I think it's good news that a Clinton campaign attempt to make hay out of Barack Obama's youthful drug use has blown back on them. I hope we've gotten past our belief that having used drugs as a young person disqualifies one for public office later in life. P.J. O'Rourke once quipped that the people who didn't do drugs in the 1960s were the ones you had to worry about. Seriously, though, if I think about all the people I knew between the ages of 15 and 25 who smoked pot or did some other drug, and thought that all those people would therefore be disqualified from the presidency always and forever ... well, that's just idiotic. Like it or not, drugs are everywhere. When I was in college, lots of people smoked pot -- even conservatives (I didn't, but not out of any virtue; I don't like smoking). I'm sure things have changed not one whit.
I suspect so many Americans today have experimented with pot or other drugs at some point in their youth that they understand intuitively that the fact that Obama did the same doesn't tell us anything about his ability to serve as president today, any more than it says anything about their fitness to serve as lawyers, business executives, journalists, teachers, firefighters, pastors and so forth.
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Since I have to tolerate the candidates' banter all year, I'm in favor of some good drugs for myself. I've never tried pot, but that would be my drug of choice. Anybody got any Cheetos?
What most people don't know, is that the Prohibition did work, when it was enforced. Do some research on the statistics, and you'll find that the first year alcohol consumption dropped drastically and stayed that way for the two or three years it was vigorously enforced. Once public opinion shifted on it, enforcement relaxed, and from there it very gradually started climbing again.
Timothy, a couple of things. First, where does the information come from that shows that "in the first year [of prohibition] alcohol consumption dropped drastically and stayed that way for the two or three years it was vigorously enforced"? The statistics on who was drinking bathtub gin would be reliable why? NO ONE KNOWS how many people were drinking illegally because, get it, they hid their activities because they were illegal.
Second, if prohibition was such a great law, why did "public opinion" shift against it?
Third, where are your alcohol consumption figures for the years after prohibition come from? May we have a citation? And how do you know that lowered alcohol consumption in the 1950's (assuming that that can be verified) was a result of prohibition? You may have noticed that there was a lot going on in the 1940's and 1950's. IF (a big if) alcohol consumption was down during those years, how do you know that those other factors were not responsible?
I have heard some different, and perhaps more reliable stats indicating that Prohibition "worked" to some extent--a falloff in the numbers of violent crimes and industrial accidents for the first couple of years after Prohibition was passed.
The real point of Prohibition, of course, was a sinister plot by feminists, who managed to get the churches on their side in one of the first efforts to reduce domestic violence. That probably worked too, along with some reduction in drunk driving, but we'll never know for sure, since nobody was keeping stats on either phenomenon at the time.
Timothy Copple
What most people don't know, is that the Prohibition did work, when it was enforced. Do some research on the statistics, and you'll find that the first year alcohol consumption dropped drastically and stayed that way for the two or three years it was vigorously enforced. Once public opinion shifted on it, enforcement relaxed, and from there it very gradually started climbing again. However, it wasn't until the 1960s that consumption rates returned to pre-prohibition levels and it was in the 1980s that it actually shot a lot higher.
Prohibition did work in the way that it was intended to work. Although not to the amount that you think it did, and you probably don't know what it was trying to do.
What it was intended to do, and what it did do, was reduce the amount of unsupported women. Men would work, buy alcohol, spend all their money, and come home drunk to a wife that couldn't leave them and possibly was abused. A wife that had to work a second job, and half that money was spent supporting their husband's habit. That is why Prohibition was passed, that is what everyone back then is talking about when they talk about how evil alcohol is.
It didn't have anything to do about altered mental state, it had to do with irresponsible breadwinners spending all their family's money on demon rum. That is why it was often supported by suffragettes and vis versa...the idea was that if women could vote this sort of idiocy by men would be forced to end, by law.(1)
Prohibition actually reduced this to some extent. However, what it also did was vastly increase drinking by women and children, in addition to vastly increasing the violence associated with it. That is why public opinion of it shifted, when it became clear that they had simply replaced neglect towards women by men with actual shooting violence.
The problems that Prohibition was intended to solve were actually solved with equal rights, 'no fault' divorces, child support, and welfare, although I know people here don't want to hear that. Women could actually leave bums and have a chance of surviving on their own, and started doing so.
And there's no way the very slight decrease in alcohol consumption lasted until the 60s. (Or would even be noticeable.) I'd like to see any cite on that. I'm sure there was a Great Depression reduction, but that was probably irrespective of Prohibition.
1) This is, ironically, exactly the current justification given by you to keep drug illegal..that it destroys families. Yeah, and alcohol used to destroy families, too. It was famous for it. Then we figured out we could treat addiction like a controllable disease and try to keep families together, instead of throwing people in jail. Of course, it still does destroy some families if people will not get help, but those people are self-destructive and unhelpable until they choose to be helped, and there is nothing anyone can do except make sure the survivors can make it without them.
I think Obama's drug use could be a serious thing if he did them.We have his admission but no verification from anyone he may have did them with.This doesn,t tell us squat.Was he a one time user? or did he use at a party or two?Both not uncommon among a lot of youths.But if he was a frequent partier or sold them on occasion even to one or two friends this tells a lot more about his personality.I personally think letting him get off with this brief admission is coming down to easy on a man running for president.
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