You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (57 page)

Alcohol was the drug of choice for everyone in colonial times. It was a staple—a basic and necessary part of their diets.
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Hard spirits were
the
beverage for adults and children. Beer did not keep, coffee and tea were expensive, and water was unsanitary. Puritans considered alcohol to be a “goodly creature of God.”

Alcohol began to lose its stature in the nineteenth century as plumbing improved water quality. In addition, workers increasingly left their country farms for the city factories, where managers demanded efficient and sober workers. The Protestant religious fervor that swept the nation in the early nineteenth century sought to vanquish every sin, and in the case of alcohol, created a new one.

The total abstinence demanded by many Protestants during this period went directly against their Judeo-Christian heritage. Moses instructed the Jews to revel in alcohol,
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Jesus approved of alcohol,
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and the Protestant founders enjoyed drink. Even the sourpuss John Calvin warned against using the dangers of excessive drinking as “a pretext for a new cult based upon abstinence.”
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Despite not having religious authority behind them, the zealots launched a moral crusade against John Barleycorn.
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A moral crusade does not need to be rational. It merely needs alarmism and a scapegoat. The flaws of delinquent alcoholics, such as wife-beating and not supporting their families, were applied to every drinker. This was not effective, as people recognized these stumblebums were not representative of most drinkers.

Much more effective villains would emerge. The missing ingredient had been racism, and the arrival of Irish and German immigrants bolstered the temperance movement.
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The cities, packed with these strange folk, made the rural Nativists nervous.
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Irish and Germans loved their saloons and did not even bother to show token solidarity to the prohibitionists [drys]. Between 1852 and 1855, thirteen states prohibited the sale of alcohol, despite “furious opposition” from the urban populations.
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These prohibitions were accompanied by widespread disobedience, lax enforcement, and violence. Most of the laws were soon revoked as people became more concerned with the bloody Civil War (1861–1865) than the fact that others drank alcohol.

Fifty years later World War I reinvigorated the temperance movement. Prohibitionists portrayed America as fighting three enemies—Germany, Austria, and alcohol. While German troops battled Americans in Europe, German-American companies like Pabst, Busch, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller were internally sabotaging America with beer. During the war Americans had to be sober and chaste, and no grain could be diverted to brewers. President Woodrow Wilson and others perceived the war as a moral battle with “civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.”
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Germans were not the only race who needed assistance maintaining sobriety. Politicians from the South were distrustful of the federal government telling them what they could imbibe, so the drys played up their greatest fear—out-of-control blacks. Liquor was blamed for transforming black men into rapists and “the grogshop” was pinpointed as “the Negro’s center of power.”
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Southern opposition dissolved.

The day before the Eighteenth Amendment’s prohibition of alcohol went into effect, the evangelical preacher Billy Sunday exhorted thousands over the radio:

This optimism was not limited to the pulpit. A journalist wrote, “There had been a liquor problem. But a Law has been passed.”
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It appears that Prohibition (1920–1933) decreased drinking significantly (a third to a half),
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,
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however, as with future drug wars, the costs of this lowered intake were horrifying and prohibition is “almost universally seen as a great social disaster.”
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Some of these costs were:

Increase in the Use of Other Drugs
—The reduction in drinking is deceptive because it does not mean increased sobriety. People simply turned to cheaper alternatives. One of the biggest benefactors was marijuana.
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Prohibition led to the opening of marijuana-smoking establishments called tea-pads. By the end of prohibition New York City had five hundred of them.

Increase in Organized Crime
—Prohibition immediately made crime extremely profitable. Small-time mafia bosses who ran local gambling and prostitution outfits suddenly became obscenely rich and powerful national players. One charismatic bootlegger, George Remus, employed three thousand men and at one house party gave every woman in attendance (roughly fifty) a new Pontiac car.
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,
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A historian wrote,
“National prohibition transferred two billion dollars a year from the hands of brewers, distillers, and shareholders to the hands of murderers, crooks, and illiterates.”
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Surge of Violence
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—The exorbitant profits meant mafia bosses were willing to use exorbitant violence to protect their operations. In Prohibition’s first year, the major cities’ crime rates jumped twenty-four percent. The federal caseload tripled and the federal prison system operated at 170 percent capacity. The murder rate rose sharply in the decade of prohibition and promptly dropped at its end.
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Perhaps more spectacular than the quantity of carnage was the brazen ruthlessness. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre occurred in 1929 when Chicago bootlegger extraordinaire Al Capone had seven members of a rival gang machine-gunned execution-style in a garage by operatives posing as police. Other Chicago machine-gun battles occurred in the open streets during the day.

Prohibition violence was not limited to gang warfare. Henry Joy, a founder of the Packer Motor Car Company, was committed to Prohibition until he saw its results first-hand. His lakeside estate on Lake St. Clair, north of Detroit, was on the front line of smuggling from Canada, and he regularly witnessed federal agents firing away at smugglers.

