kinds of alcohol untouched. Since then, plastic sachets of illegal brew have turned up occasionally in Bangalore’s poorest neighborhoods.
It used to be like that here, from 1920 to 1933. Then we wised up. But not before a lot of people had died. Now we do it with other drugs. And a lot of people still die (33,541 American in 2005 alone). And then we have the gall to blame the poor and powerless for killing themselves rather than arrogant prohibitionists for passing bad laws that kill other people.