At one point, authorities ransacked Joy’s boathouse unannounced and roughed up his old watchman who had eleven bottles of beer. The next week when a duck hunter on the lake did not hear agents ordering him to stop over the sound of his boat motor, he was blown away. In 1930, the
New York Times
reported that sixty-one federal agents had died and 151 civilians had been killed by agents.
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Erosion of Civil Rights
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—The massive volume of alcohol cases swamping the courts cemented plea-bargaining as an intrinsic part of America’s criminal justice system. In plea-bargaining, the government will make concessions, often in severity of sentence, in exchange for a guilty plea.

This works well for people who are guilty and do not wish to dispute their charges. However, it is a catch-22 for those who want to fight their charges, many of whom are innocent. The constitutional right to a jury trial is now qualified. If a citizen takes advantage of that right, she is facing a dramatically more severe punishment.
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In effect, defendants are not being punished for the underlying crime but for contesting the charges.

This right was not the only one to suffer. It was under prohibition that wiretapping became an acceptable intrusion on the home, entrapment became common, grounds for warrantless searches were expanded, and double jeopardy was first allowed—meaning that someone could now be prosecuted under both local and federal law.
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Widespread Corruption
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—The first federal agent was caught taking bribes only two weeks into Prohibition.
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By 1929, one out of four federal agents had been dismissed for charges ranging from bribery to drinking the evidence. In Detroit, public officials received over $20 million in graft a week, while in New York City underground bars, called speakeasies, had to pay over $4,000 in bribes a week to stay open.
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It is difficult to blame the officers who could
triple
their annual salary in one day by overlooking a ubiquitous and victimless crime.

The Cool/Forbidden Fruit Factor
—Prohibition made drinking fashionable. Now only bumpkins did not have a hip flask. Previously women drank at home if at all. Drinking was unbecoming of a female and the only ones at saloons were prostitutes and dancers. Now the trendy young women, named flappers, would pack the speakeasies, leading one observer to complain that the outlawed saloons may have been depraved but at least you didn’t have to fight your way through crowds of schoolgirls to reach the bar.
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The bootleggers became romantic heroes portrayed dashingly in movies.
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Infamous Al Capone was a hero to many who despised Prohibition and was cheered in the streets.

Alcohol Became Potent and Deadly
—While beer consumption plunged, the sale of the more potent, and more easily hidden, hard liquor doubled.
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Much of the alcohol during Prohibition was manufactured from industrial alcohol. To prevent this, the government required that industrial alcohol be poisoned. When the bootleggers did not properly remove the poison in their makeshift labs, drinkers could suffer blindness,
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paralysis, or death. Almost 30,000 people died in this manner, while roughly 100,000 suffered permanent damage.
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At the time, one senator called this “legalized murder.”
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During Prohibition, there were also documented cases of people injecting alcohol.
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This overview is crucial because the reason Prohibition was overturned in 1933 was because people could remember what life was like before it.
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The drys could not argue that life would be horrible with legalized alcohol because people knew that life. Society under Prohibition is illustrative as the narrative turns to the criminalization of other drugs.

The criminalization of drugs aside from alcohol was comparatively easy. Such a tiny percentage of the population used other drugs that they did not have the political strength to defend themselves. Two wowsers
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used the age-old formula of race-baiting and fearmongering to criminalize these people and create bureaucratic careers for themselves.

The first of these men was Hamilton Wright. Wright was a forty-one-year-old physician who became famous when he “discovered” the tropical disease beriberi was a bacterial infection. He was wrong, but it did not matter, for he quickly parlayed his stardom by marrying the daughter of a powerful senator. Through his new connection he was placed on the Opium Commission in 1908.

President Theodore Roosevelt was hoping the newly-formed commission would lend support to China in its dispute with Great Britain over opium importation into China. Opium usage was being misrepresented and demonized for political purposes in China, just like alcohol usage was in the United States.
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The United States did not profit from the opium trade and therefore it was a costless way to seek Chinese favor.

Wright became a man on a mission. In evaluating the opium issue in America, he determined that there was a devastating problem. He either lied or lacked intelligence. The highest credible estimates at the turn of the century were that there were three opium addicts for every thousand people. These addicts were mostly harmless hardworking middle-aged Southern white women who had become unintentionally addicted via quack patent medicines containing opium.
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For
example, at the time a popular cough syrup containing heroin claimed, “It will suit the palate of the most exacting adult or the most capricious child.”
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The number of opium addicts was actually dropping because the federal government had recently forced medicines to list their ingredients. People were now aware of addictive substances in their medicine and could be cautious.

Wright was a handsome man who looked like a “well-preserved Yale quarterback.” His immense ego, propensity to lie and exaggerate, and his “bulldozer style” well suited him to solve this opium “problem.”
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The first Shanghai Opium Commission in 1909 went well for Wright, although the British, French, and Dutch did not share Wright’s alarm. A British study showed opium to be no worse than alcohol and perhaps better. One official stated, “There is more violence in a gallon of alcohol than a ton of opium.”
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Despite this, the attending governments agreed to restrict opium and its derivatives in their own borders.